Rare Book & Manuscript Library Houses a History of Publishing

By
Will McGuinness
March 24, 2015

Within the Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s trove of publishing industry records is a single index card that notes the delivery of a manuscript by an unpublished author titled Go Set a Watchman. It is the only known record of the first draft of a novel that would become the 1960 blockbuster To Kill A Mockingbird.

The card, dated Jan. 14, 1957, rests among more than 100,000 items belonging to literary agent Annie Laurie Williams, who worked with Mockingbird author Harper Lee as well as Lee’s hometown friend Truman Capote, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck and many others. Her archive, which includes correspondence, contracts, ledgers, calendars and even a pair of Steinbeck’s jeans worn by an actor in a 1939 production of Of Mice and Men, is representative of the breadth of materials available at the library.

The recent news that Lee, now 88 and living in an assisted living facility in Monroeville, Ala., was allowing the earlier effort to be published set the literary world abuzz, raising a host of questions about whether Lee ever meant for the original work to be published. To answer those questions, the Washington Post’s Neely Tucker turned to the publishing archives for his feature story detailing part of Lee’s writing and revision process.

“A publisher's archive allows researchers a glimpse of the conversations, compromises and contingencies that determined which ideas were put into circulation at a historical moment," said Karla Nielsen, the library’s curator of literature, who has organized a small collection of Lee-related items now on view at the library. "They show how literature has been shaped by editorial and marketing departments as well as authors."

Columbia’s archives have delivered other literary bombshells as well. In 2010, a doctoral student found an unpublished novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay in the papers of Samuel Roth, the flamboyant publisher of unauthorized editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The publishing archives are just one part of a wide-ranging collection that spans 4,000 years, measures 14 miles and includes 500,000 rare books. The publishing records, which include items from agents, editors, book designers and more, shed light on the history of an industry still centered in New York City. Scholars hoping to learn more about James Baldwin’s Native Son and Baldwin’s creative partnership with his editor Sol Stein, for instance, might seek out Stein’s papers.

The materials suggest “we step back from the idea that authors are writing in garrets in isolation, thinking of an imaginary public,” Nielsen said. “Publishers do a tremendous amount of work to shape a writer’s initial creative project and place it into the market in a way that encourages a particular reaction.”

Other holdings include publisher Bennett Cerf’s (CC’19) papers and the records of his company Random House. His friend at Columbia, Richard L. Simon (CC’20), later a founder of Simon & Schuster—along with fellow alumnus Max Lincoln Schuster (CC’19)—also left his papers to the University. Their records, together with early Harper collections, Nielsen notes, established the RBML as the go-to steward for other titans of the publishing world.

“The library began building the collection deliberately in the late 1960s, and we are now considered among the best repositories for publishers’ archives in the U.S.,” said Nielsen, who also notes that many such archives aren’t destined these days for research-focused institutions such as Columbia.

Since Bertelsmann bought Random House, for example, its records are being sent to Iron Mountain, a storage and information management company. Instead of becoming a scholarly resource, Nielsen says, the archives are retained as a potential source of future income.

It’s not yet clear how Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookseller, will treat its records. But it seems certain that as the publishing industry continues its consolidation, fewer records will be publicly available for study, Nielsen notes. Thus discoveries like the index card motivates curators to continue the hunt for new archival material and to search for new ways to organize and preserve the long history of publishing. The library now also collects publishers’ hard drives containing emails, production files and their websites.

“Columbia holds extraordinarily rich publishers’ archives, and it’s so important for us to continue to collect them because digital media is changing the landscape significantly,” says Nielsen.