Placing Papers

The American Literary Archives Market

Amy Hildreth Chen

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767313
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The sale of authors' papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others have had on this burgeoning economy.The market for contemporary authors' archives began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide primary sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Demand soon grew, and while writers and their families found new opportunities to make money, so too did book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. Public interest surrounding celebrity writers had exploded by the late twentieth century, and as Placing Papers illustrates, even the best funded institutions were forced to contend with the facts that acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive and increasingly competitive.

Chapter 1

Inside the Literary Archives Market

The number of dissertations being written on Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway had, in a few short years after World War II, surpassed the number written on Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson.

–Thomas F. Staley

In 2014, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’Connor, four of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, placed their papers in academic libraries. Two of these authors, Billy Collins and Toni Morrison, selected their own repositories. Collins chose the University of Texas at Austin, home to the Harry Ransom Center, which he described as “the best orphanage in the world.”1 Morrison picked the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University. The University of Illinois acquired the literary collection of Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, while Emory University obtained the archives of Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964.

The national news media enthusiastically recounted these acquisitions. National Public Radio reported that the Ransom Center now included Collins’s “jottings on cocktail napkins, envelopes and other scraps.” Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton University president, recounted in Time that “this extraordinary resource [of Morrison’s papers] will provide scholars and students with unprecedented insights.” The Chicago Tribune delighted readers with the fact that “the venerated poet” Gwendolyn Brooks “recorded everything she ate in spiral-bound notebooks,” while the New York Times explained O’Connor’s boxes included “charming juvenilia, including a hand-lettered children’s book about a goose.”2 Each of these articles focused on how ephemera related to an author’s private life highlight the relationships, habits, and intellectual environment authors bring to bear on their work. Such documents provide powerful contextual clues about the milieu in which a writer produced his or her texts. While the public is fascinated by the unique and surprising contents of writers’ papers, scholars are preoccupied by the ability of these documents to capture the personal beside the professional. But this charm does not come cheap.

Financial Value

Writers’ cultural capital, generated by public and scholarly interest, allows them to sell as well as donate their papers. When sold, prices may range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The cost of these papers defines which institutions choose to compete on the literary archives marketplace, favoring American universities with high endowments. The relative monopoly certain universities enjoy does not mean that they, or their competitors, feel satisfied with the market’s current dynamics. Many repositories in the United States are frustrated with how the market’s prices inflated over time.

Bookseller Glenn Horowitz, who often represents writers’ collections, noted that his first literary collection sale of poet W. S. Merwin’s papers sold for “$185,000 in 1983”—a small sum compared with novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s papers, which are “widely believed to have been the first archive sale to top $1 million” in 1992. Novelist Norman Mailer obtained $2.5 million. Poet Allen Ginsberg’s papers sold for $980,000. Prices for “typical” literary archives are between “$50,000 and $250,000,” although writers associated with more modest prices are less likely to share their earnings.3 Native American poet N. Scott Momaday received $500,000, a slightly above-average price but below the payments accorded to others. Nevertheless, Momaday felt satisfied by the exchange. He told the Wall Street Journal what he was paid even though Yale attempted to protect his privacy by refusing to comment.4

Institutions outside the United States are alarmed by the cost of writers’ papers as they lose the opportunity to keep their cultural heritage at home when authors sell their collections to more moneyed American repositories. British academics lament that “the struggle to preserve valuable papers within the United Kingdom is always challenged by the deeper coffers and wealthier benefactors of American . . . libraries and private collections.”5 The primary American offender is the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For example, the Guardian reported that Jim Crace sold his papers to the Ransom Center for “a six-figure sum (in pounds, not dollars),” a price an unnamed university in England could not match. In frustration at their inability to compete, British archivists updated the proverb that “two things are inevitable: death and taxes.” Now, they say, “two things are inevitable: death and Texas.”6

Even literature documents the Ransom Center’s reach: Brian Friel dramatized the problem in Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997). In the play, Friel depicts the anxiety Tom Connolly, an Irish writer, feels when a university representative comes to evaluate his papers. After a scene in which Connolly debates what David Knight, “the agent from that University in Texas,” meant when Knight said Connolly’s papers were “substantial,” Connolly begins to show how much stress he is under. Daisy, his wife, calms him: “My hope would be that he makes you a worthy offer . . . Because that acknowledgement, that affirmation might give you—whatever it is—the courage?—the equilibrium?—the necessary self-esteem?—just to hold on. Isn’t that what everyone needs? So for that reason alone I really hope he does buy the stuff.”7 If Knight acquires Tom Connolly’s papers at a good price, Tom’s literary collection will give the family financial security. But Daisy concludes that Tom’s creativity would be stymied if he sold his papers because Tom would become too confident. The play ends before the audience learns what Knight will offer for the collection and if Tom accepts his price or follows Daisy’s advice, but the turn between the Connolly family’s desperation to sell in the first act and Daisy’s reticence in the second illustrates the potential conflict between an author’s financial and emotional needs.

Give Me Your Answer, Do! downplays the problems American institutions incite when they seek the papers of international authors. Friel shows only Texas’s wealth and ambition, not its competition with other repositories. In real life, however, many of these institutions fight back to keep the papers of their nation’s writers at home. For example, to keep national manuscripts in British hands, the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester founded the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM) in 2005, the same year the United Kingdom Literary Heritage Working Group began to create a strategy to “raise awareness of the value of archives, offer guidance to writers over committing their papers and urge the government to offer tax incentives to living writers rather than to estates of the deceased.”8 Its outreach helped British writers become more aware of the importance of their archives to their home country.

