Placing Papers Dataset

The market for contemporary authors’ archives in the United States began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Soon, the demand for contemporary authors’ archives developed into a multimillion-dollar trade. Writers and their families enjoyed their new opportunity to make money, as did the book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. For a while, library directors and curators across the American Midwest and West relished their new-found opportunity increase their prestige by building collections that could compete on equal footing against British and Ivy League holdings. But as the twentieth century progressed, and public interest around celebrity writers grew more frenzied, even the most well-funded institutions found acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive. Researchers began to question how papers came to be housed in locales disconnected from authors’ professional and personal lives. Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market is the first book to chart how the market for writers’ papers became overheated to explore what happens when tourists, rather than scholars, become the designated audience for literary archives.