KEN LOPEZ
I have been a bookseller for about forty years, and have been dealing primarily in modern literary first editions and living writers’ literary archives since the early 1990s. Over the years things have changed in a number of ways, and they continue to do so, with digitization being one major factor.
Acknowledging and exploring the past is a big part of what preserving literary archives is about. It is worth taking note of the significant changes to these archives in recent years, and the implications of those changes going forward.
One of the first and most visible changes is that writers’ literary archives today seldom include the kind of cut-and-paste manuscripts that used to be prevalent in the past. In earlier archives, the author would write a draft and then revise it by literally cutting-and-pasting the revisions onto the original sheet of paper to save having to retype the entire thing. Those manuscripts showed the physical evidence of the author reworking it, trying to improve it, and trying to get it right. You could see the archaeology of the work by looking at a single draft with its corrections, additions, and changes.
In those earlier archives, you would get one or two heavily annotated drafts that yielded significant information about the process of writing the work; today you do not see this very much. What you tend to see is a lot of paper, because it is very easy to press the “print” key and get a whole new, clean typescript. A single book will be a half a dozen, a dozen, sometimes three boxes full of manuscripts, all for the same title, all with very slight changes, but that make it very difficult to collate and understand the process of the creation of the work—even if you also possess the digital versions of them. The evolution of a writer’s work was easy and self-evident in a literary archive before, but now, especially given digitization, it can be hard to do that; even digital files leave changes unmarked in the final digital files that are retained.
There are other things that used to appear regularly in archives that are also increasingly uncommon now. One group—seemingly slight or trivial—are the ephemeral items, such as brochures and marketing materials. For example, for this colloquium, until I arrived here I had seen nothing on paper today; previously, all of the information, advertising, and promotional material had been distributed via email and the website. This is a boon for the trees that were not sacrificed to make paper promotional materials, but there’s a downside to it as well. A few years ago I was dealing with a writer’s archive that was large and that a couple of librarians were coming to see. We—the writer and I—realized belatedly that we had forgotten about a group of boxes in her garage. We had literally hundreds of boxes that we had prepared to show the librarians—but then there was this other group in the garage. Concerned that we would overwhelm the librarians with the sheer quantity of material, much of it ephemeral printed matter that we thought was all junk, we quickly went out to clean it up, that is to get the good stuff and save it, and get rid of the trash. The writer and I went out to the garage and started pulling out all the various marketing materials for writers’ workshops and other such items that tend to accumulate in an active writer’s life. We were throwing them away so that what would be left was a high percentage of original, unique material.
We thought we were doing a very good thing for the librarians who were coming by winnowing out the junk and saving the unique, original, creative materials. When the librarians arrived, we told them what we had done. They were aghast. What the writer and I didn’t think about, but that the librarians did, was that these brochures about these events, these marketing materials, might in a hundred years from now be the only information, the only evidence, that such events had ever taken place. These unique materials had value, and to have discarded them would have been a significant loss.
In this respect, archives are mosaics. Each piece within the archive represents a single piece of the mosaic. Once combined, they begin to create a picture that is understandable and conveys some meaning and information. Archives are never absolutely complete, but still they create a picture that can’t be assembled otherwise. It is important to preserve them to recognize, and in some ways reconstruct, something from the past that is understood to be of value and worth preserving. Even something as seemingly mundane and trivial as marketing materials can add to our understanding and knowledge of the time and milieu in which they were created.
Correspondence is another element that has changed since I first started dealing in archives over forty years ago. Everyone knows that in the past archives contained many letters. Nowadays the letters that most often remain in an archive tend to be form letters or formal letters. Personal communications are more likely to take the form of emails, telephone calls, texts, or social media postings. I was recently working on an archive that had a group of letters from a writer to his wife written while he was at a months-long writing workshop in the early 1960s. He told her about the informal Thursday night readings that the writers in the workshop were holding for each other. It turned out that these Thursday night readings became Thursday night parties, lubricated with alcohol. Soon, somebody brought marijuana and turned it into Thursday night pot parties. Before too long, somebody found out about LSD, and they turned into Thursday night LSD parties (and this was when LSD was still legal).
The writer who hosted these parties was Ken Kesey, who was at the Stanford writing program at the time. After he graduated from the writing program he took the concept that these readings had developed into—the free-form LSD parties—and called them the Acid Tests, which he turned into a series of these events around the San Francisco Bay Area. Those acid tests evolved into what became the communal events of the counterculture: the large, free rock concerts where LSD was distributed freely (but by then it was illegal). The concerts took place in Golden Gate Park, and later migrated elsewhere, with the most famous one being the Woodstock music festival. The mythologist Joseph Campbell referred to them as the shared ecstatic communal experiences of this culture. Contained in the archive of this writer’s letters was the description of the beginning of the process that resulted in Woodstock. Without tangible, archivable correspondence, I would not have known—no one would have known—that Woodstock grew out of a small group of writers’ informal readings on Thursday night in the Stanford writing program.
