Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker
Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting
# 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive (1973). The final Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.
Do not bore me with the facts, as fascinating as they are and as much as I enjoy immersing myself in them. Sometimes the myths mean and say more. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction, but on occasion you just want to curl up with a good story. With Burroughs, his biography and his bibliography, nothing is true; everything is permitted. Case in point, years ago, I made a pilgrimage up to Columbia University for a bibliographic rock festival of sorts. Brian Schottlaender, Oliver Harris, Issac Gewirtz, Barry Miles, Regina Weinreich, Ann Douglas, Bradford Morrow and Barney Rosset performed. Harris opened with “From Dr Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch“, now available on RealityStudio.org. Schottlaender kept up the groove with “Manifestations, Multiple Versions, and Showstoppers: Collecting the Various Guises of Naked Lunch.” The short papers ended with Weinreich’s “Honing the Word Hoard: Kerouac, Tangier and Naked Lunch.” The closing act was a jam session between Miles, Morrow, and Rosset. The star was literary giant, king of shock rock, Barney Rosset, spinning tales about publishing Naked Lunch for Grove Press. For me it was as good as Woodstock or should I say the Isle of Write.
The real surprise, the Bob Dylan of the show, was Gewirtz, who gave a talk on the Burroughs Archive, “William S. Burroughs: The Writer as Avant-Garde Archivist,” which had recently been purchased by the New York Public Library. His talk was the equivalent of a live performance of the Basement Tapes. At the time, the archive was still largely a mystery. Few beyond select book dealers and biographers had ever seen it in any detail. Gewirtz proposed that the construction of the archive and the accompanying catalogue was a major work of experimental art on the part of Burroughs. Rehashing the talk afterwards, there was some concern that Gewirtz’s interpretation was, well, something of a fiction, since the extent of Burroughs’ actual involvement in the archive’s organization was rather limited. As I understand it, the archive’s organization was largely, if not entirely, the work of Miles. To be honest I like the fiction as much as the facts in this case. Sometimes facts can get in the way of a central truth and Gewirtz touched on one that is dear to my heart and close to my obsessions: the importance of archiving to Burroughs’ creative process.
Flash forward a few years. Oliver Harris offered up his revised cut-up trilogy and one of his major revelations was that the myth of the Burroughsian Word Horde, the core mass of materials that Burroughs mined for the creation of Naked Lunch and the cut-up trilogy, such as may have been in Hardiment’s suitcase, was largely that, a myth. In my opinion this is still open for debate. Just because something does not reside in the archives does not mean that it did not exist. The thought of what the peripatetic Burroughs lost or threw away would make any archivist cringe. But again do not bore me with the facts. Whether “the” Word Horde actually physically existed does not matter to me in the least. Do not bore me with the nouns. I am concerned with the verbs here. Let’s not focus on the Hoard per se. Burroughs collected, Burroughs archived, Burroughs hoarded. These are the real facts and in terms of Burroughs’ creative life they cannot be overestimated or denied. They are central to the conception of if not the “real” Burroughs, then my Burroughs. And one’s own personal Burroughs is the only Burroughs who truly matters.
But let’s get back to myths for a moment because they are incredibly important in understanding Burroughs as a writer. For example, Burroughs spins his own yarn in the introduction to the Viking edition of Queer in 1985: The Death of Joan. The beginning of Burroughs the writer begins with a creation myth. Fall, murder, and knowledge. This is biblical stuff. Adam and Eve, Genesis, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Issac. The genesis myth of Burroughs is well known but the decline and fall of Burroughs is open for debate. Sure, there are those who argue that there was no betrayal or fall. Those who see no fault in Burroughs or his work. Burroughs as God. These people are fools. They worship a false idol. No, Burroughs is a man and the son of Man. All are fallen; all have sinned. Even Burroughs. Most of all Burroughs. True love is about acceptance and forgiveness of flaws, and even loving those flaws. It is what makes us and Burroughs human. I forgive Burroughs for the shift to narrative starting with The Wild Boys. For the corporate book deals. For the Nike commercials. Some might even consider pardoning him for attempting to absolve himself of the death of Joan with his birth as a writer. Mind you, I have not done so yet. But there is another lesser known event that truly tries the depths of my forgiveness. And this time it is personal; it is a betrayal that affects my very heart, mind and soul.
