Earlier this month, hundreds of books from the personal library of the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024 at his New York City apartment, arrived at a private home in Altadena.
The cross-country delivery came Tuesday, Jan. 7 – just hours ahead of the Eaton Fire, which destroyed nearly 9,500 structures and left 17 dead.
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The writer’s vast book collection, which had been packed up and prepared by friends and admirers, was to be part of a planned foundation and residency intended for the Altadena home, which was unoccupied and had been cleared out for a planned renovation.
“There was no one living in the house, thankfully,” says Janique Vigier, an editor at the publishing house Semiotext(e) and a friend of the late author. “It was going to be renovated so there was no one there…There was very little else in the house.”
Except his books. So when the fire incinerated the home that night, Indiana’s collection burned, too.
“I mean, just hundreds and hundreds of books,” says Vigier. “I don’t know where to start: All of Malaparte, Marx, French poetry, German folktales. It really ran the gamut.”
“We didn’t have a full accounting,” says Vigier, when asked what the collection held. “So it’s hard to speak to that.”
News of the destruction of Indiana’s library was first revealed by novelist Colm Tóibín, who mentioned it in an essay in the London Review of Books, but further information – such as, why the material had been sent there – had not yet emerged.
Also, it was perhaps not initially clear to some that Indiana’s archive – as opposed to his book collection – was not affected. His papers are in the special collections library at New York University.
“We at NYU Special Collections continue to mourn the loss of Gary Indiana, and we were devastated to learn of the destruction of his library in the Eaton fire. We take some solace in the fact that Gary’s remaining papers, which include manuscripts, journals, source material and correspondence, had been packed separately from the library and remain in New York City. These archives will be added to The Gary Indiana Papers, which have been a part of NYU’s Downtown Collection since 2005,” the institution said in a statement.
The London-based Vigier spoke by phone from New York where she had come for a Jan. 27 memorial for the author, which had been held at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church the night before this interview.
“There were about 500 people in attendance,” said Vigier. “Friends, people who have worked with him and his family spoke.” Among the speakers, according to the lineup published online, were Tracey Emin, Jim Fletcher, Betsey Sussler and Lynne Tillman.
Vigier described how he got involved in the project.
“I was just a good friend of Gary’s, and I work with Semiotext(e). Semiotext(e) and Seven Stories have republished many of Gary’s novels and essays in the past decade or so,” she says, stressing that she had not been an editor of Indiana’s work. “I got to know him over that period.”
“He was very sharp, incredibly intelligent, very, very funny. A dark wit,” says Vigier. “He was really a remarkable person, so gifted.
“When he passed away, there was a group of us who were planning a memorial and helping his brother, the executor, sort through things in New York, which obviously involved the papers, the apartment, the library. So as you know, the papers went to NYU, and the plan was to keep the library together as the Gary Indiana Library that people could access in the future.”
Asked about Indiana’s work, Vigier offered some favorites. “I really like the first one, ‘Horse Crazy,’” she says. “It’s a love story or an addiction story, and it’s also about the AIDS crisis in New York and the slow gentrification of the city, I suppose. Yeah, that one, is a great place to start.”
She also recommends the former Village Voice art critic’s “remarkable” collected essays – while not mentioning its now too-apt title, “Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021.”
“Those collected essays, I think, even give a sense of what might be in the library,” she says. “A lot of the essays are about particular books and particular artists that have long occupied his imagination.”
As she talks about his work and a novel he was working on when he died, it’s clear that Indiana’s writing, including a 2022 McNally Editions reprint of 1994’s “Rent Boy,” is better known and easier to access now than it had been in the past.
“Yeah, they really had a second life, I would say. Many of them had fallen out of print, and I think that he saw a much different audience very late in life. And that was very rewarding to him, to see the books gain a new audience and to have a rich second life.
“That brought him a lot of joy.”
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