Archaeology of North Dakota Quarterly

Yesterday, I visited theNorth Dakota Quarterly storerooms. We’re being evicted at the end of the calendar year (not, as we hoped, the end of the fiscal year), and we have about 23,000 back copies of NDQ stored there.

If you don’t know why I’m blogging about NDQ then you should read this!

These volumes represent a massive commitment of time, imagination, and energy at the Quarterly, and while we know that we can’t keep all of this massive cache of back issues, we simply have to keep some of it.

What captured my attention is that we probably have as many as three complete runs of the Quarterly. This is not trivial since the Quarterly began in 1910 and copies of the “Inaugural Issue” are rare:

They also have numerous copies of issues from the so-called “First Series“:

And a great stack of the 1956 volume which was the first issue of the “Second Series.” Because NDQ had just returned from a hiatus of over 20 years and the first issue of this series did not find its way into many university libraries. 

What is causing me some anxiety is where will this massive collection of NDQ volumes go? On the one hand, the older volumes will make their way into UND’s university archive, but we would love to find a home for the more recent volumes as well which feature significant contributions to the study of Native Americans, Hemingway, and Thomas McGrath as well as innumerable little gems like John F. Kennedy’s address to University of North Dakota’s campus and an interesting reminder to the media to avoid becoming “sedentary professional people ready to accept any fantasy that may be ‘advanced’”.

What can we do and what should we do with these back issues?