Suzzallo Allen

So, this week I went up to the Suzzallo-Allen library on the University of Washington campus --a place I used to visit regularly, especially when I was in the midst of a project and had to run down lots of bits and pieces, odds and ends you just can't find online. Plus, libraries are great places to find out about books you hadn't come across before.  It's no surprise, then, that in my string of research trips to Marquette over the last few years, I spent most of my breaks wandering over to their Memorial Library to do a thorough poke-about, mostly among the PRs and PSs. 

But the coming of Covid and my giving up driving curtailed these visits, so much so that I think it's been about three years since I'd been there (I recall I was finishing up my Nodens piece at the time, for the Verlyn Fliger festshrift).

This visit was to renew my library card: non-student/non-faculty/non-alumna can get one by making a yearly donation to the Friends to their Library program, which we did. Then I went upstairs to poke around a bit and see if things were still more or less where I remembered them. They were.  I want to look up a quote by Roy Campbell but, as my preparatory online poking about in the catalogue had shown, the book I wanted was offsite in storage. I wasn't able to put in a request to have it brought up to the main library, since I needed the renewed card for that, and I cdn't get the card renewed without actually coming to the main library.

So, as long as I was there, I looked over their Tolkien shelves, then Larkin, then Lewis, then Williams, then Wodehouse, then (shifting to a different part of the library), Ezra Pound, then Shirley Jackson, amongst others. 

Didn't go by the great Reading Room, my favorite place to work in the library, since this was a renew-contact visit, not a get-some-work-in session.  

In two weeks or so, I'll see about getting that Campbell volume to see if the passages I remember (a) is actually there and (b) might add up to a note. Or not. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading:  HAWAII UNDER THE RISING SUN: JAPAN'S PLANS FOR CONQUEST AFTER PEARL HARBOR by John J. Stephan (1984), a book I learned about from my friend David Bratman's blog.