Placing Papers

"Placing Papers presents a fascinating overview of the American literary archives market and should be read by anyone working with these collections. Chen’s work not only provides important information and new insights, but it also raises many fruitful questions that should serve as a building block for future scholarship on writers’ papers."—RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage

"Placing Papers’ straightforward prose and organizational structure is a pleasure to read. This book serves not only as an excellent overview of who is involved in collecting literary archives and when, but it also serves as a near perfect framework for how to structure a scholarly work written around a timely, thorough, and meaningful dataset."—SHARP News

"Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market is a well-written and fascinating history of how various stakeholders—and their differing motivations—shaped the literary archives trade in the United States of America . . . It is also a lively and enjoyable read and would appeal to anyone, regardless of their level of familiarity with the topic, who is interested in authors' papers and the thorny question of 'value' in literary archives."—College and Research Libraries

"In her informative and inventive Placing Papers: The Literary Archives Market, Amy Hildreth Chen introduces readers to the various actors and interests that shape the competitive market of literary archives . . . In lucid prose, she introduces her readers to the key players of the archives market, noting that the emergence of this market is inextricable from the invention of contemporary literature."—American Literary History

"The author's prose offers sheer grace and cleverness, shrugging off the burdens of the empirical/institutional nature of the project to produce a nascent work of valuable cultural criticism alongside its more purely informational dimension."—Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

"Chen's research is impressive, drawing from a multifarious range of documents, everything from journals on trends in library science to correspondence with literary market professionals to journalism on trends in publishing."—Eric Bennett, author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War