The London Review of Books

[0:00:04 Speaker 2] the director of the Harry Rents and Humanities Research Center is going to introduce our speaker, but I want to say just a word about this remarkable book. This is called an incomplete history because it’s not a single narrative that begins on the first page and goes on to the end. This is a book that is made up of archival material on, so you can’t help but see be fascinated by the informal exchanges of what we’re up to. What are we doing for the next issue? The last issue was a disaster. Will never invite him again to write a review and that sort of thing. This is what you’ll find in the, uh, the informal history. So I thought, a someone who works a lot in the archives that this was a brilliant idea. It’s just a new way of looking at institutional history, and I’ve never quite seen the anything comparable state. [0:01:08 Speaker 4] Thank you, Roger. Um, so it is a pleasure to introduce Sam Kitchen Smith, who will be speaking about The London Review Archive. While this is a lovely book that Sam has worked on to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the London Review, of books publication. I will say the originals are even better on there in a room just downstairs. So we’re proud to hold that archive and delighted toe Have Sam here talking about the history of the LRB. Sam came two years ago, I guess, to begin work on this project to mark the 40th anniversary, and I look forward to hearing him speak today and welcome Sam back to the Ransom Center. [0:01:53 Speaker 6] Understands what to [0:01:57 Speaker 0] hello, everyone. Um thanks, Steve. And thanks Roger for inviting me. It’s a great honor to contribute to a Siri’s that both predates me and the magazine I work for. [0:02:15 Speaker 1] I’ve called my lecture today. London Review [0:02:18 Speaker 0] of Books A History in Pieces Whether or not it becomes clear why over the course for the next 45 minutes, you’ll have to wait and see [0:02:29 Speaker 1] before I begin a couple of brief background notes. I’m well aware that my job title [0:02:35 Speaker 0] under review of books head of special projects sounds a bit ridiculous, like a ceremonial position invented for an annoying jobs worth to keep them out of the way of the more important work being done elsewhere. [0:02:45 Speaker 1] But actually, that’s precisely the point It’s the unusual freedom [0:02:49 Speaker 0] of enjoyed for the four years I’ve worked at the LRB to pursue ideas and leads and parallel to the editorial work that produces the fortnightly paper perpendicular and parallel. Until it isn’t, that [0:03:00 Speaker 1] meant I was able to spend a couple of weeks here [0:03:03 Speaker 0] in Austin at the Harry Ransom Center, digging around in the hundreds of boxes of correspondents, type scripts and galleys that we have been sending here since the mid 19 nineties, and then a couple of months compiling and enthusiastically in complete history of the magazine based on what I found for our 40th anniversary, a copy of which I was pleased to see here today on a couple more copies of which I’ve brought with me today to give to those of you who asked the best questions. [0:03:28 Speaker 1] All of which is to say that at the London Review of Books, I’m a newcomer with a weird brief. I worked there for less than 10% of the time. Mary Kay Wilmers, its co founder and still it’s editor, has sat in the center of the [0:03:41 Speaker 0] office that one contributor, Mikel Nieve described is the scariest room in London [0:03:47 Speaker 1] and So I have confined myself in the lecture that follows two areas in [0:03:50 Speaker 0] which I can claim a degree of expertise the paper’s history, as expressed by an archive that has been so untouched and under investigated that I might actually be the world’s leading expert on it, which [0:04:03 Speaker 1] is an exciting thought on our present and future, especially the digital [0:04:07 Speaker 0] side of things, which I’m helping to shape for a detailed account of the Ellerbee’s writers and writing over the years, its editorial processes, intellectual contribution and, uh, well, what it all means. I refer you to my colleagues Future currently hypothetical. But let’s face it, inevitable memoirs. [0:04:29 Speaker 1] Secondly, I spent part of last week at a conference claiming to explore the intersection of culture, technology and entrepreneurship. It was actually very good, and in recent years I’ve attended many more keynotes at these sort of events and papers. Academic conferences. The form these presentations tend to take is the first person journey described by charismatic, self identified visionary. I had a dream but kept finding myself blocked by a problem. So I came up with a solution which achieved immediate success. So here’s my plan for its terrifying global expansion. Now I find this genre is annoying is the next skeptical non Californian person. But it’s t Leah logically convincing in the moment, to an extent that makes it quite difficult to shake off. And I fear the first person [0:05:15 Speaker 0] account that follows might slightly reflect that, in which case apologies in advance apologies also for the quality of some of the slides, which are decidedly makeshift for reasons I won’t bore you with on weekends. [0:05:29 Speaker 1] As the decades passed, the origin myth of an increasingly [0:05:32 Speaker 0] legendary publication or cultural institution becomes over rehearsed to the point of meaninglessness. A neat paragraph of sentences is refined and copied and pasted onto the bottom of press releases. Three inside pages of books on the about pages of websites while [0:05:49 Speaker 1] seated through newspaper interviews and magazine profiles like professional production standards or, indeed, a crest. It serves as a signifier [0:05:58 Speaker 0] or pray sea of prestige on elegant crystallization of the cachet that accumulates over time, discreetly pocketed so that the institutions community can focus instead on the very much more engaging present and future off. In the case of the London Review of Books, the magazine or the paper as you might have already noticed. We prefer to call it [0:06:20 Speaker 1] on the things that orbit [0:06:21 Speaker 0] it the next big investigative piece. Or take down a