Project Director, Irene Reti conducted fourteen hours of interviews with Rita Bottoms, Head of Special Collections at the University Library, UC Santa Cruz, shortly before her retirement in March 2003. This oral history provides a vivid and intimate look at thirty-seven years “behind the scenes” in the library’s Special Collections.
For thirty-seven years Bottoms immersed herself in collecting work by some of
the most eminent writers and photographers of the twentieth century, including
the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, photographer Edward Weston, composer
John Cage, visual poet Kenneth Patchen, poet and letterpress book printer William
Everson, poet and visual artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, composer and poet Lou
Harrison, singer and photographer Graham Nash, and philosopher Norman O. Brown.
But her role as a curator and librarian extended far beyond acquiring collections;
she developed intense and profound intellectual and emotional relationships
with each of these individuals. It is her detailed and deeply personal stories
of these relationships which form the heart of this volume, and provide the
kind of human amplification of the library’s collections which can only
be captured through oral history. Bottoms’ recollections of these individuals
are an important contribution to the history of twentieth century art and literature
in the United States.