Chapter 11
On the sixth floor of the stone and glass building that contains the Harry Ransom Humanities Center on the Austin campus of the University of Texas, between white boxes containing an original Maurice Ravel score and Gone With the Wind film stock, sit a few shelves of paperbacks. They are from the David Foster Wallace collection. The paperbacks include a copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, its pages filled with the blue marker underlining and marginalia of the man now considered a twenty-first-century literary genius.
The Ransom Center, one of the most important research libraries in the country, with one of the largest collections of contemporary author archives in the world, is preserving all of Wallace’s handwriting, along with thirty-six million other manuscripts pages, one million rare books, five million photographs, one hundred thousand works of art, and a Gutenberg Bible. But it is their post-1950 literary collection that they are most concerned with building today.1
Creating an archive of contemporary authors’ papers presents challenges: Many authors, of course, have been word processing since the 1980s, and their manuscripts—that of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie—are overwritten as they are revised, the first drafts lost to posterity. The authors included in the Ransom collection are those who have been wedded to handwriting. Although the center bought the platen Norman Mailer used to type The Naked and the Dead, it was no doubt the rest of Mailer’s ten-ton, $2.5 million archive that prompted them to close the deal. “His mother saved everything!” said the guide looking at row after row of Mailer boxes filled with handwritten notes, letters, and drafts. The Ransom Center also has the longhand first drafts of novels by J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Denis Johnson.
Thomas Staley, the longtime director, who retired in 2013, kept hunting for new talent: He had a photocopied list of some six hundred authors on whose careers he had an eye. He relied on influential friends, the staff reading group, and word on the street to give him tips. When Staley heard about an undergraduate reading Langston Hughes’s poetry on campus one day, he asked the student which other poets he read, and noted down their names.
The center is wagering these authors will be the ones twenty-second-century Ph.D. students will pore over, whose novels will be released as “classic editions,” and whose friendships with each other will become biography fodder. It is a gamble. What if authors in their collection drop off the literary map, their novels stocking the remainder tables? Staley is a realist: “Ten percent of an archive is worth 90 percent of its value, and 90 percent of an archive is worth 10 percent of the price.”
The David Foster Wallace papers, along with the James Joyce and Samuel Beckett holdings, are now part of that 10 percent. Wallace in particular has spurred an uptick in off-the-street visits to the reading room. A woman walked in carrying a copy of Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and asked how to apply for a research card. (All you need is a driver’s license.) Fans trek across the country for the chance to see Wallace’s handwritten annotations in paperbacks and his marginalia on his typed early drafts. Some ask for his handwriting to be sent via e-mail, and the staff has received several requests from tattoo artists for PDFs of Wallace’s handwriting.
To preserve the value of its archive, the Ransom Center needs to keep finding authors who leave, as Staley put it, “the tracks of the imagination” with their pens, who write longhand, or annotate their books by writing in the margins. In a sense, this enormous, bustling center is an institution dependent upon scrawled-upon scraps of paper. For libraries like the Ransom Center, handwriting is not becoming less important: It is rising in literary and financial value as it ceases to have much practical function. Libraries adding to their handwritten manuscript collections might be better prepared for the future than those busily replacing shelving with computers, because their holdings are singular. At the same time, the libraries installing technology are also preserving handwriting by using its more successful successor, the computer. Many librarians are going through their files and taking out the handwritten items in their archival boxes, scanning them to create digital copies, and then putting them up on their websites for all to see.
So over the last decades, and for the first time in the history of handwriting, unique, brittle documents are no longer kept under tight guard, their contents, if not the paper itself, accessible to those without the urgent desire to see in person those singular documents (and then, say, request a library card so they can see how David Foster Wallace annotated Don DeLillo’s novels).
Using sophisticated digital tools that allow us to view one page of, say, an eleventh-century Spanish manuscript produced in a scriptorium, we can view medieval manuscripts even better, given computer resolutions and the ability to expand the size of the page, than if we were to view the original under museum glass. We are able to see more pages than we could in a museum as well: Rare books are usually statically opened to one page, whereas the best digital displays of them allow you to virtually turn pages.
In an age when technology allows us to search texts astonishingly quickly, handwritten documents that have never been transcribed or uploaded are left out. Another set of librarians and scholars has been working to solve this gap in access and knowledge by entering the texts of handwritten manuscripts, not just the images of them, into their databases.
