Gary Indiana’s Personal Library Incinerated in LA Wildfires
150Jan. 14, 2025
The personal library of rabblerousing artist, novelist, and cultural criticGary Indiana, whodiedlast fall, were destroyed in one of the massive fires that have ravaged Los Angeles in the past week. Colm Tóibín, writing in theLondon Review of Books, reports that following Indiana’s death, his books, which in some instances had been arrayed three rows deep on his shelves, had been boxed, carried down from his sixth-floor East Village walkup, and subsequently shepherded cross-country. On January 7, the archive arrived in Altadena, at a house that was set to be used as an artists’ residence, and where it was to form the core library.
The Eaton fire, which wasfirst reportedin the Altadena/Pasadena area on the evening of January 7, had by the end of the following dayconsumedover 10,000 acres.
“On Tuesday when Gary Indiana’s library came to Los Angeles, it rested for a while in the appointed house in Altadena,” Tóibín wrote. “But it was the wrong day. If they—the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured—had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday, unfortunately,” he concluded, “there was still an address.”
At the time of writing, eleven people had perished in the blaze, which was 33 percent contained, having scorched more than 14,000 acres, destroyed nearly 2,000 structures, and damaged over 250. Roughly 40,000 more buildings are threatened by the conflagration.
Indiana’s papers dating from 1976 to 2005 are held by New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections.