In my last post, I wrote about a sheaf of interview notes on the philosopher John Locke, told to a journalist by one of his last surviving friends in 1718 and, as far as we know, unpublished and unseen until this year. Along with the Guardian, and the scholar who actually found this document, and most other commentators, I went along with calling this find a “discovery,” in the sense that something had been found that we didn’t know existed. In my first draft of the post, I hadn’t thought much about using the word. As I did more research on my second pass, though, I found that “discovery” is a contested trope within library & archival circles. I toyed with including this argument into my piece for the sake of clarity and because I have always wanted, since I was a child, for librarians to think that I’m cool. I thought better of it and kept the Locke piece focused on the des Maizeaux document and its meaning, but in this post I want to look more closely at this debate. Part of my project at Bibliophilia is to take a closer look at those parts of reading, writing, and books that most of us know just enough to patch over our ignorance of what actually goes on. Libraries and archives, especially, are something so familiar as to be invisible, rather complex institutions depending on diligent professionals to keep them going. This post is dedicated to them.
Let’s start with the popular cliches. Dusty archives like the warehouse out of Indiana Jones, intrepid hero-scholars, precarious stacks of ancient manuscripts, hodgepodges of papyrus, perhaps a frantic etching made with paper and charcoal to reveal a treasure map before some mustachioed goons adjust their fezes and kick down the doors. At its absolute dumbest, when archive stories make it onto TV, we’re usually not far from National Treasure or The Mummy. These are obviously false. For one thing, as places devoted to preservation, archives tend to be spotless, flatly lit, windowless rooms with controlled air circulation, with everything kept in tidy, labeled boxes. You won’t find much dust, and if you found stacks of documents or books lying around in piles to sort through, somebody is probably going to lose their job.
More prosaically, I think we can guess that when the average bluffer reads “archival discovery,” they imagine a frumpy scholar sorting through rows of folders and collection boxes with labels like GEORGE ELIOT’S STUFF 1870 - 1880 or SOMETHING CHINESE, flipping through the contents until they find a document hidden in the piles or, perhaps, mislabeled, its significance heretofore unrecognized.
This is closer to the truth: after all, the SOMETHING CHINESE case actually happened. In 2014, the Huntington Library confirmed that a pair of old, unidentified Chinese books sitting on their back shelves were lost volumes of the Yongle Encyclopedia, an 11,000-book medieval compendium, most of it lost. As it turned out, the grandchildren of an American missionary had donated the books in the 1960s and there wasn’t anybody at Huntington who could read them (to be fair, even experts struggle with interpreting and identifying classical Chinese). They sat on a shelf for decades, until a visiting professor of Chinese was able to confirm that these were two of the most-sought books in the world. Book discoveries are rarely so clear as a pair of perfectly-preserved Chinese manuscripts waiting for somebody who can read them, but it’s closer to what the real thing usually looks like: getting the right person with the right knowledge to see something that others have passed by.
More often, as in the case of the Philadelphia Free Library’s very special First Folio of Shakespeare and its marginalia, scholars already know that they have something interesting and show it to as many experts as they can, asking, like Jerry Seinfeld field-testing a joke with his friends, “Is this anything?” Could anybody, professor Claire Bourne asked, recognize the handwriting of this unknown First Folio owner? This particular book had been with the Library for decades, its annotations well-known to scholars, but we had no record of who wrote them. After the request spread online, though, a Cambridge professor saw it and knew, right away, that these notes were from the hand of John Milton: the handwriting, the vocabulary, and the specific style of note-taking all matched the author of Paradise Lost. This, most assuredly, was something.
These are both cases, though, of an archive holding onto something that they know is valuable, even if it hasn’t been identified. Where things get murky, and where librarians get crabby, is when a “discovery” is made in a place where nobody was expecting to find much. The classic case of grievance is probably the “lost” Sylvia Plath short story “Mary Ventura and the Lost Kingdom,” which was found in a collection of Plath documents in 2019 to much fanfare. Bethany Anderson has an excellent round-up of the real story: rather than “languishing in [Plath’s] archives for decades,” as a Vox article had it, “Lost Kingdom” was clearly identified as a copy of an unpublished short story written by the author in 1952 and part of the Plath Archive at Indiana University, mentioned in passing in academic surveys and searchable online. “Lost Kingdom” was only a discovery insofar as it was a rare bit of Plathiana not already available to the public, a nightmare that HarperCollins heroically resolved with a sixty-page, standalone hardcover edition retailing at a cool $15.99.
A similar, less marketable case played out in 2012 with the discovery of a medical report filed by Abraham Lincoln’s doctor after he’d been shot--essentially, an expert eyewitness to the president’s murder. Surely such a significant find for presidential historians had some kind of equally wonderful recovery, right? Not quite. Helena Iles Papaioannu found Dr. Leale’s report in, well, the files of Charles Leale, Surgeon General in 1865, all of them faithfully kept by the National Archives since they received his papers in the 1890s. If you were looking for a report from Abraham Lincoln’s doctor in 1865, this is exactly where you’d go looking. We just didn’t know that we had that specific document by Leale. This is because archives, as Suzanne Fischer explains, are usually catalogued at the “collections level,” described in terms of boxes, files, and collections, rather than at the page-by-age “item level,” which even in a modestly-sized archive would quickly reach Borgesian proportions. Just as scholars didn’t have to search from Poughkeepsie to Palau to find the “Lost Kingdom” but only a few boxes in Indiana, the Leale report was found in Leale’s preserved papers, right where the archivists put it. What looked like a brilliant discovery was really proof of decades-long institutional practices doing exactly what they were supposed to do: help researchers find stuff.
I should note that The Atlantic, which ran Fischer’s piece, also allowed the Leale report’s finder, Helena Iles Papaioannu, to respond. Fittingly for an argument between two librarians, the whole thing is quiet, civil, and largely restricted to quibbling over the meaning of the word “discovery.” The crux of the debate is not the metaphysical status of papers whose location is known and content isn’t,1 but rather how, exactly, credit should be shared between the archivists who work at the collections level and the researchers who identify and interpret individual items. The real problem here is less about feuds between researchers and librarians and more of a general exasperation with the ridiculous narratives that culture reporters spin around the very boring process of nerds labeling boxes of files or thumbing through outgoing letters from Millard Fillmore’’s Treasury Secretary.
The case of the Locke document, then, seems like another case of archivalship and scholarship doing their respective thing: Felix Waldman wanted to study primary sources on John Locke, he went to a collection of 18th century primary sources on Locke curated by the British Library that wasn’t fully-catalogued at an item-level, and by God, an unidentified item slipped out that Waldman immediately recognized as a game-changer. Whether or not you want to call that a discovery or just a marvel of cataloguing is, it seems, a matter of taste. Just don’t be surprised if any librarians get crabby about it.
Last time, I shared Henning Lederer’s animated book covers project, which does exactly what it says to mid-century academic paperbacks with minimalist cover designs. Since this post is in some ways a development from the last one, it only makes sense to share Ledere’s “Even More Covers,” which also does exactly what it says. To my eye, this is a better crop of books, both in terms of ones that are still important and read today, and in sheer oddness. I’d kill for a copy of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, which this photographer seems to have found, helpfully sharing the blurb. It really does, improbably, seem to be an atomics primer written in the chatty, condescending tone of a Ladies Home Journal etiquette marm. Women studying atomic radiation! Has feminism gone too far?
If you are equipped to handle that ontological debate, please send me a copy of your argument. I’m bad at metaphysics but do love to read it.