Famous Authors Archive E-mail

[Sitaram]

http://donswaim.com/nytimes.cyber.html

Salman Rushdie is also a saver. ''Yes, I have saved my e-mails, written and received since the mid-90's when I started using computers regularly, and yes, I suppose any archive deal would include these (pretty extensive) e-mail files,'' Rushdie said. ''I e-mail a lot, so there's all sorts of stuff there, but don't ask me to remember what it is. Private correspondence, texts, business mail, jokes, everything.'' Rushdie said he had backed up a lot of his correspondence on an external hard drive, where he had also transferred messages from old computers.

This must be music to the ears of Rushdie's agent, Andrew Wylie, who hopes to broker the sale of the papers of writers in his star-studded roster. E-mail messages are ''a very, very valuable resource,'' Wylie said. ''I foresee volumes of e-mail correspondence that are frankly far more interesting than the traditional selection of written letters.'' He continued: ''Correspondence is such a slow form. It's like travel before airplanes,'' while e-mail ''heats up around issues and then quiets down,'' so scholars could potentially home in on particular themes or dates. A writer's papers would be ''considerably'' more valuable if they included e-mail, Wylie said. The question for an acquiring agency or library is how to prevent ''extrapolated diminishment of value,'' he added. ''I could certainly see Dave Eggers's collected e-mail correspondence appearing in 10 volumes in the course of the next 40 years, and I think it would be absolutely riveting,'' Wylie said of another client. (He said there were no immediate plans to sell Rushdie's or Eggers's e-mail correspondence.)

 

[Kenny Shovel]

Interesting link Sitaram, thanks for that. I'd never thought about this aspect of emails before, despite having archived correspondence with some of my own friends as a kind of electronic diary.

It also reminds me that there are a few collections of author correspondence that I've been meaning to get, mainly writers like Kafka & Fante whose work I've exhausted.

Regards,

K-S