Comments on: #1: A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive

By: Daurade

Daurade — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:48:28 +0000

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.

By: Jed

Jed — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:29:07 +0000

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.

By: Daurade

Daurade — Sat, 28 May 2022 08:35:36 +0000

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….

By: Jeff Ball

Jeff Ball — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 02:24:06 +0000

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.

By: Jed

Jed — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 19:45:04 +0000

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.

By: Tim Denny

Tim Denny — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 19:03:52 +0000

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.

By: Bigcrux

Bigcrux — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 23:57:45 +0000

Peter Juerges,
Excellent stuff. Is yours one of the lettered copies with a page of manuscript? If so, what is the page?

By: Peter Juerges

Peter Juerges — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 15:17:23 +0000

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.

By: Terry Kattleman

Terry Kattleman — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 01:46:08 +0000

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

By: Barry Miles

Barry Miles — Thu, 19 May 2016 09:23:01 +0000

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.