Flashback
50 years ago
Our debt to Charles D. Abbott
Charles D. Abbott Hall currently houses UB’s extensive Health Sciences Library. The building that opened in 1933 was known for decades as Lockwood Memorial Library and served the burgeoning University of Buffalo community as the central library. Charles David Abbott was the university’s first director of libraries. Rightfully, Abbott Hall bears Charles Abbott’s name. From his wood-paneled office on the upper floors of Lockwood, Abbott built and steered the library from 1934 until his death, 50 years ago, in February 1961.
Born in 1900 in Milford, Del., Abbott graduated from Haverford College in 1922 and attended Columbia University. He received a bachelor of letters degree from New College, Oxford in 1927 and in September of that year arrived at the University of Buffalo to become a member of the English department. In 1929, he accepted a post at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Courted by Thomas B. Lockwood and Chancellor Samuel P. Capen, and lured by the promise of a new library and the added prospect of building a college library book collection, Abbott returned to the UB English department in 1931 and in 1934 took full charge of the library.
A lover of books and a devotee of British poetry, Abbott founded the Poetry Project in 1937. He intended it to be a first-edition collection of all books of Anglophone poetry by 20th-century poets. Ignoring literary ideology and collecting without prejudice, the Poetry Project matured into the Poetry Collection.
In 1939, Abbott hired poet Mary Barnard to be its first curator. Abbott’s fascination with manuscripts and literary letters began during his student days at Oxford. He initiated a 20th-century manuscript collection in the Poetry Collection and as the first collection of its type, it became the prototype for university manuscript collections across the country. To cite a few, Abbott was responsible for acquiring the manuscripts of William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Graves and James Joyce.
Abbott intended the Poetry Collection to be a research library for the study of the poetic imagination. A true visionary, the Poetry Collection today stands as the largest Anglophone poetry-book collection in the world, with more than 140,000 monographs and hundreds of thousands of working drafts and literary letters from poets from around the English writing word. The collection continues to grow.
Tireless, distinguished, ingenious and dedicated to poetry, books and libraries, Abbott was always the mentor. He gladly interacted with students and faculty, and welcomed guests to his library and to the Poetry Collection. With delight, he is remembered by his timely adage: “There is no end to what remains to do.”
The papers of Charles D. Abbott are available in the University Archives.
—Michael Basinski, The Poetry Collection
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