The David Foster Wallace archive (Lisa Gold: Research Maven)

TL;DR

A researcher's same-day link roundup (14 September 2010) of the Wallace archive's opening, by freelance researcher Lisa Gold. No interpretation — its value is the tidy period inventory of the Ransom Center's own opening-week publicity posts and finding aids (titles preserved even where the capture carries no working links), plus another sighting of the annotated Players inside-cover photograph that circulated that week.

Key claims

• Same-day report: the HRC "announced that the literary archive of David Foster Wallace they acquired after his death is now open to researchers" — papers, manuscripts, correspondence, teaching materials, and "the extensively annotated books from his library."
• The post reproduces a photograph of "the inside cover of Wallace's annotated copy of Don DeLillo's" Players.
• The HRC blog posts it indexes, by title: "How the David Foster Wallace archive found a home at the Ransom Center"; "The archives are a window into his mind" (by Bonnie Nadell); the materials slideshow; the opening announcement; "Additional David Foster Wallace materials at the Ransom Center"; and "David Foster Wallace's library: Dog ears, coffee rings, duct tape, and heavy markings".
• Finding-aid pointers: the inventory of Wallace's papers, the inventory of the library books, further annotation photographs, and the teaching materials.

Themes

Archive opening-day publicity; the marginalia-first public framing of the collection; research-infrastructure pointers.

Cross-references

• htmlgiant-butler-dfw-archives — the same day's litblog reaction; Gold is the researcher's-eye counterpart to Butler's ethical ambivalence.
• kut-dunbar-consider-ransom-center — the Players marginalia image again, there as the article's illustration.
• bostonglobe-fehrman-lost-libraries — Gold's next post is titled "Productive frustration, lost libraries, and required reading for aspiring writers"; the "lost libraries" subject circulating that week is Fehrman's essay.

Notable passages

• The HRC library post's title, as indexed: "David Foster Wallace's library: Dog ears, coffee rings, duct tape, and heavy markings".
• Nadell's post title: "The archives are a window into his mind".