Robert John Charles Gore
October 7, 1958 – June 12, 2026
Robert Gore was born in Sussex, New Brunswick, and became himself on the other coast. He arrived in Vancouver and stayed for three decades, long enough to make it the place he meant when he said home, even after twenty-one years in Los Angeles.
He worked in libraries from the age of eighteen — a high-school volunteer first, then bookstores, then everything after. But he took the long way. He studied English and Canadian literature at the University of British Columbia, then photography at Emily Carr, then returned to UBC for his Master of Library Science in 1989. He described the creative student’s path as a line that goes “zigging and zagging off in any direction,” and he meant his own. He called it art school mind, and he spent the rest of his career defending it in other people.
In 1991 he joined Kwantlen, then a community college on its way to becoming a university. He was a reference and instruction coordinator, an acquisitions librarian, and finally collection development coordinator. Early on, his boss asked him to build the opening-day collection for an entire new campus on a million-dollar budget — a job, Robert said, that no one else wanted and that intimidated him considerably. He took it because he understood the offer would not come twice. He credited it with everything that followed.
What followed was UCLA. From September 2005 until his death he was the Arts Library’s librarian for art, art history, architecture, and design | media arts, and for a period the interim film, television and theatre librarian. He chaired the Library’s Information Literacy Program for three and a half years. Above all, he built and championed the artists’ book collection — objects he called “genre busting,” because they refuse to sit in any one category. He taught a Fiat Lux freshman seminar on them for years. Asked once what pleased him most about the work, he described a room of first-year students with no phones out, each holding a small handmade book, and the only sound the turning of pages.
He was, in the words of colleagues, the opposite of a gatekeeper. He greeted new hires with flowers. He wrote the letters of reference. He explained the tedious machinery of a large public library to anyone who asked and never once made them feel slow for asking. He kept up terrible puns, sang snatches of musicals in the stacks, wore an inexhaustible supply of graphic t-shirts, knew the campus magnolias and jacarandas by name, and was reliably the person who lightened a tense meeting. In 2024 his colleagues named him LAUC-LA’s Librarian of the Year.
He was also a poet and a photographer, and had been since long before the library career took hold. In 1980 he co-founded the Vancouver literary magazine Vancouver Streets, and kept the correspondence from it for forty-five years. His chapbook The Code Between Us was published by Frog Hollow Press. A further manuscript, Forth and Back, was in near-final draft at his death.
He was predeceased by his partner of many years, Mitchell Levin, a story analyst, writer and teacher, who died in November 2021; and by his sister Jacqueline, who read literature aloud to him as a boy and to whom he credited, wryly, his eventual turn to poetry. He is survived by his sister Katherine, his nephews JP and Stefan Holecka, and his great-nephew Noah and great-niece Sonia.
His work continues at UCLA through the Robert Gore and Mitchell Levin Endowment for Artists’ Books in the Arts Library, which supports the acquisition, care and preservation of the collection he spent twenty years building — and through the students, artists and librarians who learned from him what it means to hand someone a beautiful thing and let them make of it what they will.