Lost Libraries: The strange afterlife of authors' book collections

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TL;DR

Craig Fehrman's September 2010 Boston Globe Ideas essay is about the haphazard fate of writers' personal libraries — its central story is the crowdsourced reassembly of David Markson's library after it was scattered through the Strand — and David Foster Wallace appears only as one case among many. But for the archive-based Wallace sources it is valuable background: it records how the Ransom Center's Wallace book collection was actually formed (only the annotated books kept, thirty-plus boxes given to charity, no inventory made), documents the institutional attitude that an author's own books are secondary to the manuscripts ("The books are gravy."), and notes Wallace's real-life esteem for and 1990 meeting with Markson. It advances no theory scoped to an Infinite Jest crux.

Key claims

Wallace prized Markson: he considered Wittgenstein's Mistress (a novel rejected by 54 publishers) "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country."
After Wallace's 2008 death, the Ransom Center "bought his papers and 200 of his books," including two Markson novels Wallace had both annotated and "had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990."
How the collection was triaged: when Karen Green and Bonnie Nadell sorted the library, they sent only annotated books to the Ransom Center and donated "more than 30 boxes' worth" to charity. There was no time to make a list — another professor needed Wallace's office — so, as Nadell puts it, "We were just speed skimming for markings of any kind."
The institutional hierarchy of value: private collectors and universities prize manuscripts, letters, and research materials (the Ransom Center paid $5m for Woodward and Bernstein's papers, $2.5m for Mailer's); an author's own library "takes a back seat." Ransom Center director Tom Staley: "An author's books are important," "but they're no substitute for the manuscripts and the correspondence. The books are gravy."
The wider argument: most authors' libraries are dispersed rather than preserved (Melville's, Crane's, Twain's cautionary cases), so what survives — and what a library reveals as "a kind of intellectual biography" — is determined by money, prestige, and library specialty, not by scholarly ideal.

Themes

Archive and preservation; provenance and the accidents that shape what survives of a writer; marginalia as intellectual biography; the market and institutional economics of literary papers.

Cross-references

theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — Bustillos read the annotated books this piece describes being triaged; the two together frame both the value and the precarity of the marginalia (and see the removed-books follow-up: the self-help volumes were later withdrawn entirely).
newsweek-walls-mixed-up-files — the other 2010 archive-opening overview; both quote Nadell on the garage salvage and the collection's formation. The two report different book counts — "200 of his books" here, "more than 300" there — a discrepancy the sources never reconcile.
dtmax-every-love-story — the biography's fuller account of the estate and archive.
Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress as a touchstone of Wallace's aesthetics — context for the experimental-fiction lineage, not an Infinite Jest crux.

Notable passages

Wallace on Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress: "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country."
Ransom Center director Tom Staley: "An author's books are important," "but they're no substitute for the manuscripts and the correspondence. The books are gravy."
Bonnie Nadell, on triaging Wallace's library: "We were just speed skimming for markings of any kind."