Archive Fever (2)
There comes a moment in archival research when you realize: no one knows the depth and breadth of what’s inside of most archival collections, including those in the country’s most respected libraries. We thrill to news of rediscoveries: an author’s “lost” novel found, a rediscovered silent film, or overlooked sound recordings of great importance, and so on. Each narrative is telling us: no one really knows. It’s led me to think about what archives I visit, how I what questions to ask archivists and librarians, and the best approach to a given collection, always within limits of access and time. I’ve come away with insights about history and its gaps, institutional cultures and their impacts, research path dependence and serendipity, the roles of collectors and ad hoc archives, and the slippage inherent in “lost” and “found.”
If you’re lucky enough to spend time with a given collection, personalities begin to emerge from the documents, the recordings, the films, and so on. In my first “Archive Fever” post, I wrote about my research in the David O. Selznick collection at the University of Texas. So much of Selznick can be found in the memos alone, as Rudy Behlmer discovered long ago. I spent enough time in the collection to work in it as a paid proxy researcher to others, I still wouldn’t suggest I had any broad sense of it all. Nor would I be surprised to hear of new discoveries made by a researcher who stumbled upon a file no one had noticed before.
The first time I arrived at the Library of Congress years ago, advice from University of Texas film scholar Janet Staiger was top of mind. In her historiography class, she implored us: always be kind to archivists. It is the right and just thing to do since librarians and archivists have long been preservers of knowledge and advocates of free expression. But it is also crucial, she said, because so little of what is housed within any given collection is actually catalogued. The rest, if known at all, lives in archivists’ minds.
Gambit at Lincoln Center
On an east coast research trip, I heard from the legendary Edison Records researcher and record collector Raymond Wile that the New York Public Library had some uncatalogued materials from OKeh and Columbia Records housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. I sent them emails for weeks and months before, asking about the collection with no reply. Since I was in the area for a series of research jaunts, I thought I’d show up. The polite librarian at the front desk searched the NYPL catalog and found nothing.
An archivist overheard our conversation and told me that what I’d heard was true, but that the collection was uncatalogued. The conversation could have ended there, as many archives will not allow researchers access to uncatalogued materials for various reasons (including theft). But this archivist put a sticker on my shirt that signaled my clearance. We took the elevator down a few floors.
He walked to a shelf full of boxes and pointed to those in question. He pulled down a box and began showing me materials from A. F. R. Lawrence, a recording archivist who compiled a library of recordings for Columbia Records over a ten-year period. Lawrence died in 1972 at 50 years old.
In their obituary for Lawrence, the New York Times noted that the Columbia Records archive created by Lawrence was “the only historical collection of its kind ever commissioned by a major commercial record company.” Whether first or not, that Columbia’s initiative (and Lawrence’s work) would be groundbreaking almost a century after the phonograph’s invention says a lot about recording companies and the perceived value of their back catalogs.
He handed me a box and pointed to a nearby photocopier. “You can photocopy anything you like,” he said, but he asked me to record what I found in marker on the outside of each box. I spent the rest of the week digging through archival documents from OKeh and Columbia Records, along with Lawrence’s research notes. I would stumble back above ground for brief lunches and then leave in a daze at closing time, trying to make sense of what I’d found. Reentering society was made all the more surreal due to David Blaine’s presence on the Lincoln Center plaza for much of the week, as I made my way through fans lining up to wish the illusionist (“endurance artist?”) well. My New York gambit turned out quite well, and it was largely down to happenstance, persistence, and luck. There is luck, but there is also asking the right questions, and trying to respect people and read situations on the fly.
Surprising finds and Unexpected Gifts in Richmond, Indiana
I learned this first hand while in Richmond, Indiana doing research at the Starr-Gennett Foundation on Gennett Records, an all-important company for its role in the expansion of the recording industry of the 1920s. One of my stops was the Wayne County Historical Museum. I asked for the Gennett materials and the sole librarian on duty accommodated my request.
But I could also tell he was bothered. I got up the courage to ask: “What’s going on?” “Most of our visitors come looking for information on Gennett,” he told me. “But no one ever comes looking for this.” He brought an old log book over to my table, dropping it from a height meant to ensure a dramatic thud. I opened up the book to find page after page of notes and images of research by engineer and inventor Charles Francis Jenkins. It took a few pages to figure out what I was reading at first. Then I realized I was looking at early research that led to television.
Jenkins was a key figure in the development of television, founder of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and author of several books on media and a memoir on spending his youth as a boyhood inventor. Before Thomas Edison had done so, Jenkins projected motion pictures to an audience in his Richmond, Indiana hometown. (There’s a plaque on Main Street commemorating the event.) The log book had photographs of his mechanical television experiments, along with handwritten notes and illustrations on page after page. I wondered whether anyone researching television’s earliest histories knew about this. How would anyone in media studies know this is here? I would have likely never seen the log book at all had the librarian not been in a bad mood – a mood that began to lift as he saw my astonished look as I turned the pages.
That’s one item in one archive in Richmond, Indiana. We really have no idea what is housed at many of the state, regional and local archives in the United States, despite some work toward a digital network where such information could be found. Your curiosity as a researcher and your attention to less-traveled archives could change the shape and impact of your research, the nature of its importance, and even how you write it up. (The largest collection of Jenkins’ work is at the TriCollege Libraries archive of the Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore colleges in Pennsylvania.)
On the same trip to Richmond, I received another archival gift of sorts. I met Al Gentry, a Richmond philanthropist and retired Army Colonel, who played a key role in founding the Starr-Gennett Foundation and the Whitewater River Gorge Project, what was once “Starr Valley” and named after Starr Piano, Gennett’s parent company.
Al took me down to the gorge, not far from downtown Richmond, and led me to the site of the old Gennett studio. He knelt down and picked up a brick by the side of the river then put it in my hand. “Here’s a brick from the studio where the greats played,” he said and then listed them off: Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Charley Patton, Hoagy Carmichael, Gene Autry, Alberta Hunter, Duke Ellington, Big Bill Broonzy, and on and on.
He gave me a commemorative box to store the brick in and I headed back to Indianapolis for my flight to Austin. At check-in, I was informed that my luggage was now over the weight limit. The brick, of course. I gladly paid the fee.