Writer Sylvia Plath is here. So are poet Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy. Directors Orson Welles, John Ford, Federico Fellini and Peter Bogdanovich are on hand too.
Indiana University’s famed Lilly Library is a virtual cocktail party of personalities whose correspondence, original manuscripts and biographical ephemera are collected in the institution’s archives.
“Libraries are somewhat like art museums, in that they have writings from all over the world,” says Breon Mitchell, director of the Lilly Library. “We collect in a worldwide market the papers of authors who are interesting to us. We collect very broadly.”
The Lilly’s not alone. Big-name collections equal international prestige, scholarly interest and good old-fashioned bragging rights. The recent death of Hunter S. Thompson has triggered speculation over where the gonzo journalist’s papers will end up. In the final few weeks of Thompson’s life, he was adamant about placing his papers at a single institution, says Thompson’s lawyer and friend, George Tobia Jr.
“Let’s just get it in the right place,” Tobia remembers Thompson saying. “I want to get it in a university or library home.”
For authors, artists and social figures, the allure of placing their private papers in an academic library is threefold: It’s a chance to clean out the basement; it’s an assurance that their legacy on paper will be professionally cataloged and preserved; and it can be profitable. There’s a market for the best collections, and libraries are willing to invest.
The former investigative reporting team Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward recently found a home at the University of Texas for their “Watergate papers,” to the tune of $5 million. (Neither of them went to college there.)
Comparatively, “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien sold his manuscripts for “The Hobbit,” the trilogy and other works to Milwaukee’s Marquette University in 1956 for 1,500 pounds, or $4,800 (roughly equal to a year’s pay for Tolkien teaching at Oxford University).
Today, the median price for a contemporary author’s archives can be $200,000 to $500,000, though it’s not unheard of for high-profile authors’ collections to reach the millions, says John Wronoski of Boston’s Lame Duck Books, a dealer in rare books and manuscripts.
“In the last seven or eight years, the price level of these things has broken away from what it has been tethered to for many years,” says Wronoski.
Still, he says,Woodward and Bernstein’s $5 million coup stunned him.
“To my mind, that’s one of the most absurd things I ever heard. . . . I was shocked by that. So many far more meritorious archives cost a fraction of that,” Wronoski says. “A large number of Nobel laureates’ papers sold for less than that.”
But, Wronoski adds, the purchase was “certainly clever,” given the amount of attention the University of Texas has received since the acquisition.
That was part of the point, says bookseller Glenn Horowitz, who brokered the Texas deal. Rare-book dealers who aid libraries and authors in acquisition contracts are a small, professional group of “seven to 10,” Horowitz says.
“[Libraries] are there to promote scholarship; they are magnets for textual and biographical scholars. Beyond that, the benefits are very real,” Horowitz says. “In terms of projecting an image of creative scholarship, of vigilant protection of the national interests . . . the attention they’ve received is in excess of the costs already.”
The world of library special collections and author manuscripts is insular and gentlemanly. An author’s papers are rarely subject to open bidding, a practice viewed as distasteful.
“That almost never happens, actually. Most people who represent authors or their estates have a great deal of regard for the institutions,” Wronoski says. “I’m not an auction house. Most of us resent that option that auction houses practice.”
The Lilly Library’s Mitchell flatly refuses to participate in an auction culture.
“Bidding is not something that we do at any time,” Mitchell says. “When an individual offers their papers, we always say, `If you’ll send us a description of materials and indication of the price, we’ll see if it’s appropriate for our collection.'”
Also, Mitchell adds, “It’s best to have papers of a single author together in one place. So if I know that the first half of an author’s early material is at another library, I suggest that they may want to approach that place first.”
An author selling his or her papers midcareer is not all that uncommon, Mitchell says. In fact, some libraries are so competitive that they “gamble” on young writers, securing early work in hopes of future greatness and the proportionate scholarly enthusiasm.
“I have to admit that I’m not paying that world much attention,” says Wronoski, though he lists writers such as Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker and T.C. Boyle as established talents whose archives may be of interest to libraries.
Oftentimes, a compromise is reached because a single institution isn’t able to pay the true value of an entire collection. That was the case when Tobia helped broker the deal between Beat author Jack Kerouac’s estate and the New York Public Library.
While the library received the bulk of Kerouac’s papers, the typewritten scroll manuscript of his opus “On the Road” was sold via auction to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for $2.2 million.
“Like most things in life that are that difficult, you try to get some form of compromise about it,” Tobia says. “The New York Public Library, even without the scroll, they had the other draft versions of the manuscript.”
Irsay’s Kerouac scroll was put on display last year at the Lilly Library before embarking on a cross-country tour.
For libraries, high-profile acquisitions mean increased exposure, which in turn means more donations, more alumni interest. Ultimately, famous collections make libraries an attractive place for future authors and artists to place their papers.
Director Peter Bogdanovich (“The Last Picture Show,” “The Cat’s Meow”) chose the Lilly Library to house his early papers, in part because his friends and mentors Orson Welles and John Ford entrusted their papers to the Lilly. IU’s library also offered him the best financial package at the time.
