The rosters of record — and a blind poet

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SHELF, AS THE BIBLIOGRAPHERS KEPT IT

How the early roster survives. Fort Wayne's nineteenth-century writers left no shelf of famous books; what they left is a bibliography. The state record, Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816–1916, worked the whole state county by county, and the Allen County Public Library later did the same work for its own ground in Marguerite C. Ritchie's Fort Wayne Area Authors, a card-file bibliography of everyone who had written a book from a Fort Wayne address or a Fort Wayne childhood. Between them they preserve the shape of the early record: sermons and schoolbooks, county and church histories, volumes of verse printed by local job shops — the ordinary literary output of a canal-and-railroad town, kept by librarians when nobody else thought to keep it. The full rosters live in those two bibliographies; this section profiles the names that carry weight beyond them.

One name from the cards. The Reverend Albert Delson Burkett (1879–1946), a Fort Wayne minister who retired in 1937 after going blind, published as a Hoosier poet into his blindness — Old Home Farm and Things We Love (1945) is the volume the library's bibliography records. He stands here for the dozens of Fort Wayne versifiers, memorialists, and pamphleteers whose whole surviving claim is a card in Ritchie's file and a copy on an Indiana Collection shelf.

Sources: Ritchie, comp., Fort Wayne Area Authors (Allen County Public Library), incl. the Burkett entry and its cross-references to Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816–1916.