![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reviews_and_ramblings
Ralph G. Moritz was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on November 16, 1912. He was a librarian and classical music enthusiast. He attended the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Rapids, in the 1930s. His last known position was Chief Catalog Librarian at California State University, Los Angeles.His special interests were travel and music, and from at least the 1960s onwards he made several trips a year to music festivals and performances both in the United States and Europe.
He died in Los Angeles on June 19, 1998.
His papers are collected at The Online Archive of California (OAC), which provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections. The papers consist of travel diaries of Ralph G. Moritz, listing the sights he saw, the concerts he attended, and his sexual encounters on his travels from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The bulk of the collection consists of letters Moritz received from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s from Samuel Potter, aka "Octavian", Brown (1916-1995), an expatriate American living in Rome, who in the 1970s and early 1980s ran a small bed and breakfast and male bordello, that Moritz frequented, out of his apartment. The letters detail the trials, tribulations, and pleasures of life in Rome, and are filled with gossip about the lives of his "boys" and his clients, from the unnamed to the famous.
Source: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt867nf1sn/
Further Readings:
American Music Librarianship: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge Music Bibliographies) by Carol June Bradley
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (August 23, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415972914
ISBN-13: 978-0415972918
Amazon: American Music Librarianship: A Research and Information Guide
Written by one of the foremost historians of music librarianship in the US, this authoritative bibliography of music librarianship reflects the great diversity of the literature of music librarianship in America. The literature of American music librarianship has been around since the nineteenth century when public libraries began to keep records of player-piano concerts, significant donations of books and music, and suggestions for housing music. Throughout the twentieth century American periodicals printed more and more articles on topics within music studies and eventually specialized books designed to aid the music librarian began to be published. This comprehensive, annotated bibliography includes: items of historical interest; descriptions of individual collections; catalogues of collections; descriptions of specific library functions; record-related subjects; bibliographies designed for music library use; literature from Canada and Britain relevant to US library practices; key discographies; and information on specialized music research. This fully indexed reference will be invaluable to researchers, students and scholars in music library sciences as well as those interested in specific collections.
