Cataloguing archives can seem like a vastly different endeavor than cataloguing the regular bibliophilic material that, until fairly recently, was every bookseller\u2019s stock in trade. By their very nature, archives are unique, intimately shaped by the person or organization who formed them. Often they include unique manuscript or photographic material that requires research and time to catalogue, sometimes lots<\/i> of time \u2014 although booksellers aren\u2019t researchers, or archivists, and time spent working on an archive means time not spent cataloguing other material. More important, at least for my purposes here, is that the research needed for archives rarely employs the standard (and standardized) bibliographical references, relying instead on primary documents available on genealogical websites like Ancestry, online newspapers, Google, and yes, even Wikipedia. Like a good journalist, booksellers researching archival material need to be able to separate reliable sources from unreliable ones, draw accurate conclusions from them, represent material honestly, and construct an authentic and compelling narrative out of what seems at times to be nothing more than a chaotic mass of papers.<\/p>\n
So, if they\u2019re so much hassle, why do we buy and sell archives? In reply, a brief anecdote:<\/p>\n
The first archive I ever catalogued consisted of 24 nearly consecutive diaries kept by a man named Lyman Wilmot over the course of about 30 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s, plus related ephemera. Wilmot grew up on a farm in Illinois and later moved with his parents and other adult siblings to Colorado during the silver boom. At the beginning, when he was still in Illinois, I thought he was a bit of a bore and a prude, a lifelong bachelor making endless visits to cousins, selling bibles as a supplement to his farm income and interjecting occasional knee-jerk pieties into his reports on what seemed a rather prosaic Midwestern life. In Colorado, as far as I could tell, he\u2019d only sold pictures, speculated a bit, and worked at a store in Leadville, which meant the purported mining content we\u2019d bought the archive for was of minimal value, at best. This was in September of 2015, about a month after I started working at Tavistock, and I was privately flabbergasted at the amount Vic had spent on the archive, and the price he wanted it to sell at. What kind of nutjob was I working for?<\/p>\n
At some point, though, it occurred to me to check Wilmot\u2019s entries from early October, 1871, and sure enough, there were several pages on the Great Chicago Fire (his cousins lived there and lost their house in the disaster). Major incidents in the Civil War and his thoughts on them? Check. Lincoln\u2019s death? Yup. Soon I discovered that one of Wilmot\u2019s young neighbors died after getting struck by a baseball; in another entry, a distressed Wilmot reports just awaking from an erotic dream in which he has kissed a nun. I started staying late every night after work just so I could read the diaries, finding more and more things to appreciate about odd-duck Lyman Wilmot: his involvement with the women\u2019s suffrage movement (eventually leading to his escorting of his mother to the polls for the first time), his visit to a surprisingly prescient phrenologist, this lovely entry from New Years Eve, 1874, shortly before he headed west:<\/p>\n
[N]ow as I write the shades of the last evening . . . are gathering fast, the sky is cloudy & as I look out of the east windows of the dining room & see the smoke from the engine of a long freight train rising as a cloud as the train rushes on up the grain, we are now in a living moving world & things look as if they were to last much longer than they will . . . .<\/p>\n
And then, astonishingly, I came across a year\u2019s worth of entries documenting Wilmot\u2019s own moderately successful attempt at digging and operating a mine, with two partners, during which he fended off rival claimants and feuded with backers and worked himself into exhaustion every night and marveled at his new strength and griped about always having to bake bread all the time, and, ultimately, grew into himself.<\/p>\n
In the end, Lyman Wilmot went bust and moved back to Illinois, but I felt inexplicably proud of him anyway. Plus, I knew that even if he<\/i> hadn\u2019t struck gold, I had. We put the Wilmot archive in our e-catalogue that month, priced at what I thought then was an astronomical figure, and it sold four times in rapid succession. I wasn\u2019t in Kansas anymore.<\/p>\n
Who would\u2019ve thought that an archive of diaries kept by a 19th-century white guy from Midwestern America who no one\u2019s ever heard of could open my eyes to the possibilities and magic of working in the antiquarian book trade?<\/p>\n
As institutions and collectors continue to seek highly visual and primary source material, not to mention vernacular material by and about groups traditionally underrepresented in bibliophilic\u00a0history, booksellers have increasingly dealt in archives and archival material to meet the demand. No one reading this is likely to be surprised by that statement. Nevertheless, despite the undisputed and abiding popularity of archives in the trade, and the plenitude of guides available for archivists cataloguing archives and booksellers cataloguing books, there don\u2019t seem to be any guidelines for how booksellers should go about cataloguing archives.<\/p>\n
This blog series is an attempt to fill in that gap in some small way. It\u2019s compiled from my own experiences with archives I\u2019ve catalogued over the past not-quite-two years, as well as from the comments of many of the booksellers and librarians who responded to my request for \u201cpro tips\u201d via the CABS listserv on April 24 – 26; I\u2019ve quoted as many of these as possible, and offer my apologies for those I was not able to include. My hope is that this is only the beginning of the dialogue.<\/p>\n