Such outreach was essential as more American universities entered the field. Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library also is interested in British literary archives. The university paid $600,000 for Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s papers and an “undisclosed sum” for those of Best of the Booker award winner Salman Rushdie. However, Emory does not focus only on British papers. In 2007, the university purchased American novelist Alice Walker’s papers for around $1 million. But Emory’s collecting policy favors writers from a third country—Ireland.9 Emory decided to focus on the country as it had a rich literary heritage that had yet to be systematically collected. Now Emory holds most manuscripts related to the Belfast Group, a set of writers who dramatically reshaped the landscape of Anglophone poetry and whose most notable member, Seamus Heaney, would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

Whether British or American, many archivists and librarians believe that literary archives should not be sold. As costs rise, archivists and librarians note how their institutions struggle to provide the funding needed to continue supporting new acquisitions. Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, commented that donations are decreasing while individual items can cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”10 Public institutions can accept donations of literary archives but cannot always pay for them due to lower funding levels. Even when they can pay, representatives from such schools often are not able to match the offers of their more-moneyed peers.11

Complaints about the high price for literary archives do not come solely from universities struggling to build their profile in contemporary literature. Major players, like the Ransom Center, also feel the strain of high prices. Stephen Enniss, the center’s director, revealed how much his repository spent on Gabriel García Márquez’s papers—$2.2 million—only after the Associated Press and the Austin American-Statesman filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Enniss protested that “our competitive position is eroded” now that the cost of García Márquez’s collection became public, for “we can’t negotiate without showing the larger market our vulnerability.”12 Enniss did not want the price the Ransom Center paid for García Márquez’s papers to be known because he believes that other authors will then expect higher amounts for their materials. Enniss’s words demonstrate that although foreign and domestic repositories are frustrated that they cannot compete against their well-funded competitors for literary archives, the Ransom Center itself is beginning to complain about the costs associated with the trade.

Yet the market persists. Despite growing institutional objections to high costs, libraries need to continue acquiring research collections, and most writers prefer to sell their papers as Billy Collins and Toni Morrison did. Dan Piepenbring, reporting for the Paris Review, noted how ubiquitous the idea was: “One good thing about getting older, though, is that you can sell your papers—you know, all that junk that records your ‘process.’” While Piepenbring jokes that literary archives are junk and dismisses scholarship based on them as creating an artificial understanding of how composition occurs, the market remains attractive to authors. Those who participate in the trade can profit; this prospect is too enticing to ignore. Even deceased authors get in on the game. When authors die before they can choose a repository for their papers, the executors employed to maximize estate assets also prefer to sell their literary archives. As the Wall Street Journal wryly commented, whether an author is living is beside the point: “Being dead helps but isn’t required.”13

Authors nevertheless find the process of transferring their archives from their homes to a repository emotionally fraught. Phillip Lopate noted that “the most gratifying event to have occurred this past year—my ambivalence about surrendering them aside—was selling my papers to Yale University’s Beinecke Library.” Lopate did not enjoy the undertaking, which required approaching several repositories, enduring appraisers who determined his papers’ value, and waiting for universities to decide whether they were interested in his work. Lopate particularly resented the appraisal process, which required setting a financial value for a lifetime of work based on external market considerations. Lopate remarked that the men and women who came to survey his collection took only two hours to determine his papers’ worth and maintained clinically detached expressions as they examined the intimate details of his life.14 The process of transforming personal papers into a literary archive may be lucrative, but it requires writers to see their work as a commodity.

Appraisal can provoke an author’s sense of competitiveness. Creating a literary archive out of an author’s personal papers does not just commodify the work but also commodifies the life. Papers document a writer’s experiences in addition to his or her creativity. If another author obtains a certain sum for his or her collection, why is it that the amount is higher or lower? Is it because that writer had a more interesting life? Or is it because the person’s work obtained higher critical recognition? Or is it that one’s peer found more popular success?

Once authors know what other authors can earn by selling their papers to repositories, they see that price as an anchor and are more likely to argue that their value is equal—or higher. As a result, library directors and curators try to conceal the amounts they pay partially to keep writers from negotiating their rate. Enniss’s desire to suppress the amount paid by the Ransom Center for García Márquez’s papers is a result of this concern. Other repositories manage authors’ egos differently. Emory University either agrees to pay or not to pay the amount a third-party appraiser quotes for a collection; it does not negotiate with an author to find a lower price. This strategy keeps financial evaluations outside the university’s control, simultaneously eliminating the need to negotiate with authors while maintaining their goodwill. In contrast, Washington University in St. Louis does not rule out negotiating acquisition prices with its authors, although it avoids comparing and contrasting prices among its writers.15 While some institutions do not negotiate whereas others are open to debate, most institutions avoid public disclosure of prices.

Despite these emotions, authors are the winners in the literary archives marketplace. That is, writers who command enough scholarly and public interest to generate high prices for their papers are the trade’s beneficiaries. For as long as their materials are in demand, repositories will have to pay. However, capturing scholarly and public interest is difficult. Even when a writer achieves acclaim, their status among scholars and the public must remain constant, or show signs of growing, to fetch a high price in the trade.

Scholarly Value

Ironically, the value of contemporary literary archives to American repositories originally rose from their affordability. Acquiring contemporary writers’ papers was a cheap way for university libraries to begin building collections of distinction for the benefit of their burgeoning number of students and scholars in the postwar period. As the market progressed after 1955, acquisition rates varied but remained on an upward trajectory. Furthermore, the market’s growth did not depend on academic trends, such as New Criticism.

Following World War II, the first universities to recognize the teaching and research potential of contemporary writers’ papers ignored naysayers who saw these writers, as well as their materials, as less prestigious subjects for study and chose instead to amass these collections. A growing number of students entered American higher education after Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (more commonly known as the GI Bill) in 1944, swelling the size of youn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index