Another Look at . . . Granger’s
By Mary Ellen Quinn

One of the enduring monuments of reference publishing, The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry was born more than 100 years ago when Edith Granger, who worked for the Chicago publisher A. C. McClurg (also publisher of the Tarzan novels) was given a manuscript to edit. This manuscript was the fruit of efforts by the employees in the McClurg bookstore’s poetry department to help customers find poems in collections. An Index to Poetry and Recitations; Being a Practical Reference Manual for Librarian, Teacher, Bookseller, Elocutionist, Etc., appeared in 1904 and indexed 30,000 titles. Columbia University Press began publishing the index with the fourth edition in 1953. The thirteenth edition, published in 2007, indexes poems in anthologies published through May 31, 2006, that contain multiple authors. It is a companion to The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Collections and Selected Works (1996), which indexes more than 50,000 poems that appear in the collected and selected works of 251 major poets. A CD-ROM version of Granger’s was released in 1992, and in 1999, Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry went online.

As we are told in the preface, the thirteenth edition indexes 70,000 poems—the work of 12,257 authors—in anthologies “whose high editorial content and design standards mark them as likely to be found on library shelves.” Some 150 of the anthologies are new to this edition, among them Iraqi Poetry Today, The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the Library of America’s Poets of the Civil War and Poets of World War II. For the first time, poetry from other languages (French, Spanish, and Vietnamese) is included. As in the past, some anthologies have been dropped.

There have been no changes on the structural side; the arrangement of Granger’s has served very well through the years and altered little over numerous editions. The volume contains three indexes: “Title, First Line, and Last Line Index” (providing last-line indexing  for 10,000 of the most frequently anthologized poems); “Author Index”; and “Subject Index,” which has 4,500 subject headings. Within the indexes, anthologies are indicated by codes, which are keyed to the list of anthologies at the front of the volume. Anthologies recommended for acquisition are indicated by asterisks.