CELESTE WEST “FESTSCHRIFT” BOOK PROJECT

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A CELESTE WEST “FESTSCHRIFT” BOOK PROJECT

Co-editors Toni Samek and KR Roberto are seeking articles, stories, 
poems, photographs, letters, thought pieces and other individual and 
collective memories of Celeste West, lesbian, feminist librarian, 
publisher, and activist, for a festschrift to be published by Library 
Juice Press in 2009. Celeste passed away in San Francisco on January 
3, 2008 at the age of 65. She was a pioneering progressive librarian 
and one of the founders of the Bay Area Reference Center (BARC), 
Booklegger Press, Synergy [Magazine], and Booklegger Magazine. She was 
also co-editor of the now classic title Revolting Librarians. From 
1989 until 2006, Celeste worked as the library director at the San 
Francisco Zen Center. She was a radical library worker whose practice 
challenged established library traditions by encouraging librarians to 
speak up about the need for systematic change. West initiated 
questions and challenged assumptions (such as library neutrality) that 
continue to be central issues examined in critical librarianship 
today. However, while Celeste released a lot of work to the world as 
author and editor, not much was ever shared about her as subject.

Thus, we are seeking your contributions to a Celeste West festschrift 
book project.

For an historical snapshot of some of Celeste�s key contributions via 
Booklegger Press, please see: Toni Samek. 2006. “Unbossed and 
Unbought: Booklegger Press the First Women-Owned American Library 
Publisher” in Women In Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American 
Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by James P. 
Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand. Foreword by Elizabeth Long. Madison, WI: 
The University of Wisconsin Press in collaboration with the Center for 
the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. Pages 126-155. Available in print and as an online 
book.

For a more contemporary introduction to Celeste�s way of thinking, 
see: Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by K.R. 
Roberto and Jessamyn West.

Please direct your ideas and queries to the FESTSCHRIFT Editorial 
Assistant and Project Manager Moyra Lang (moyra @ ualberta.ca). The 
final deadline for all contributions is December 10, 2008.

If you have not encountered the name Celeste West until now, please 
see here: http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=361 and here:
http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/in-memoriam-celeste-west.html

THANK YOU! Toni Samek, KR Roberto, and Moyra Lang.

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