Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market

Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

by Amy Hildreth Chen

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Books About Books

231 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2020

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

So worth your time if this is a subject that's important to you.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, interesting, and well researched.

[Cassia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clearly written and wonderfully engaging book to read!

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp, concise, well written, thoroughly documented history and discussion of how the ecosystem of top-tier literary archives end up in libraries, and the market forces that drive that process. This study purposely uses a very limited dataset (specifically, authors that appear in the 7th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature). It would be very interesting to see further study on "the rest" of the field, particularly looking at the fate of archives of authors that are not brand names, or who publish in popular genres. (Vested interest: I spent over a decade as an archivist for science fiction writers.)

[Timo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tijdens het lezen dacht ik net te vaak: dit boek was misschien beter een artikel geweest.

[Linda]

Obviously a niche topic but well researched and fascinating. The prose is somewhere between academic and general-interest. I learned a lot.