“I find that it’s helpful to have my papers organized so students, scholars — whomever — can learn from my experiences,” Bogdanovich said.
Film scholars may find it particularly helpful, given that Bogdanovich co-wrote the definitive Orson Welles oral history, “This Is Orson Welles” (Da Capo Press, $24) and directed the biographical documentary “Directed by John Ford.”
The business of author archives isn’t all agents and seven-figure deals. Often papers make their way into a university’s special collection in other ways, sometimes thanks to a passionate library head or faculty member working on a biography. Other times, people donate their archives to an institution.
For example, the papers of “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder are at the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa because Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, wrote the first Hoover biography. Because of that link, the Hoover library had an interest in acquiring her manuscripts and papers, which included letters from her mother and drafts of several “Little House” books.
Author Ray Bradbury’s early manuscripts, including “The Martian Chronicles,” call Ohio’s Bowling Green State University home because of William F. Nolan, author of “Logan’s Run.” Nolan’s ties to the university and longtime friendship with Bradbury helped the school amass a huge collection, 35 years in the making. Bradbury, however, hasn’t thought about his papers in terms of posterity.
“I still have a helluva lot of it around the house. My house is junk heap,” says the 84-year-old author. “Collections are nice . . . but I haven’t thought about it much. I’d like to give some of my books to Waukegan, to the Carnegie Library where I spent my formative years. That would be meaningful. It’s being renovated now, so we’ll see if they can get it in shape in time.”
He isn’t concerned with legacy and isn’t afraid of scholars reading his correspondence.
“It’s all right. I have nothing to hide,” Bradbury says. “I’ve never written letters that would incriminate me.”
Later in his career, Thompson wasn’t shy about the public reading his correspondence. Two volumes of his letters have been published, with a third collection in the works. The issue of placing his archive is still being explored.
“We’re just starting to go through the archive now, but there is plenty of interest out there,” his lawyer Tobia says. “We won’t know what we’re going to do until we go through everything.”
For Thompson, says Tobia, protecting his legacy was paramount.
“Authors put so much time and effort into their body of work, it’d be demeaning if it was sold off in parts,” he says. “The thought that their stuff be scattered to the wind is repugnant to them.”
Tobia adds that, for some authors, entrusting their papers to an institution provides solace for them.
“It’s a sense of going to the grave feeling like you’ve taken care of things the right way,” Tobia says. “They want people to enjoy it, rather than just one person hoarding it.”
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relder@tribune.com
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The Virtual Cocktail Party
Authors and other luminaries mingle in special collections all over the country. Here is just a sampling.
– Indiana University: Sylvia Plath, Rodin, Orson Welles, John Ford, Federico Fellini, Peter Bogdanovich, Kurt Vonnegut, Gordon Lish, Upton Sinclair, Ezra Pound.
– Bowling Green State University: Ray Bradbury, Jan Wahl.
– Boston University: Robert Frost, Martin Luther King Jr., Bette Davis, Issac Asimov, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., W. Somerset Maugham, Sam Shepard, Dan Rather.
– Marquette University: J.R.R. Tolkien.
– University of Chicago: Saul Bellow, Poetry magazine archive, including poem manuscripts from T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne More.
– UCLA: Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler.
– New York Public Library: Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, H.L. Mencken.
– Wheaton College: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers.
– University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Carl Sandburg, H.G. Wells, Roger Ebert, W.S. Merwin, Marcel Proust letters, John Philip Sousa.
– University of Wyoming: Jack Benny.
– University of Tulsa: V.S. Naipaul.
– Yale University: Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, J.M. Barrie, George Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton.
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How their papers found a home
Carl Berstein and Bob Woodward sold their Watergate papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $5 million. The collection was opened to the public last month, but the identities of unnamed sources will be revealed only after each source’s death.
“Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R.Tolkien sold his manuscripts for his trilogy, “The Hobbit”” and other works to Milwaukee’s Marquette University in 1956, thanks to negotiations by director of libraries William Ready. At the time, no other institution had shown interest in the author’s literary papers.
Director Peter Bogdanovich (“The Last Picture Show,” “The Cat’s Meow”) chose Indiana University’s Lilly Library to catalog his archive in part because his friends and mentors Orson Welles and John Ford entrusted their papers to the Lilly. IU’s library also offered him the best financial package at the time.
A handful of original James Joyce letters found their way to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, thanks in part to material collected by Herbert Gorman for his 1924 biography of the author.
The papers of “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder are at the Herbert Hoover Library because Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, wrote the first Hoover biography. When the presidential library acquired Lane’s papers in the 1970s, they included letters from her mother and drafts of several “Little House” books.
Author Ray Bradbury’s early manuscripts, including “The Martian Chronicles,” call Ohio’s Bowling Green State University home, because of William F. Nolan, author of “Logan’s Run.” Nolan’s ties to the university and longtime friendship with Bradbury helped the school amass a collection 35 years in the making.
