Photo by Kyndall Harkness, Minneapolis Star & Tribune
Kudos to the University of Minnesota for coming up with the money to acquire the archive of Robert Bly, arguably Minnesota’s greatest literary figure since John Berryman.
For $775,000 they get:
1. 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts
2. his journal spanning nearly 50 years
3. notebooks of his “morning poems”;
4. drafts of translations;
5. hundreds of audio and videotapes,
6. correspondence and first dibs on all future output
It is a refreshing change to have an author’s archive stay in his hometown. So much of a writer’s output relates to their sense of place and something is lost each time a writer’s archive flies away from his home to the highest bidder.
Article on the acquisition here
We also tip our hat to fellow ABBA bookseller Rob Rulon-Miller who served on the committee that raised the funds
Along these lines – Brenda Maddox has an article in Saturday’s Guardian on “Special Collections: Does it matter where and author’s papers are kept…” She poses an interesting concept of creating travel funds to help scholars visit an author’s papers no matter where they are housed.
Guardian article here