Bibliographies are organized listings of books; they document and celebrate a writer’s creative life. In a sense they are obituaries. The Mausoleum: William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-1973, compiled by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles. Eric Shoaf and Shottlaender are appreciated but Maynard & Miles is the bibliography that matters; these are the works that merit memorialization and preservation. In addition, Burroughs’ foreword to M&M is more important and insightful to me in understanding Burroughs as a writer than the introduction to Queer. It is in the works listed here that Burroughs lives and will live on. Here we have Burroughs from poet to philosopher to pundit to professor. Burroughs would eventually die a private citizen surrounded by shooting buddies and cats. But who cares about that? I am well acquainted with his work, not friendly with the man. No doubt, this could be my loss; by many accounts Burroughs was a great guy. Maynard & Miles ends in 1973. There is something right about that. My relationship with him for all intents and purposes ends here.
One of my key myths about Burroughs is that he died as a creative artist when he sold his archive to Roberto Altmann in 1973. The archive was sold to serve as the foundation for an alternative university that never actually happened and would remain mythic. Burroughs was motivated to sell it so he could leave dreary London and step away from the typewriter to the front of a classroom in New York City. Those who can no longer write teach.
(Let’s have a pull-out from this lecture. This is again another myth. I am married to a teacher; I understand it is a challenging gig. One of Burroughs’ most powerful lessons is that of the evils of bureaucracy. What I object to is that in becoming a professor Burroughs became something of a bureaucrat. Education, like the government, the military or the corporate world, is increasingly being depersonalized and deindividualized, replaced by a world of filling out paperwork and providing processed lesson plans. Black Mountain College, particularly in is “dying” days, is a model for a true experimental college. By all accounts this experience was harrowing but this time and space became hallowed ground, from which grew Black Mountain Review, arguably the most important little magazine of the post-WWII era; Jargon Society, arguably its most important small press; and a school of writers and artists who would leave Black Mountain to make their names in New York City. Not bad for a college that provided no accreditation, facilities or even food. Yet it provided intellectual freedom and the unique instruction of free thinkers, like Charles Olson. Olson proposed a curriculum that was as far from the common core as possible yet was still foundational and fundamental. The revived interest in Black Mountain College, as expressed by an art exhibition at Boston, demonstrates the frustration with and failure of today’s education system. Why would Burroughs want a part of that? True, Burroughs taught at City College and Naropa, institutions with an experimental bent, but even they fall all over themselves in the pursuit of federal and state funds and in establishing legitimacy, i.e, abiding by governmental standards and benchmarks in education. No experimental institution, be it a college or a small press, can accept government cash. Once you take the cash the education is no longer free. This is the true meaning of selling out.
And no benchmark can measure great teaching. To me Burroughs was not a great teacher in the classroom; his heart was not in it. I have listened to the lectures. He was far from the dynamic presence that Olson was. Outside of the classroom, Burroughs and Olson were pedagogues through their persona and personality. In that sense they were gurus. They were also philosophers through their writings. For Burroughs this did not translate to the ivory tower. Olson on the other hand changed people’s lives in front of the blackboard through his lectures and instruction. The legacy of Black Mountain after its demise, such as that the establishment of Black Mountain North in Buffalo or in the success of Black Mountain artists in New York City, is proof of this. Nothing similar exists for Burroughs.)
To get back to the library and the snake in that library, which was Brion Gysin. Gysin came up with the idea of the archive and Gysin betrayed the initial plans for its sale. But Burroughs fell to Gysin’s temptations, and I am firm in my belief that with the sale of the archive Burroughs mortgaged his creative capital. He sold his mind and soul, the source of his knowledge and power. An archive serves as a repository of memory, which is crucial to Burroughs’ complex handling of nostalgia. Separated from this Word Hoard, Burroughs suffered from creative amnesia.
The sale was not just fatal for Burroughs as a creative artist. It set back Burroughs scholarship forty years. The critical reception of Burroughs has yet to recover or really to even fully develop. Again this can be blamed on Gysin. The original plan was to sell the archive to Columbia University. Gysin fucked that up by helping orchestrate the sale to Altmann. The Vaduz material remained in its original packaging decades after Altmann’s original purchase on through to its sale to Robert Jackson until its eventual “liberation” by the NYPL in 2010. Even at the NYPL it is far from free; it is currently under the lock and key of academic protocol, which is totally understandable.
