Cornell University Library Digital Collections
Ithaca House Press Publishing Files
About this collection
This digital collection contains images of 76 items from the archives of the Ithaca House press, which was a small press that operated in Ithaca, New York from 1969-1986. The Ithaca House archive is held by Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Spanning across 11 cubic feet of materials, the archive includes manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials relating to books published by the press along with business records documenting the operations of the press and its associated gallery and bookstore.
The 76 items featured in this digital collection were selected by Marty Cain, PhD '22. The items provide insight into how Ithaca House was managed, and the role it played in both Ithaca and the national small press ecosystem. The digital selections include press clippings, advertising, reviews, photographs, and other promotional materials.
Historical context
Started by Baxter Hathaway, a Cornell professor who also edited the university-affiliated literary journal Epoch, Ithaca House published over one-hundred books. It never had the visibility of some of its more celebrated but now-defunct small press contemporaries, such as the Burning Deck or Black Sparrow Press; nor did it pursue a path in the direction of more mainstream legibility, in the fashion of Graywolf Press or Copper Canyon. Ithaca House was nonetheless an early member of Serenity Book Distribution (a Berkeley-based precursor to Small Press Distribution) and, for a time, was a prolific participant in a burgeoning small press movement. Its titles received reviews in numerous little magazines of its day, and amidst many poets who have now been forgotten, Ithaca House published a number of writers associated with Language poetry—Tom Mandel, Ray DiPalma, David Gitin, and the first books by Bob Perelman, David Melnick, and Ron Silliman—as well as a book by Maxine Chernoff, and works by the important Black avant-gardists C.S. Giscombe and Kenneth McClane.
Based upon this list of authors, Ithaca House might sound similar to many of the highly curated avant-garde small presses that emerged during the "mimeo revolution" heyday of the 1960s. But while many of its best-known authors had some adjacency to the Bay Area Language writing scene, Ithaca House's list of published works offered a much broader representation of the diversity of work being written through the 1970s and '80s: it published books of metrical verse; works of Robert Bly-esque “deep image” poetry; feminist confessional poetry; numerous books from across the aesthetic spectrum by poets local to Ithaca; and several books of fiction, to name a few examples.
Even though it published poets from across the United States, Ithaca House held visible ties to its local community. During the majority of its of existence, it maintained a storefront in Ithaca—initially on Forest Home Drive, near the Cornell University campus, and later on Plain Street in downtown Ithaca. Run by Sherry Hathaway, Baxter Hathaway's spouse, the Ithaca House storefront contained the press's printing equipment, but also a silkscreen studio and a gallery for local visual artists. The Ithaca House storefront also housed a small press bookstore called the Poets' Corner that sold a host of literary journals and poetry collections.
While narratives of U.S. small press history tend to be dominated by metropolitan centers—particularly New York City and the Bay Area, the putative birth-sites of the “mimeo revolution"—Ithaca House's archive provides evidence of D.I.Y. publishing activity within a decidedly different geography. Further, by virtue of its adjacency to Cornell, Ithaca House foregrounds the complex relationship that U.S. poetry has long had with the academy. On one hand, Ithaca House had no technical affiliation with the university, and in fact, Hathaway often framed it as a response to an institutional lack—a direct response to a decision by Cornell University Press to cease publishing poetry. On the other hand, Baxter Hathaway was ensconced in academic institutionalism. In addition to being a professor in Cornell's Department of English, he was—like his peers Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner—an early outspoken advocate for the academic creative writing program and was largely responsible for founding the Creative Writing M.F.A. at Cornell. Nearly all of the Ithaca House staff, as well as a significant number of the authors it published, were current or former students of Hathaway. In the early '80s, John Latta—one of Hathaway's former students, who had intermittently lived in his basement and worked for him as a property manager—assumed leadership and continued to run the press for two years after Hathaway's death in 1984.
Jointly influenced by old-guard institutionalism, avant-garde aesthetics, and the countercultural milieu of Ithaca in the '70s, Ithaca House exemplifies the interplay between literary subculture and institution that often characterized small press publishing during the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, Ithaca House's business documents—which frequently disclose financial losses and an ongoing struggle to secure funding—showcase the immense challenge of publishing outside the commercial mainstream.
Using the collection
The digital collection can be browsed or searched by title, author, or keywords.
For more information about this collection, contact rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest Stern Curator, Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Marty Cain Ph.D. '22, Department of English; Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts & Sciences, awarded to Marty Cain in 2020.
- Credits
- This collection overview was prepared by Katherine Reagan, Ernest L Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, with Historical Context written by Marty Cain, Ph.D. '22 in English, Cornell University, and last reviewed in 2025.