Placing papers : the American literary archives market
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Placing papers : the American literary archives market
（Studies in print culture and the history of the book）
University of Massachusetts Press, c2020
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-167) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Outside the Literary Collections Market
Chapter 1: Inside the Literary Collections Market
Chapter 2: Brand: Authors and Families
Chapter 3: Profit: Agents and Dealers
Chapter 4: Competition: Directors and Curators
Chapter 5: Provenance: Archivists and Digital Archivists
Chapter 6: Access: Scholars and the PublicConclusion: The Matthew Effect
by "Nielsen BookData"