The Unseen Theft of America's Literary History | Hacker News Reader

The Unseen Theft of America's Literary History

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73 pointsjoe515019 comments

Found a broader discussion of archive theft here for those interested: http://blog.oup.com/2012/08/difficulty-inside-book-archive-t...

The basic challenge for the thief is finding something valuable enough to be worth selling, but not so valuable it's obviously hot. Then make sure there are no records it existed (in this case it appears the catalog didn't include the letters) and find somebody trustworthy to sell it to.

I have to agree that the best approach would be to digitize as much as possible, but that might or might not be a tall order for the institutions in question.

It seems almost as egregious that the items in the collection weren't digitized and made public.

That's a very considerable expense in itself - digitizing, creating and maintaining an archival site. Not to mention that there are copyright questions to be sorted out, which implies legal costs.

I didn't think of the legal costs, they'd have to wait 70 years past the authors death to release it freely?

Forget legal costs for a second, the man hours required to digitize a sizable collection is no trivial matter.

From what it sounds like, the collection this guy was looting from was huge. I doubt the organization had such a generous budget that they could afford such a project.

The person-hours required to digitize a sizable collection is, generously, maybe 12¢ per page. See my breakdown upthread.

That's what work study students are for. They cost any university pennies on the dollar. Simply cataloging and backing up stuff is about as well protected from IP lawsuits as you can get.

And Special Collections libraries the world over employ students doing exactly that. I was one of them. :) I led this project (at UVA) for a couple of years, digitizing both manuscripts and first editions of Walt Whitman's works. It was fulfilling work as a student, and interesting.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

Did you learn anything shocking that hasn't been published?

His handwriting was so bad I often needed one of the expert scholars to decipher it. I essentially learned through exposure, and realized how valuable studying the original manuscripts of authors can be. Whitman, for example, wrote on scraps of paper (essentially like Post-Its), and then tacked them to a large wall and rearranged, crossed out, rewrote, and edited everything like that, eventually getting to a point where he was happy, upon which time he rewrote everything again in the final manuscript he sent to his publisher. This was for Leaves of Grass.

UVA also has the papers of William Faulkner, so I learned quote a bit about him, too. Additionally, four original copies of the Declaration of Independence.

No, I didn't learn anything shocking, but I learned an awful lot about the history of the book, and archiving, and digitizing, and publishing. Terry Belanger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger), a MacArthur Fellow, was my mentor.

This kind of material might fall within the domain of the Google Books Library Project. This would mean very little cost (if any) to the libraries themselves.

I'm not sure the Google Books Library Project is actually continuing. Have you seen any books they've digitized this year?

When I digitized the first-edition OED, it took me about a month of nights, using equipment the Internet Archive let me use. That means I was doing about 1000 pages a night, including nights when I didn't work and nights when I got lost reading it. It doesn't take even close to a month to build a book-digitizing machine (thanks, in large part, to the Archive sharing information about the approach that worked for its Scribes), so the labor is the majority of the cost. Based on this and on US$15/hour for an 8-hour day, digitizing a letter should cost about 12¢.

12¢ per letter, but then how do you "create and maintain an archival site"? You make a torrent and seed it. If each 12¢ page is 35 megapixels (A4/letter at 600dpi), then 8:1 JPEG-2000 compression should get you about half a megabyte per page. Half a megabyte of disk space is 0.0015¢. I pay about US$32 a month for my internet connection here in Argentina, and it can sustain about half a megabit per second, upstream, which is 164 gigabytes per month; so uploading that page to the swarm takes about 8 seconds and costs 0.01¢. You probably only have to do this once, but you might need to occasionally step in to resuscitate the swarm if all the other seeds die.

So, to sum up, this "very considerable expense in itself" costs 12¢ per letter to digitize, 0.0015¢ per letter to create, and 0.01¢ per letter to maintain an archival site.

You're right about the copyright questions, which could easily cost US$1000 (100,000¢) per letter. And that is the true unseen theft of the world's literary history.

This. Someone should call the Internet Archive people, it should be right up their alley, at least going by this presentation: https://media.ccc.de/browse/conferences/camp2015/camp2015-69...

From the title, I expected an article on how ever-extending copyrights are denying the public the right to enjoy out-of-print works.

Pragmatically, I can't consider a bunch of personal letters a treasure in any sense but the personally emotional, and I can't consider the fact that I will never see things I would have never seen a disaster.

The hyperbolic language indicates a strong emotional attachment, but it somewhat ironically compelled me to not care, and stop reading.

The article explains that these items can unexpectedly shed light on historical questions, giving as an example a letter from Marat that seemed to demonstrate he was not in an English prison at a time when most historians thought he was.

Items in archives are like fossils: remarkably rare, incredibly personal to the entity involved, but potentially of great import to the rest of us because of what we can learn from them.

I admit I'm a little tone-deaf and didn't notice any hyperbolic language, but I would encourage you to give the article another chance.

Letters and manuscripts have, besides their obvious historical and aesthetic value, a pretty clear economic value. The first example the author cites is a single letter which went for over $500--not a fortune, but when applied to a whole mass of documents, not unreasonable to call a treasure. And again, that's besides their cultural value.

You might never have seen them, but you could very well have seen information from them. Personal letters are the primary texts which historians and literary critics draw from, the sources from which we build up an understanding of the past. Their loss means more than a few random pages being scattered to the wind--it means we've lost a bit of knowledge of our own history.

It can be quite significant. Authors' letters to their editors and the like often turn out to be important sources to later literary scholarship. Now, this might be somewhat less of an issue for the most modern authors, now that so much more stuff is written down, but for a notoriously secretive author like Thomas Pynchon for example any letter is likely to contain invaluable information.

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