ROBERT

1958 — 2026

Robert John Charles Gore. Librarian, photographer, poet. Uncle. His fridge was always crowded — family, friends, postcards, proof of a life thick with people. These are the things that stuck. The words are his own — from a 2018 interview, and one poem, further down, exactly as he printed it.

Los Angeles

A Celebration of Robert’s Life

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.

Powell Library Rotunda

University of California, Los Angeles

the program begins at 3:15
light refreshments · parking in Lot P4

RSVP for Los Angeles

Hosted by UCLA Library.
Please reply by Friday, September 4.
One form per guest.

Vancouver

A Celebration of Robert’s Life

we hope to gather Saturday, September 26, 2026 daytime

VanDusen Botanical Garden

5251 Oak Street

at the tree the family
adopted for Jackie

not yet confirmed with the garden

Add me to the list

Family and friends welcome. Leave your name
and we’ll write as soon as it’s settled.

“When you’re a creative person… you don’t always think in a straight line. That line can go zigging and zagging off in any direction.”
“If they ask you an odd question like, oh, I kind of want to look at artists’ books on freeways — then you go with it.”
there will be periods of silence
and all I can hear
is the turning of pages — on his favourite hour, teaching artists’ books
“I call them genre busting. They don’t really fit easily within any particular category.” he meant the books
“Just because they’re small doesn’t mean that they’re not valuable. In the long run, it’s often those smaller catalogues that become really historically significant.”
“My older sister read so much literature to me, and then I disappointed her by going out and reading mystery novels and becoming a science fiction nerd, but then eventually becoming a poet. There was some redemption there.” on Jackie
“It’s not a boring library.”
He was a poet as long as he was a librarian. This is the title poem of his chapbook — printed here as he published it. more from Forth and Back to come

The Code Between Us

for Jackie

Past one o’clock my brain switched over to coyote time

snow darkening the streetlights a drug breathing somnolence through the streets of the city.

The calm outside a focal point for the energy I spent all along the day choosing gifts

how more alien I felt with each passing dollar, wondering if the piano music I bought for X

would be romantic enough or if the plate for Y was just the right colour, the man behind the counter wrapping it so carefully as it passed

from his hands into mine while I tried to imagine what it might look like in your apartment, tried to think with your eyes about beauty

and the small pleasure I thought would come into the code between us, our year on year museum of artifacts

an anthropology of our own lives for the record, for the language we create

when this ritual is unwrapped.

Take a copy a printable page, A5

Robert Gore, from The Code Between Us — Frog Hollow Press

“Sometimes it’s worth taking that chance.”

in lieu of flowers

The Robert Gore and Mitchell Levin
Endowment for Artists’ Books

UCLA Arts Library

In 2018 he was asked whether the artists’ book collection had an endowment. “I don’t have an endowment,” he said — just one loyal donor, and his own time spent ferreting out the small, easily missed books that “in the long run… become really historically significant.” Now the collection he rebuilt carries his name, and Mitchell’s, and it supports the acquisition, management and preservation of artists’ books at UCLA for good.

Give to the endowment

Memories & photos: the Remembering Robert page