LAST JANUARY, STEWART Pugh, who lives in Cape George, received a phone call from his accountant in California.
Would Pugh accept a commission to clear out books stored in the basement of a Victorian house in Port Townsend that belonged to mutual friends who were selling it?
The house had served as the base for a poetry press called Dragon Gate Inc. in the 1980s.
Pugh knew the press’ founder, Gwen Head, and spouse Bernard Taper when they all lived in Berkeley, Calif.
A physicist, Pugh and spouse Virginia Thompson, an author, had rented part of the Victorian house when they first moved to Port Townsend 11 years ago.
“Gwen lived upstairs, and we lived downstairs,” he said.
So Pugh accepted the commission and started compiling an inventory of the contents of the basement.
31,841 books
The total: 31,841 books, most still in shrink-wrap and packed in boxes, of the 20 titles that Dragon Gate published during its decade of operation.
In the past seven months, Pugh has managed to reduce the piles of boxes by contacting the authors, bookstores and other interested parties but still has hundreds of books to find homes for.
“Here’s a little treasure in Port Townsend that’s going away — one way or another,” Pugh said.
“I may be the only person in town who doesn’t want a house to sell right away.”
His first priority: to locate the 17 authors or heirs and find out if they wanted the books.
Some were easier to find than others, he said, depending on the unusualness of their names.
It took him six months to track down Nancy Robertson, author of Women and Other Bodies of Water, eventually locating her in Utah. Her response rewarded the effort.
“She was so excited,” Pugh said. “She had been told her books didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t have one copy. I had only 277.”
Blynne Olivieri, Pacific Northwest curator of University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division, was also excited to hear from Pugh.
He contacted her in April to see if she was interested in copies of New as a Wave, a retrospective of Northwest poet Eve Triem’s work published by Dragon Gate in 1984.
Olivieri replied that she was interested in much more than that.
“Special Collections actively collects records and papers related to poets, writers and presses,” Olivieri said in a phone interview Monday.
“It was important to preserve the records of the press as it operated and not to break it apart.”
25 boxes
So Olivieri and a graduate student drove to Port Townsend in May and took away 25 boxes of administrative and production files that Head had kept: manuscripts, galleys, page proofs, paste-ups, cover designs, layouts, correspondence, contracts and photographs.
The library has created an online inventory of the Dragon Gate records, and special collections documents are available to the public, Olivieri said.
“The records show editorial and publication production for each of these titles,” she said.
Head established Dragon Gate as a short-story and poetry press in 1979, Olivieri said, and published books through 1987.
More coming by
The first poet she published was Henry Carlile, who, after being contacted by Pugh, came to Port Townsend and picked up cases of his book, Running Lights.
Poet Laura Jensen, author of Memory and Shelter, is sending someone over to pick up cases of her books, Pugh said.
He has also corresponded with Joan Swift, who lives in Edmonds, and Katherine Knapp Johnson, who lives in New York.
Pugh found Caroline Finkestein, author of Windows Facing East, living in Roswell, Ga.
The authors pay the cost of shipping, he said, so they can’t always afford to have all their books shipped.
Others end up on the damaged pile, including books that were stored in the converted garage that Head used for her office.
“They were all sunburned,” Pugh said.
Pugh also sent six cases of books by the late Jim Simmerman to the Jim Simmerman Poetry Festival in Flagstaff, Ariz., and offloaded three cases of A Radiance Like Wind or Water by Richard Ronan, who has a cult following.
Jordan Hartt of Centrum picked up cases of books to sell as fundraisers for the Writers Conference.
Joseph Bednarik of Copper Canyon Press, who has served as an adviser on the project, is taking cases of books to Portland, Ore., where Mark Wessel of Wessel and Lieberman Booksellers distributes poetry books to schools, Pugh said.
‘Introspective-type’
“I told him you might want to vet them,” Pugh said. “They were all introspective-type material.”
Pugh also found buyers at Open Books, an all-poetry bookstore in Seattle.
Having received an official pronouncement from the house owners’ lawyer that the books “belong to the basement,” Pugh decided to give half the proceeds from book sales to the Friends of the Port Townsend Library.
“I took them a check for $600 from the sales to Open Books,” he said.
Also in the basement are boxes of Head’s book of poems Frequencies, one of three volumes of her published poetry.
Born in New Orleans in 1940, she taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Writers at Work Conference in Park City, Utah, and at the University of California/Davis.
Education
In 1995, Head received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete her book Fire Shadows, published in 2001.
Head was also a member of Poets for Peace, which was established in the 1980s to protest the posting of the Trident fleet of ballistic nuclear submarines at Bangor, Olivieri said.
Head’s husband, Taper, is a veteran who helped track down stolen art work during World War II.
An author and writer for The New Yorker, he is now in his 90s and lives with Head in Berkeley, Calif., where Pugh first met the couple through a shared interest in the Shakespeare Festival.
They also shared an accountant, Patrick Golden, who called Pugh about tackling the book problem.
“They want the books gone,” he said.
But Pugh has not been able to contact the heirs of some of the authors, including James Thomas, author of Pictures Moving.
He has also tried to contact the widow of Richard Blessing, a Northwest poet, and has written Linda Gregerson but has received no reply.
As a last resort, Pugh said, he will contact a remainder house to see if they will take the orphans.
“The most painful part is I’m going to have to throw away someone’s book because I can’t find them,” he said. “That hurts.”
New owners
Eventually, the basement will be empty, and the house, which was built in 1888, will find new owners.
Perhaps they will read poetry in front of the fireplace in the front parlor of the house, which fostered a poetry press.
To access the inventory of the Dragon Gate archives at the University of Washington Library, visit http://tinyurl.com/3n7qf2b.
The three-story house, 508 Lincoln St. at Monroe Street, has seven bedrooms, stained-glass windows, original woodwork and a working elevator that also services the basement.
The front hall has a separate entrance for the upper floors.
It is listed at $550,000.
For more information, contact Barbara Bogart at Windermere Real Estate/Port Townsend at 360-385-9344 or bbogart@olypen.com.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
