New York City-based publisher and book collector George Bixby spent a lifetime tracking down the works of writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin – from uncorrected proofs and rare editions of novels to scripts of theatrical work and interviews in newspapers and magazines.
When the collection went up for sale after Bixby’s death, a rare-book dealer notified Katherine Reagan, the Ernest L. Stern Director of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Cornell University Library. Reagan recognized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and collaborated on acquiring the collection for the library with Brenda Marston, curator of the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection, and Kofi Acree, curator of Africana Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library.
Now available by request at Cornell University Library for students, instructors and visiting researchers, the George Bixby James Baldwin collection includes rare and early editions of books by the famed Black, gay author who tackled issues of race, politics and sexuality through his civil rights activism and literary work from the 1940s to the 1980s.
“This is the labor of a dedicated and passionate collector who loved Baldwin and worked for decades to assemble a complete record as possible of his published output,” Reagan said. “Even if we could, this level of completeness would have taken decades to replicate today.”
Among the items in the collection are well-known works such as nonfiction books The Fire Next Time and Notes by a Native Son, and the semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, as well as magazine articles, advertisements and other promotional materials.
To bring visibility to the new collection, Acree curated select materials in a current exhibit, “Know Whence You Came: James Baldwin, Public Intellectual,” running through July 25 at the Michael T. Sillerman ’68 Rotunda of Carl A. Kroch Library.
“I chose the items to reflect facets of James Baldwin – essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, activist, all those different things,” Acree said.
Also featured are pictures of Baldwin taken from the photographic archive of the New York Amsterdam News, from the library’s Rare and Manuscript Collections. “The Amsterdam News was one of the oldest Black newspapers in America,” Acree said, “and I wanted to choose items that would draw the eye, too.”
Baldwin’s work is even more urgent and relevant today, according to Acree. “I disagree with people when they say Baldwin was ahead of his time,” he said. “Baldwin spoke of his time – we just took a long time catching up with him.”
Dominique Joe, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Literatures in English, visited the exhibit when it first opened in February, and was especially interested in the ephemera on display, such as magazine articles, printer proofs of novels, and playbills and tickets for Baldwin’s plays.
“The ephemerality adds to our understanding of who Baldwin was as a person, as more than just the writing that he produced,” Joe said. “We get a better sense of who this writer and thinker was within the context of the time in which he was writing and living.”
Like Acree, Joe emphasized Baldwin’s enduring relevance.
“We can look back at his ‘Open Letter to the Born Again’ from 1979, for example, and say Baldwin is talking about exactly what is going on right now,” she said. “We can always turn to Baldwin.”
This story also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