Almost every archive I have encountered has had a random or miscellaneous group of photographs, sometimes a handful, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands. A recent archive I sold was about two-thirds digital. This made the photos harder to find because they weren’t printed and lying around in boxes. They had resided on different machines over the years, and were preserved in different ways by the writer. It occurred to me to wonder what would have happened if this writer had died before transferring the digital archives. Today, much digital storage of personal materials is moving from residing on one’s own personal computer, iPad, or smartphone and into the so-called “cloud.” If this writer had died we would be left wondering, “Did he have cloud storage somewhere? Are there thousands of photographs somewhere that not only have no physical presence but can’t be located digitally here in this house?” You would have to know about the existence of an account, or more than one. You would have to know the writer’s passwords, and you would have to know that these things existed for you to be able to find them. You would have to know all of this before the account was cancelled because the writer had not paid the bill for storage, and all the digital items contained were erased. These digital materials stand at risk of getting lost at this moment in time in a way that they didn’t when they had a primarily physical manifestation.
One of my customers, a collector, was a John Updike scholar who ran a John Updike website for many years. It was full of bibliographic information, photos, gossip, and contained a forum where other interested people could communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, make comments, and share their information and opinions. One day this collector’s Internet service provider simply shut down. It was a small business up in Maine run by a couple of young guys. Apparently the increasingly competitive Internet business was squeezed to the point where they couldn’t make a profit, so the owners simply unplugged the machines and shut down the business. My customer called them up and asked if he could at least retrieve his material from their servers and they essentially told him they didn’t have time for him. Without having any backup, he lost ten years’ worth of work that he had put in and that others had put in about John Updike. It just disappeared overnight, in cyberspace one day and out of existence the next.
There are numerous dangers to the archival environment in which we live when we rely so entirely on non-physical materials. Another recent archive with which I have been dealing has a large digital component. The writer asked, “Do you think they really want my honorary degrees? Do you think anybody’s going to actually look at them? Do you think maybe I should just send a scan of them?” I said, “I think they do want them.” I told him that the whole point of these archives was to preserve the original items—the “Thing Itself,” not some representation of it. By analogy, in a magazine article I read recently, the rock-and-roll musician Neil Young compared the digital music we listen to on iPods and MP3s to looking at a photo of the painting of the Mona Lisa as opposed to looking at the painting itself. I was thinking this was the same thing. I told this writer, “You are getting paid a lot of money for this archive: they want the archive, they don’t want pictures of the archive.” So he began to understand.
What this exchange did for me was a little surprising. It made me realize—or ask the question—what is the Thing Itself that is being preserved here? I realized when I was talking to him that an image of an honorary degree is definitely not the same as an honorary degree, but the honorary degree itself was not the Thing Itself either; it was a representation of an honor that this institution was according to the writer. In some sense it was as much a pale shadow of the Thing Itself as the picture of the degree was of the degree. What I started to consider was that in this case the Thing Itself was an honor, an acknowledgment and indication of respect for the writer’s work. However, “honor” and “respect” are intangibles. You cannot frame them or hang them on the wall, nor can you put them in a box and store them. They’re part of what the poet Charles Olson called the “human universe.”1 Similarly, a printed book, or the manuscript of a printed book, is not ultimately the Thing Itself, but only something that points to the Thing Itself.
A book matters, and its manuscript may be preserved and valued because of the ideas it contains, the perceptions it reveals, the insight it yields, the wisdom it shows. It affects us because it enlightens us, broadens our understanding, widens our gaze, and elevates us as thinking and feeling living creatures. All of these things—wisdom, insight, understanding, perspective—are intangibles, but they are still the Things Themselves. They make up not only the “human universe,” but also what the theologian Teilhard de Chardin called the “Noosphere,”2 that is the mental, emotional, spiritual correlate to the physical atmosphere that surrounds us at all times, in which we live in and breathe, and to which our own thoughts and actions contribute.
Intangibles are what define us as human beings. They are what will endure. If we think of ourselves as merely preserving (or, in my case, selling) paper products, then our jobs may end in the near future as nearly everything is digitized (or at least we may be reduced to triviality or irrelevancy). However, if we think of ourselves as stewards who recognize and preserve that which elevates us as humans—and that improves ourselves, our culture, humanity in general, or the earth at large—then our task will endure, even as the archives take on new forms. It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of the process of acknowledging, and thus preserving, the Thing Itself—that which ultimately has value and meaning.
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