Likewise Burroughs studies are imprisoned in abstractions and theory, with the notable exception of Oliver Harris and select others, who attempt to break themselves and Burroughs free by locking themselves in the archive. Bibliography is crucial to Burroughs studies. The work of scholars of the book, like Robert Darnton, D.F. McKenzie, and Jerome McGann, and theorists, like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, suggest that a sociology of Burroughs needs to be fully developed. Let’s have an exploration of the history of Burroughs’ books; of the Burroughs communication network involving author, publishers, booksellers, printers, and readers; and of enumerative, descriptive, textual and analytic bibliography.
The study of Charles Olson provides one of many potential models. Take for example the publication of selections of his archive in Olson: A Journal of the Olson Archives, issued by the University of Connecticut Library. Why should the Burroughs archive in various libraries, but especially in the NYPL, not get the same treatment? Why not appoint a scholar/editor to run a blog at the NYPL in order to write on the archive’s contents? I am sure a graduate student in NYC would jump at the chance. It would be a valuable learning experience in archival research for the student and for Burroughs fans. Alex Wermer-Colan, you busy? Possibly this is in development. I would not be surprised if it is. If you have not heard there is a revolution going on in our libraries and archives, a revolution that could learn a few things from the Mimeo Revolution. The encouragement of the DIY spirit, for example.
In addition, we have Michael Stevens‘ The Road to Interzone that documents Burroughs’ reading and his library, but let’s go further. The work of Ralph Maud, Olson’s Boswell, is something to aspire to. He wrote Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, which analyzed the meaning of Olson’s library not just listed it, and then went further by reconstructing the library physically, going so far as to reproduce Olson’s annotations in various books. Until Burroughs’ archive, his library, and his bibliography are more fully accessed, Burroughs studies are a fraud. It is criminal. If Burroughs’ writing career began with tragedy, it ended with a betrayal, which put Burroughs’ archive into the hands of the Ugly Spirits.
To this day, the Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, published by Covent Gardens and Am Here Books in a lavish edition, which you might expect from Richard Aaron, given his later rare book catalogues, provides a tantalizing glimpse into the extent of the Burroughs collection and into Burroughs’ creative achievement generally. Of course, like the NYPL collection, the Catalogue is largely unattainable by the general public. This is due to the difficulty of the rabble to break into institutional holdings as well as due to the economics of the rare book market. The lettered edition of the Catalogue is a $4000 book and the trade edition, which is only slightly less ornate, is over $1000. Burroughs was truly right to sell out; there is money to be made in them there bookshelves. Mine the archive.
Let’s be clear and let’s be completely honest. Could you possibly blame Burroughs? A man has got to eat. British food fucking sucks. Burroughs ain’t a toad-in-the-hole type of guy. Although he did love Senior Service cigarettes. Unfiltered, of course. I understand I am being unfair to Burroughs and am perhaps holding him to a standard that I will be unable to measure up to myself. Where is my book collection going to go and at what price? And that gets to the heart of what fascinates me about Burroughs selling his archive. I have little in common with him and he is a distant figure in some respects. I never think of knowing him personally, but I think I can relate intimately to his archive and understand just how important and meaningful it must have been for him. He must have been really, really desperate to sell it. Even more than with my collection, Burroughs was selling a piece of himself. It must have been devastating. Death, divorce and debt. The dreaded D’s. For the true collector these are the only reasons you would ever part with what you have accumulated. So I really feel for Burroughs. There but for the grace of God goes I. And I have been in his shoes for a few brief periods in my life. I was in a position where I was selling pieces of my collection to pay daily expenses. It was a low point to be sure.
If Burroughs’ archive served as the source of his creativity, my Burroughs collection serves a similar and even more expansive function. It is not so much a database as an interface. It is the window through which I view the world. I access everything around me through my collection and through Burroughs. I approach all politics, popular culture and even people by means of Burroughs. Any ideas or ideals that I have are filtered through my book collection. The thought of having to sell this collection is akin to suicide. It might not be the end of me physically but it would be psychically. In a sense I would cease to exist, or more accurately I would not know how to exist.
I like to think of Burroughs as a DIY archivist. He surely created his own RealityStudio. As Oliver Harris has demonstrated in his introductions to the restored cut-up novels, Burroughs’ writing is a detourning of the Time/Life image and data banks and he created banks of his own to draw from. When he made his triumphant return to the United States in late 1964, he brought with him seven suitcases of books and papers. He travelled with an extensive archive. After dropping out of graduate school I realized that I would never again have access to similar resources, unless I built an archive of my own. Burroughs did not just show me what was possible (or impossible) in the world of literature; he led the way to what could be done in building an archive. If you appreciate the work of Burroughs, nothing is more in the spirit of his work and its revolutionary message than collecting it. Any fan of Burroughs should also become a Burroughs collector and seek to become a complete man in the industry.
