WSU Retention List Stories

John Lucas was from a prominent Winona family (as in Prentiss-Lucas Hall). He studied literature and was a professor of English at Carleton College in Northfield. He and his wife Pat spent their summers in Europe and collected a wide range of books. When John passed away, Pat donated many of those books to the Krueger Library. John and Pat Lucas focused their collecting efforts on the early 20^th century modernists, both in literature and the visual arts.

When the collection was donated, I personally assisted with its evaluation. In the second of these two books, I found a letter from the translator to John and Pat thanking them for providing the funds for the translation from English into Italian.

Picasso / par Christian Zervos. Paris: Fernand Hazan, 1949.

Berryman, John. Omaggio a Mistress Bradstreet. Prefazione, traduzione e note di Sergio Perosa. Torino: G. Einaudi, 1969.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

The Krueger Library retention list includes some scarcely-held novels by the famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It also has a book that discusses the legacy of a long-forgotten story that his nineteen-year-old lover and soon-to-be wife drafted one summer when she was inspired by a ghost-story-writing challenge. Everyone still quotes Zastrozzi, but no one remembers … Frankenstein!

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, and Stephen C Behrendt. Zastrozzi: A Romance; St. Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.

Shaw, Debra Benita. Women, Science, and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000. 

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

(Note: None of our many copies of Frankenstein are rare enough to be on the Krueger Library retention list.)

At age 96, Noam Chomsky is a major American scholar. Last year, he was rumored to have died, but he was later discharged from the hospital.

In the later 20^th century, Chomsky's linguistic framework became the dominant theory for how humans acquire language and process it in their brains (although his ideas have now been called into question by the new AI Large Language Models). His leftist politics also challenged American culture. Chomsky spoke at Winona State on March 20, 1998, a little over 27 years ago. The video of that lecture can be viewed on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2JWvgMiR4

One of our many books about Chomsky is on the Krueger Library’s retention list. 

Chomsky: language, mind, and politics / James McGilvray. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.

(Our student newspaper, the Winonan, has been digitized and can be found on the Krueger Library’s OpenRiver repository. At the time of his lecture, there were letters to the editor of the Winonan discussing some of Chomsky’s ideas. Those letters can be found here: https://openriver.winona.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=thewinonan1990s) 

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

November 28^th is the 267^th birthday of the poet William Blake. Professor Wayne C. Ripley (English) is the bibliographer for The William Blake Archive. Thanks in part to his research, some of the books on WSU’s retention list are studies of Blake. 

Makdisi, Saree. Reading William Blake. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. Here is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

During the summer, Winona hosts the Great River Shakespeare Festival. One of the titles we are retaining in our section on literature is a text by the esteemed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro.

“But wait!” you say, “The whole point of the retention list is to identify books that are relatively rare in the State of Minnesota. How could an important study by one of the best-known contemporary Shakespeare scholars appear on our list?”

The answer is that the American edition of the book, published by Simon and Schuster, is common in Minnesota. It is not on our retention list, even though we own a copy of that edition. Instead, the copy on our retention list is the British edition, which was published in London. Winona State has both editions.

Shapiro, James. 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. London: Faber & Faber, 2016.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

One of our Collection Develop criteria for the Krueger Library is whether a potential addition is of local interest. At least two of the books on our retention list are creative works from WSU faculty or staff.

Oness, Elizabeth. Twelve Rivers of the Body. Arlington, VA: Gival Press, 2008.

Peterson, Nancy Kay. Selling the Family: Poems. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2010.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

Originally posted March 21, 2024

Works by members of marginalized communities, almost by definition, are likely to be uncommon. Here are two volumes of creative work by members of marginalized ethnic and gender communities.

Baraka, Amiri. The Baptism & the Toilet. New York: Grove, 1969.

Holoch, Naomi, and Joan Nestle. Women on Women 2: An Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction. New York: Plume, 1993.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

As one could predict, none of the books written by Nobel-prize winning author John Steinbeck are uncommon enough in Minnesota to be on the Winona State retention list, … but his FBI files are!

Fensch, Thomas. The FBI Files on John Steinbeck. Santa Teresa, NM: New Century Books, 2002.

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. This is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.