Honoring the Sukov Collection

The history of the Little Magazines Collection in Special Collections began in the late 1950s, when Memorial Library acquired by purchase and donation the collection of Marvin Sukov, a Minneapolis psychiatrist and dedicated collector of largely non-commericial, avant-garde, experimental English-language literary magazines. These periodical publications are called little not because they are necessarily very small (though some are), but rather because their publication runs tend to be small, which in turn means that they have not always been acquired by academic and research libraries. Frequently they also deviate from a strict timetable for their publication, which poses its own challenges to acquiring and cataloging them.

We are pleased today to welcome to Special Collections members of Dr. Sukov’s family and to call attention to aspects of Dr. Sukov’s original collection and his generosity to the Libraries in the years following the original acquisition of his remarkable collection of little magazines.

The building itself bears witness to the importance of Dr. Sukov, in the form of a conference room in which many a lively discussion of the growth of the Libraries’ collections has occurred.

Two bookplates also speak to the growth of the Sukov Collection. The first is what we presume to be Dr. Sukov’s original bookplate (here, as affixed to the first volume of The criterion):

The second indicates the collection’s new home once it arrived in Madison: 

The collection now resides in what is called the Department of Special Collections within Memorial Library, where it anchors an extensive, and growing, collection of little magazines. Shown here are a few very recent additions to the Little Magazines Collections, which enjoys much use by readers both local and afar.

For more about the Sukov Collection and how it grew, we refer you to Susan Barribeau’s introduction to the Collection; for more about the Little Magazines Collection and how it continues to grow, the Little Magazine Collection blog edited by Oliver Bendorf. Susan Barribeau’s participation in a lively Grolier Club event about little magazines was also noted here.