We'll see you at the Georgia Book Fair

We'll be at the Georgia Fine and Collectible Book Fair on Saturday and Sunday. If you're in the area, come by to say hello. We'd love to see you. Click on the link above for all the details.

Off to the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair

We're on the road again, bound for Davy Crockett country and the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair this coming weekend. This year, it's at the University of the South in Sewanee, moved from nearby Cowan. We're always excited to be a part of this book fair. Not only do we see longtime customers and longtime bookseller friends (many of the regulars at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair exhibit in Tennessee), but this is a great place for bibliophiles. Tennessee is home of the Southern Agrarians, the writers and poets with a particularly southern sensitivity who arose at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and 1930s. Accordingly we're taking works by Agrarians like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom and other Southern literature as well as English literature and leatherbound books (always quite popular in Tennessee). If you're in the area, stop by to see us. The book fair is in the Fowler Center on Texas Avenue. If not, we'll see you when we get back.

Allen Tate was a Southern poet

Allen Tate

It is the birthday of poet Allen Tate (1899), who was a member of the Southern Agrarian poets, along with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. Tate served as poet-in-residence at Princeton University and United States Poet Laureate.

The Southern Agrarians contributed to the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and '30s. They wrote a collection of essays titled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, that serves as a manifesto of the tradition. Tate met Warren and Ransom when he started at Vanderbilt University in 1918.

Originally they were known as the Fugitive Poets and they published a literary magazine called The Fugitive, once considered one of the most influential publications in American letters. Also among the Fugitives were Merrill Moore, Donald Davidson and William Ridley Wills. The group eventually morphed into the Southern Agrarians and included a dozen American writers, novelists, and essayists as well as poets. Their roots were in the agrarian South.

Tate moved to New York City in 1924 and met poet Hart Crane. Tate contributed to The Nation magazine, the Hound and Horn, Poetry magazine and, eventually, the National Review. The writing didn't pay the bills, however, and Tate worked as a janitor to support himself.

He married writer Caroline Gordon and they lived in Greenwich Village and then for a time in London and Paris but after 20 years they divorced only to remarry after a year and then divorce again. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

In early adulthood, Tate espoused atheism but eventually became a Roman Catholic. He married poet Isabella Gardner in the 1950s but began an affair with a nun enrolled in one of his classes, divorced Gardner and married the nun, Helen Heinz. They settled in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he helped transform The Sewanee Review into a prestigious literary journal.

Tate's best known poem is Ode to the Confederate Dead (1928), a long poem set in a graveyard in the South in which the narrator contemplates his own mortality.