In Burroughs studies, access to information is narrow as is our understanding of his work. Corporations and institutions seek to build and control the RealityStudio. Few individuals have the time, resources or inclination to construct their own archives. My top 23 is filled with What Ifs but maybe the ultimate in wishful thinking in Interzone has to be: What if the NYPL Burroughs archive and the others scattered across the world were publically available and networked together on the internet? What if these archives were presented as an accessible database that could be commented upon, sampled, re-mixed and recycled to form new critical interpretations and creative works? This virtual archive should be dynamic not dormant. This is how Burroughs manipulated his own archive. Its purpose was not as storage but as a means to generate stories. All institutions should attempt to return to something akin to Burroughs’ mythical Word Horde, the ultimate source of Burroughs’ creative energies, which would power and expand the reach of Burroughs for generations to come for professionals and amateurs alike. I outlined my vision of the future in Operation Total Exposure. This is a total assault on the culture. And as I mentioned above, this is happening now. This is a bibliographic Happening. An event, a moment, an action, a call to arms. The oppressors are cracking open the door to the ivory tower. They are peeking out to see what the Vandals are doing. “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” The legacy of Burroughs has yet to be viewed clearly. Access, not excess, is the means to cleansing the doors of perception and critical reception. Forget tune in, turn on and drop out. Follow not Albert, heed Abbie. Steal this book. Archive and survive. Bootleggers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your copyrights.
Let’s end this Top 23 list with a link that hopefully suggests that the chains placed on our Burroughs archives by various institutions are in the process of being loosened or broken entirely. (But always remember, do not look upon the digital as our savior because no doubt the link will someday be broken) Storm the RealityStudio!!!
23 weeks have flown by. Great anticipation followed by awe, occasional anger, occasional head-scratching, re-evaluation…probably the most fun I’ve ever had relating to collecting. How about following up with the 2323 next most interesting Burroughs collectibles?
The photo of the catalogue used above is described as follows:
“A presentation copy from Brion Gysin to Richard and Lilia Aaron. This copy has a full-page calligraphic drawing by Gysin (similar in form to the one numbered “iv” on the cover of the catalog) on the recto of the leaf before the title page. Signed by Gysin and inscribed “for Lilia + Richard with love.” In acetate dust jacket.”
The 26 lettered copies were signed by Burroughs, Gysin & Miles, housed in a slipcase, and included a page of manuscript (with a reference to its source within the archive.) It would be fun to track down and create a list of the 26 pages of manuscript. Ginsberg’s own copy, inscribed to him by Burroughs, was offered for sale recently, but it lacked the slipcase and it lacked the page of manuscript. I wonder what the manuscript page was and where that page is now??
This was a great series. Thanks for all the hard work that went into putting it together.
There are a number of Burroughs items where it would be interesting to compile a census. The Catalogue is definitely one (Derringer Books had one not long ago, which sold quickly I believe) as are the Fuck You APO-33, the Digit Junkie, the Unicorn Ali’s Smile, the British Journal of Addiction Offprint, the 1-10 edition of the C Press Time (I saw one at Lucius Books at the New York Fair; I also saw another C Press Black Tulip, 2/2 Stories for Warhol, at the Morgan Library Warhol exhibit). There are several others.
BTW did anybody go up to the NYC book fairs? Any finds???
Wow, I’m very honoured to have made number one!
When I first began work on the Burroughs archive in 1972 I naturally asked around to find out what, if anything, was stored with other people. There was a suitcase, filled largely with old newspapers at the home of an artist in New York – however, among the newspapers, the individual pages scattered among them, was a copy of the Fuck You APO-33. The illustrations were also mostly detached but were all there. This copy is now in Emory. There was little in the way of mss material, but there were a dozen or so Brion Gysin drawings. This was typical of the various Burroughs hoards I uncovered. Bill had material hidden in the back of cupboards, in the kitchen and under the bed in his London flat, including the wonderful block of mss about 18 inches tall tied up with thick brown string and labelled, on the top page of mss in thick black marker pen: “Bottom of the Barrel”. It was among these mss pages that I found all the extant pages of “Queer” as well as much of the material now filed away in folders – “folios” as Brion Gysin called them – at the Berg collection. I tried to track down the legendary Hardiment suitcase, which I last heard of as being in the possession of bookseller Larry Wallrich, but drew a blank. He had moved to Vancouver. I was assured by someone who had seen it that it contained mostly reel to reel tapes and little in the way of mss.