To return to my earlier contention: cataloguing archives can seem<\/i> vastly different than cataloguing bibliographic material, but it\u2019s not. Many of the same basic skills apply, as do the same ethical and professional standards. The goal, in cataloguing, is simply to ensure that the material we sell is what we say it is.<\/p>\nStep 1: Meeting Your Archive for the First Time<\/h2>\n
In my experience, archives are singularly unimpressive and reticent in their natural state: a bunch of papers, ephemera and\/or photographs crammed inside a box (or many boxes). Depending on where you\u2019ve gotten the archive and what you know about its subject, you may be able to determine at the outset how much time to invest in it. More often than not, though, you have to dig through an archive first to see what you have (especially if you are a mere assistant and your boss plunks said archive on your desk with a cheerful, \u201cMore job security for you!\u201d).<\/p>\n
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More job security…<\/p><\/div>\n
Respect des Fonds<\/b><\/p>\n
That said, don\u2019t just start pulling out anything that looks interesting! Arrangement matters, or it might. One of the key concepts in archival theory is the principle of provenance, or \u201crespect des fonds\u201d (literally translated as \u201crespect for the group\u201d). The idea was introduced during the French Revolution, when formal archival practice was established as a way to ensure the integrity of public records. It is \u201cfundamental to contemporary archives work and exists to protect the integrity and authenticity of archival records as evidence by retaining the nature of the relationship that exists among records by the same creator\u201d (Sammie L. Morris and Shirley K. Rose, \u201cInvisible Hands,\u201d Landmark Essays on Archival Research<\/i>, p. 203).<\/p>\n
Maria Lin (Rulon-Miller Books) cautions that not all archives have an original order, however. \u201cIf it\u2019s clear that you\u2019re dealing with material that has been arranged in some way archivists would want it to stay that way, but if you\u2019re dealing with material that has been spilled out onto the floor a couple dozen times before you got a hold of it then rearrangement is fine. \u2018Respect des fonds\u2019 . . . often applies less with personal archives that have no fonds to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n
First Glance<\/b><\/p>\n
Before I even get out my pencil and notepad, I like to take a few minutes to glance through the archive first, getting a general feel for what it contains. For me, this is sometimes no more than a way of introducing myself to its different kinds of materials and determining the archive\u2019s overall condition: Does it appear to be complete? Are there any significant defects? If the text is in manuscript, is it legible? If the archive contains photographs, what type of images are they (photo, RPPC, half-tone, color\/b&w), and are they clear and well-developed, captioned, etc.?<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, Lorne Bair (Lorne Bair Rare Books) takes a slightly different approach, viewing archives as both a buyer and a cataloguer:<\/p>\n
[M]y first step when I approach any archive is gestalt: does the archive \u201ctalk\u201d to me on its surface? If it only whispers, I\u2019m immediately filled with doubt \u2014 because as drawn as I am to subtlety, I\u2019ve found that it\u2019s unrealistic to expect the same sensibility from my customers. I\u2019m a big one for leafing through lightly and somewhat skeptically: is there a letter, a photograph, a document that seems the least bit unusual? Did the person(s) represented here do anything of sufficient importance to make it into a Wikipedia entry, either they themselves or the thing they were involved in? (I\u2019ve found that this notion, anathema a decade ago, is, it turns out, a decent marker these days for gauging a likely level of compensation for my time. Wikipedia has become our Feuerbachian species-consciousness). \u00a0Is it in a language I understand? Will I be able to read the handwriting without a great\u00a0deal of effort? Is there enough of one thing in the archive \u2014 photographs of Alaskan beauty pageant contestants, for example, or of Italian motor scooters \u2014 to make it an unusual group of things? If the answer to any of these questions is unsatisfactory, is there something else to hang a hook on – maybe it\u2019s a stack of letters in Russian, for example (huge pain in the ass, for this cataloguer at least) — but they\u2019re postmarked St. Petersburg and dated 1917-1919? (time to brush up on my cyrillic!). Or is it something I can at least flip, with minimal\u00a0effort, to some other dealer who knows more than me about this (a) language (b) thing (c) person (d) etc.? \u00a0I\u2019m willing to look deeper at this point, but if I find myself getting bored or overwhelmed I feel no compunction just walking away. To paraphrase Stanley Tucci, sometimes the pile of paper just wants to be alone.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, a first glance is a quick and dirty way of formulating and applying a rough value matrix based on content, condition, and that ever-demanding factor, time. Not all archives are created equal: as alluring as it is to think that each one provides a clear and unique perspective on its particular historical moment, some just aren\u2019t coherent and\/or interesting enough to merit a lot of investment. We are, after all, in business.<\/p>\n
Next in the series: Getting to Know Your Archive<\/em><\/p>\n
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