David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Books Removed From Archive

TL;DR

A brief August 2011 follow-up notice by Maria Bustillos to her April 2011 Awl essay on David Foster Wallace's annotated self-help library, reporting that every book she had discussed has since been withdrawn from the Harry Ransom Center's Wallace collection at the estate's request — the collection shrinking from "320-odd books" to 299. It is a reception/archive-ethics document, not an interpretive one: it advances no theory scoped to a novel crux, and its news value is the redaction itself and Bustillos's dismay at it. The reasoning behind the removal is given in Bonnie Nadell's paired statement on Howling Fantods.

Key claims

• Bustillos reports that all the books referenced in her April 2011 Awl piece "have since been removed from the Ransom Center's collection of Wallace's papers"; the collection, which "used to contain 320-odd books, now contains 299" — roughly twenty-one volumes withdrawn — with the remaining list still searchable online.
• She had not anticipated the removal: "It never occurred to me that Wallace's estate would be in a position to rescind part of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center", and she had written her essay assuming "these books would remain available to anyone who was interested in seeing them".
• Her reaction: she was "very sorry -- or rather, entirely freaked out -- to learn that that will no longer be the case".

Themes

Privacy versus scholarship (an author's annotated personal library as contested archival territory); the ethics and instability of a literary archive (a sale partly rescinded after the fact); the posthumous management of a writer's legacy.

Cross-references

• theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — Bustillos's original April 2011 essay, the piece whose subject books were withdrawn; that essay carries the interpretive reading of Wallace's self-help reading against IJ's recovery/earnestness material, and is the reason this removal matters to the archive.
• hf-nadell-changes-to-wallace-archive — Bonnie Nadell's own explanation (September 2011) of why the self-help books and other volumes were restricted; the direct counterpart to this notice, and the source of the privacy rationale.
• The same 2011 restriction was covered by Joe Gross for the Austin American-Statesman (on the Ransom Center restricting part of the Wallace archive) and in the Texas Observer's archive coverage; this is the Awl's own record of the event.