The first person I turned to for advice was Ian Sommerville, who had years earlier attempted to make sense of Bill’s filing system. (Ian owned little in the way of mss. He had a lot of signed galley proofs including a corrected Nova Express, a lot of collages and photographs and a lot of tapes. His mother destroyed them all on his death.) He said that most of the files in Bill’s four drawer file cabinet were marked “miscellaneous”. Ian told me that to his knowledge several suitcase of material were missing and this was confirmed later in the year when Brion Gysin came over from Paris in September, 1972, and told me that two suitcases had been stored with a junkie in Tangier and that they had been destroyed, along with everything else in the man’s rooms, when a candle set the place on fire. Bill himself confirmed that these were mostly left over pages from The Naked Lunch. A further suitcase was rumoured to be in the possession of an Arab street boy who was selling the pages off to collectors but I’ve never seen evidence of this – single pages just don’t turn up – and am inclined to not believe it. A more reliable story concerns a box of mss stored in the attic of the Beat Hotel by Brion Gysin but missing when Brion tried to retrieve it several years later in 1963 when the hotel closed. Brion had a vague memory of it but couldn’t be sure whether he retrieved it or whether, as Ian thought, it had disappeared. However, the fact is that there is a great deal of manuscript material missing.
The fact there is an archive at all is thanks to Brion Gysin: Burroughs was prone to up and leave on a whim, leaving behind everything that did not fit into his suitcase with friends in a series of boxes and suitcases stored between London, Paris and Tangier. At the Beat Hotel, Gysin would carefully pack everything away in his sea trunk when Bill did his disappearing act, but in London, where Burroughs had more than a dozen different hotel rooms between 1960 and 1964, much material went missing because Ian Sommerville wasn’t always there to rescue it when Bill shot off to Tangier or back to Paris. (Thus the legendary Hardiment suitcase, which one can assume was but one of many). The idea of Burroughs as archivist is, unfortunately, a bad joke. Until rare book dealers began sniffing around and Ginsberg informed him that he had sold some of Kerouac’s letters, Bill had thrown away all of his correspondence as soon as he had read it (as did his mother). Brion Gysin, who helped in the final stages of the cataloguing of the archive, said that in his estimation, about half of Bill’s manuscripts were missing, presumed destroyed, and so we cannot get a balanced view of his work just by looking at what has been preserved by collectors and institutions.
When I began work there were some folders already labelled, sometimes with obscure quotes or just with pictures, (making them impossible to put in alphabetical order), as I have already described in Call Me Burroughs and elsewhere, but the vast quantity of material was just in large piles, usually with the remains of a rotted rubber band holding them in place. I sorted them by page size, then paper type, typeface, single or double space and so on until I had a series of piles that appeared to belong together. These I put into folders newly bought from Rymans office stationers. Bill had not seen many of these pages for many years, and almost as soon as I had created a file, Bill would pull out a page or two to use in whatever he was working on. I usually waited until late in the afternoon before consulting him, then we would spend half an hour or an hour going through what I had done that day; identifying and dating the material (not always accurately). I actively encouraged Bill to write descriptions of the material, which in some cases he did, and these pages were added to the other material. I also asked him to describe the contents, which he did, usually on the front of the folder. Thus folios such as 7, 8, 910, 12, 13 etc. were essentially created by the two of us. Many folios were already in existence but not labelled, sometimes the contents were obvious – such as folio 26 which just contained a set of proofs – in this case I think I simply put them in a folder and labelled it – other times I asked Bill to ID them and label them.
It has been a long time since I assembled these folders, but generally speaking I would say that I created the vast majority of the folders, but that Bill in many cases then labelled them and in some cases moved material around from one to another. I assembled all the correspondence files. Of the 168 manuscript files, I probably created about 125 of them, of which Bill then suggested labels for about a third of them when we had our daily identification sessions. The final file, folio 169, was the folder in which I put material to file. The fact that those sheets were not filed is simply because there was not room to spread out the folders: they were all stacked away at the end of each day so that Bill could use his living room/bedroom. Folders already completed were piled up in the cupboard. These last remaining items were just called miscellaneous as the folders they belonged in were probably already packed in boxes. Anyone who has experience of cataloguing archives will recognise that the last ten or so folders were things that had been set aside for later, in the hope of finding more material for them, or else they were things that did not easily fit, such as Folio 163 which was a box of objects.
