Miskatonic University PressJohn Cage’s library is now catalogued online. There are 1126 items—perhaps fewer than I’d have expected, or perhaps not. Lots about mushrooms, poetry, Zen, anarchism, music, art, chess, Marcel Duchamp and cooking. Just the sort of collection one would love to look through, especially when flipping open Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947–1980 one sees the dedication: “For John Cage & Merce Cunningham / One syllable at a time! New York January 18, 1985 / Allen Ginsberg.”
He had Hoyle’s Rules of Games, like everyone used to … but in the Cage-Cunningham household, maybe it was used for making art as well as checking the rules for Canasta.