
The Unseen Theft of America's Literary History - joe5150
http://lithub.com/the-unseen-theft-of-americas-literary-history/
======
steve-howard
Found a broader discussion of archive theft here for those interested:
[http://blog.oup.com/2012/08/difficulty-inside-book-
archive-t...](http://blog.oup.com/2012/08/difficulty-inside-book-archive-
theft-girolamini-library/)

The basic challenge for the thief is finding something valuable enough to be
worth selling, but not so valuable it's obviously hot. Then make sure there
are no records it existed (in this case it appears the catalog didn't include
the letters) and find somebody trustworthy to sell it to.

I have to agree that the best approach would be to digitize as much as
possible, but that might or might not be a tall order for the institutions in
question.

------
werber
It seems almost as egregious that the items in the collection weren't
digitized and made public.

~~~
atlantic
That's a very considerable expense in itself - digitizing, creating and
maintaining an archival site. Not to mention that there are copyright
questions to be sorted out, which implies legal costs.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
That's what work study students are for. They cost any university pennies on
the dollar. Simply cataloging and backing up stuff is about as well protected
from IP lawsuits as you can get.

~~~
eitally
And Special Collections libraries the world over employ students doing exactly
that. I was one of them. :) I led this project (at UVA) for a couple of years,
digitizing both manuscripts and first editions of Walt Whitman's works. It was
fulfilling work as a student, and interesting.

[http://www.whitmanarchive.org/](http://www.whitmanarchive.org/)

~~~
werber
Did you learn anything shocking that hasn't been published?

~~~
eitally
His handwriting was so bad I often needed one of the expert scholars to
decipher it. I essentially learned through exposure, and realized how valuable
studying the original manuscripts of authors can be. Whitman, for example,
wrote on scraps of paper (essentially like Post-Its), and then tacked them to
a large wall and rearranged, crossed out, rewrote, and edited everything like
that, eventually getting to a point where he was happy, upon which time he
rewrote everything again in the final manuscript he sent to his publisher.
This was for Leaves of Grass.

UVA also has the papers of William Faulkner, so I learned quote a bit about
him, too. Additionally, four original copies of the Declaration of
Independence.

No, I didn't learn anything shocking, but I learned an awful lot about the
history of the book, and archiving, and digitizing, and publishing. Terry
Belanger
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger)),
a MacArthur Fellow, was my mentor.

------
dzdt
From the title, I expected an article on how ever-extending copyrights are
denying the public the right to enjoy out-of-print works.

------
oldmanjay
Pragmatically, I can't consider a bunch of personal letters a treasure in any
sense but the personally emotional, and I can't consider the fact that I will
never see things I would have never seen a disaster.

The hyperbolic language indicates a strong emotional attachment, but it
somewhat ironically compelled me to not care, and stop reading.

~~~
maldusiecle
Letters and manuscripts have, besides their obvious historical and aesthetic
value, a pretty clear economic value. The first example the author cites is a
single letter which went for over $500--not a fortune, but when applied to a
whole mass of documents, not unreasonable to call a treasure. And again,
that's besides their cultural value.

You might never have seen them, but you could very well have seen information
from them. Personal letters are the primary texts which historians and
literary critics draw from, the sources from which we build up an
understanding of the past. Their loss means more than a few random pages being
scattered to the wind--it means we've lost a bit of knowledge of our own
history.