The catalogue was made at the request of Kenneth Lohf at Columbia University’s Butler Library who wanted to buy the archive, but obviously needed to know the extent of it first. The arrangement and degree of detail (how many pages, how many annotations) was made according to his suggestions. Unfortunately Brion Gysin was seduced by the idea of a secret Vaduz bank account, and the collection was sold instead to Roberto Altman for the same money, who intended to build a study centre specifically for the files, something that Burroughs went off into a number of amusing routines about but which I think he knew all along would never happen. Altman was somehow related to the Prince of Liechtenstein, but his father ran out of money and the centre was never completed – though building work did apparently begin. (Burroughs wanted a moat filled with piranhas to surround it.) The archive is still well protected, the Berg Collection at NYPL not being the easiest library in the world to use.
Thank you for this essay and thanks to Barry Miles for his illuminating comments. I wrote a paper on this subject for a library science master’s program in 2014. The NYPL’s copy of the catalog is Gewirtz’s personally penciled copy, which is close to falling apart, but this just enhanced its rare-book aura. The Berg is certainly not the easiest of archives to access, but the WSB finding aid, indeed all the finding aids, are excellent.
https://www.academia.edu/12057123/The_William_S._Burroughs_Papers_at_the_NYPL_Berg_Collection_Appraisal_Arrangement_and_Access
This essay sparked memories… I was priviledged to have worked on the production of this publication back in the day. I was the designer and graphics technician from Covent Garden Pess, back in 72/73, that worked with Richard Aaron and the guys melding this mamoth archive into a printable, publishable tome. Your essay re the catalogue inspired me to go back though my book shelf to refind the treasured vellum bound volume that was signed for me by William, Brion and Miles. Now the white of the vellum is loosing its pristine sharpness ands the edges of the pages are showing signs of having been just one of the books on the shelf for 45 years but the signatures are still full of life and sounds to me … perhaps this volume should be itself archived and protected for tomorrow for there will never be anything so tangible, so evocative, so telling of the ‘Burroughs’ epoch. I would be interested to hear/ read others thoughts on this.
Peter Juerges,
Excellent stuff. Is yours one of the lettered copies with a page of manuscript? If so, what is the page?
I have a tattered, spine-taped catalogue of the archive signed by WSB, Gysin and Miles. On the front end page, it is inscribed “Allen DeLoach working copy”. I am familiar with Mr. DeLoach and his magazine, “Intrepid”. I also have several photos of WBS and others taken by Mr. DeLoach. Any advice on whether I should have this restored? Thanks.
It is a $1500 book normally and increasing in value. It might be worth putting some money into it since it is an association copy on top of that.
I’m intrigued by the ‘working copy’ notation. Allen must’ve worked with it on his own as I’m sure he wasn’t participating in its creation. Is it numbered or lettered? Is it a presentation copy? So many questions! I’d say it’s absolutely worth a restoration inquiry.
I’m sure this is stated somewhere, but haven’t found it yet. Aside from the NYPL, how many major Burroughs archives are there, and how many pages do they represent? I mentioned the intro to “The Travel Agency is on Fire” in another comment. The editor writes of drawing from 10,000-plus pages of cut-up material, and suggests one or two other similarly-sized collections exist. Sorry if I’m asking something you’ve answered elsewhere, but I’m under the impression that despite Burroughs’ neglect, his archives are vast, thousands upon thousands of pages….
The three major archives are NYPL, Ohio State and Arizona State (if I remember Arizona correctly). There are others that have smaller holdings like Florida State. Have you checked their Finding Aids. They will give you some idea of what Alex was talking about in Travel agency.
I haven’t done that. I won’t be perusing them anytime soon, sadly, but was just wondering if we have an idea of just how many pages there are. It’s amazing what’s out there. Cornell’s Olin Library had Apo-33, in the stacks! A buyer there at one point had a real bug for the Beats: Yugen, Floating Bear, Olé, all in the stacks. I informed out archives dept. to get them into the vaults posthaste!
Thx, Jed.