Couple needs new home for 30,000-volume Rocky Mountain Land Library

Give me a home where the stacks of books loom, and the reader and researcher play.

Two self-described bookish people with an unusual dream worked a quarter-century and amassed a 30,000-volume collection on "the land and people's connection to the land" that could make any naturalist drool.

It's called the Rocky Mountain Land Library, and experts say it's a Colorado treasure. But the books are about to be homeless.

Soft-spoken Tattered Cover Book Store employees Jeffrey Lee and his wife, Ann Martin, who met on the job, bought all of those books and stored them in every nook and cranny of the rooms of their rented home on Humboldt Street.

After about 23 years , they must move because the house will be sold.

This collection of nature books has evolved into one of the finest archives of it's kind anywhere. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)

They have found a much smaller place for themselves, but there's not enough room for the books.

Losing the house was "totally depressing and disorienting," Lee said. The timing was bad — which becomes apparent as the story unfolds — but they rally.

By midweek, Lee, Martin and helpers had packed more than 100 of the 600 large boxes they estimated would get the job done. "But we're kind of wondering if we low-balled it," Lee said sheepishly.

They're also wondering where the books will go. They have a March 8 deadline.

Upstairs, the situation seems almost under control. But in the basement, the stacks are floor-to-rafters. Leaning. Forming walls. Framing the furnace and water heater. Filling the stairwell. Each book is a beautiful brick of paper and knowledge bound together and asking to be held.

However, picking up the beguiling "Mad Farmer Poems" or a Teddy Roosevelt biography off a basement stack might set off an avalanche of the printed word.

"Ann and I have always gravitated to the same kind of books: natural history," Lee said.

Bird, bee, bug, beast and botany books are abundant enough to populate their own sections. The Rocky Mountains are well-represented, but then so is every range on the planet.

They have a serious American Indian collection. And here and there is the odd title: "Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay."

Each book, however chaotic its placement in the basement, has a handwritten 3-by-5 index card devoted to it. These books are loved.

"I had to actually see the books to believe it," said John Calderazzo, a Colorado State University English professor and a nature writer on the board of the nonprofit, all-volunteer Rocky Mountain Land Library.

"It's the best nature library I know of anywhere. There are so many beautiful books. Piles and piles and piles. There's a thin line between collecting and hoarding," he said, laughing loud.

Lee and Martin have made the books available to nature writers and others interested in them, and some have been used in the Tattered Cover's Rocky Mountain Land speaker series.

But a library that exists as piles, or in boxes, is not a proper library.

Yet there is much more to the story. Lee and Martin have been slowly hatching and executing a grand plan to create something extraordinary.

They were inspired by a visit in the mid-1990s to "a bed and book" called St. Deiniol's Library, now known as Gladstone's Library in Hawarden, Flinstshire, Wales. The residential library, considered an important British research resource in the arts and humanities, was founded by Victorian statesman William Ewart Gladstone in 1895.

"We came back with the naïve thought we could do something like that in Colorado," Lee said.

After years of looking for a site, followed by almost six years of discussion, Lee said, he is close to signing a 99-year lease for a residential land-study center at South Park's circa-1863 Buffalo Peaks Ranch along the Middle Fork of the South Platte River. It's about two hours from Denver and Colorado Springs.

Working with Park County's community-development officials and the city of Aurora, which owns the ranch because of water interests, and Denver Water, which owns water rights, Lee and Martin sketched out program possibilities.

Colorado's residential library could be home to workshops, classes, conferences, field work, heritage tourism and more than 20,000 of Lee and Martin's books, as wells as maps and journals.

The center, with its views of Mount Silverheels, could host and inspire teachers, writers, artists, students, conservationists, ranchers, historians, chefs, astronomers, birders, archaeologists, other scientists and all species of nature lovers.

"We're offering people a refresher course in nature," Lee said. "If you don't have joy in nature, it's hard to save any part of it."

Lee describes himself as "not the most dynamic person," yet he and Martin have dreamed large and recruited well.

The library partnered with Denver Water and the Thorne Ecological Institute to establish in 2009 a 3,000-book Kids and Educators Library at Waterton Canyon's Kassler Center, southwest of metro Denver.

Lee and Martin are also proposing an unconventional library to house children's books and an urban-homestead collection to bring nature into the inner city (urban farming, beekeeping, raising chickens). They are looking for a site. It could also serve as temporary storage for the land library until Buffalo Peaks is a done deal and ready for occupancy in a year or two. One candidate for the urban-connection land library is the Cole Neighborhood's Phillips Center.

They need about $200,000 to put this piece in place. Failing that, they need to find storage space somewhere — on a campus, in a garage or in a warehouse — for about 600 boxes.

"Help us, please," Calderazzo said. "This is really a wonderful resource. And they're great people."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver has been designing, over several semesters of Kat Vlahos' Studio Class, restoration of the Buffalo Peaks ranchhouse, bunkhouse, barns and other structures to accommodate the land center. Volunteer crews have scraped and painted, cleared brush and fixed fences.

The Environmental Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder gave its 2,500-volume environmental- studies library to the Rocky Mountain Land Library because of storage-space problems of its own.

The Tattered Cover donated shelving it left behind in 2006 when it moved from Cherry Creek to its new location on East Colfax.

So many pieces are in place, or nearly so.

But this weekend, and for the next few weeks, the job is boxing books and finding someplace safe and dry for the short term, until the books are home on the range.

"I'm a little daunted by the task at hand," Martin said. "That's the hurdle in front of us right now. But we're excited. We're moving ahead."

It's not hard to imagine Gladstone cheering them on.

After all, at age 85, he personally hauled most of the 32,000-book collection he donated to its new home at St. Deiniol's using his wheelbarrow.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com

Got an idea?

For more on the Rocky Mountain Land Library, visit landlibrary.org or write to jeff@landlibrary.org.

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Couple needs new home for 30,000-volume Rocky Mountain Land Library