To enter the entire text of an eleventh-century Spanish manuscript, for instance, requires people who can read the words on those pages written in various and often difficult-to-decipher scripts. It also requires many hours, so some libraries and universities have asked the public to help them out by transcribing handwriting from their couches at home. They are literally crowdsourcing handwriting.
The National Archives’ pilot program, launched in 2011, was called “Transcription Pilot Project.” More than three hundred documents were loaded onto the archives’ website, including “letters to a civil war spy, various laws and acts, presidential records, suffrage petitions, indictments, and fugitive slave case files,” and the public was invited to “help the National Archives make historical documents more accessible [and] help the next person discover and use that record.” The documents, a small sample of those contained in the archive, were organized into three levels of difficulty—beginner, intermediate, and advanced—and they provided explanations and links to those who wanted to learn basic paleography.
However, the pilot program ended very quickly, because citizens rapidly and accurately transcribed all the documents as they were loaded; even the “advanced” documents were easy for some. The same thing happened when the New York Public Library launched its “What’s on the Menu?” crowdsourced transcription program, in which menus from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century restaurants were scanned and uploaded in 2011. In just weeks, the public accurately transcribed all 9,000 menus the library had scanned. Since then, the library has digitized additional menus, and as of the end of 2015, more than 17,000 of the 45,000 in their collection had been transcribed by the public.2
A third project, Transcribe Bentham, is digitizing the Bentham Papers’ archive of more than 70,000 items handwritten by Jeremy Bentham. (Bentham was an influential eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British thinker best known for his theory of utilitarianism, whose papers are of enormous historical and philosophical importance.) Since the program was launched in 2010 by University College London, volunteers have transcribed more than 10,000 manuscripts, or some 5.5 million words. Some of the documents are being read for the first time by these transcriptionists, and they are finding important nuggets about which scholars were previously unaware. As Tim Causer, the director of the project, says of the transcribers, “They make a genuine contribution to humanities research, as draft transcripts will act as a starting point for editors of [Bentham’s] Collected Works volumes.” And they will be acknowledged in those future books.
Bentham wrote in a script ranging from legible to almost impenetrable, and some letters cannot be read by laypeople: “He was writing until a few months before his death, and during the final years of his life his eyesight (and his handwriting) deteriorated very badly—this later material requires a specialist to try and decipher much of it,” Causer points out. But with this project as with the others, a small group does the bulk of the work. “Most of the work has been done by a core of 25 volunteers,” says Causer, “though 440 people have transcribed something.” Other, similar programs include the “Transcribe the Renaissance,” a one-day “transcribathon” held in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania and the Folger Shakespeare Library 3 and the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers’ Transcription Center.4
With the success of these initial crowdsourcing programs, the door can be opened to all sorts of handwriting that has been previously inaccessible. In that lies tremendous potential for future reclamation of the ephemeral past we do not want to lose. Libraries and institutions are developing tools and guidelines to enable individuals to digitize family documents; the National Archives has several guides. Some commercial options are available to have these documents transcribed as well, and scholars are working on additional transcription programs for anyone with a private manuscript collection. These would help me: Thirty years ago, before she died, my grandmother gave me handwritten notes about her life that she wrote in her final days. These fragments of her memoir are written on the backs of envelopes, on pages of drawing paper, on lined notebook paper, and other odd scraps of paper she had close by. They are hard to read. The paper is fragile. And carrying around these notes causes me anxiety—what if there is a fire? But a free, convenient way for me to scan those notes, have them transcribed and encoded, and then delivered back to me as an electronic file—as well as being searchable on the Web, should I choose to make them so—would be a boon to both my family and to the historical record. What would be a better way to preserve my familial, cultural, and historic connection to the past and pass it on to my child and future generations? There are enormous numbers of handwritten manuscripts that have never been available to the public, let alone transcribed; as these documents are digitized, translated, and made accessible, they will alter our understanding of history.
But as scrawled notes to lovers are put up on the Web, there is a growing nostalgia for handwriting, to see it as a more “authentic,” “natural,” and less mediated way to communicate. A similar longing, a century ago, led to the creation of calligraphy in the West.