new writer with an original voice. Ah, high profile public event. [0:06:29 Speaker 1] Here’s what you’ll find on the about [0:06:31 Speaker 0] page of the brand new LRB website, rendered in our distinctive funked on a classically off white background. Fingers crossed. Yes, [0:06:42 Speaker 1] The long review of books was founded in 1979 during a year long management lockout. At times, that is to say, a dispute between management [0:06:50 Speaker 0] and unions over manning levels and new technology meant none of the five publications in The Times Group of published for almost a year. [0:06:56 Speaker 1] In June that year, Frank Kermode wrote a piece in The Observer suggesting that a new magazine filled the space [0:07:02 Speaker 0] left by the temporary absence of the Times Literary, something. The first issue of The Lrb, edited by Carl Miller, appeared [0:07:08 Speaker 1] four years later. It included pieces by Miller [0:07:10 Speaker 0] and CA Mode, as well as John Daly on William Golding on William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Poems by Ted Hughes, and Shame is Heaney, edited by Mary Kay Wilmers. Since 1992. The Lrb now has the largest circulation of any magazine of its kind in Europe, etcetera. [0:07:26 Speaker 1] But then a major anniversary [0:07:27 Speaker 0] comes along on the past suddenly becomes the most important focus oven organizations present and immediate [0:07:33 Speaker 1] future. Or rather, that’s what needs to happen. Reaching a recognized milestone could be very valuable in terms of both cultural and actual capital. You have an institution is able to get sufficiently ahead of the narrative so that it can successfully leverage [0:07:47 Speaker 0] the accumulated esteem and affection the still around nurse into a PR and marketing and, in the case for a magazine editorial, Philip, that can fire it some way into the next decade until, inevitably, things start to slow down. After four or six years on, the existential questions kick in what we for. Why do we still exist? Are we still the right people on the right platform for doing the thing we set out to do Originally? [0:08:14 Speaker 1] This is true for a magazine about to turn 40 hardly a venerable age but still pretty long [0:08:18 Speaker 0] in the tooth bearing in mind, the elephant’s graveyard of short lived literally magazines, [0:08:23 Speaker 1] as it is for, say, an organisation seeking to re secure on increasingly unfashionable [0:08:28 Speaker 0] cultural figures place in posterity. Treading water is another decade or quarter century trickles away before the long awaited big birthday arrives, bearing the gift of grants and newspaper coverage [0:08:41 Speaker 1] on to get ahead of the narrative to make the past sufficiently engagingly present, the prey see in your pocket is no longer enough, nor is worn out reminiscence Mary. Recollection of the adventures of Your Glory Days only serves to emphasize to your readers and your rivals that those days are far behind you. Still, it’s what a lot of all cultural organizations end up falling back on, mostly because for them their best days really are behind them, but also because nothing says [0:09:07 Speaker 0] you’ve had a good run, but you don’t have any right to be around forever. And perhaps it’s time for a young pretender to be given a proper chance to overtake, like, really, actively blowing an anniversary safer to passively resort to the tried and tested it. [0:09:21 Speaker 1] The lobby’s plan for [0:09:23 Speaker 0] our 40th wasn’t exactly high risk. A book, a program of events, some merchandise, including a facsimile of that first ever issue, have brought some of those [0:09:32 Speaker 1] two on the new website. The anniversary was actually [0:09:36 Speaker 0] sort of dais x machin off the new website, which meant that we could claim that launching it a good three years after the project began, thanks to a series of technical and managerial mishaps was actually what we had intended all along. Our [0:09:47 Speaker 1] lack of originality meant the risk that we would end up sinking into the comforting [0:09:50 Speaker 0] quicksands of the usual bullet points. Frank Kermode Call Miller. Our Origins is an insert in the unit in The New York Review of Books are Emergence From that marsupial pouch on the hand over of the editorial, battered in 1992 colored in with dashes of self indulgent reminiscence, was pretty riel. [0:10:09 Speaker 1] Perhaps the book could be another anthology [0:10:11 Speaker 0] of famous, that is to say, unusually influential prophetic. All controversial story pieces from Oliver Sacks is the man Who mistook his wife for a Hat 1983 which Sacks called the starter for his actually famous book of the same name to Hilary Mantel on Kate Middleton in Royal Bodies, which provoked a response from the prime [0:10:31 Speaker 1] minister at the time, David Cameron. Simpler times with an introduction tracing the same old dots all the way back to 1979. More background. The lockout and to some extent, Promodes Call to Arms resulted in the founding of three other [0:10:48 Speaker 0] new British literary magazines in 1979. Craig Rains Quarter Over on Wars Literary Review on Bill Buford’s [0:10:56 Speaker 1] Grant, although about third example was actually technically [0:11:01 Speaker 0] the relaunch of a Cambridge University student periodical founded 19 years before. [0:11:05 Speaker 1] I’ll return to the subject [0:11:06 Speaker 0] of Grant ER on its own ruby anniversary celebrations, which played out somewhat in parallel to ours. [0:11:12 Speaker 1] Later they sent it on a special [0:11:14 Speaker 0] issue for the famous stories and report Taj from the last 40 years, which [0:11:18 Speaker 1] is the closest any of the [0:11:19 Speaker 0] 4 1970 magazine 79 magazines came to as I see it, revealing their hand in that way. [0:11:26 Speaker 1] Another publication concert couldn’t help itself, however. Curiously, in the year of its 106th birthday, Statesmanship, the best of the new statesman 1913 to 2019 conspicuously felt the need and its accompanying press release to insist that the magazine’s best days weren’t behind it. In case you’re worried, according to the European press price, Jason Cowley has succeeded in revitalizing the new statesman on re establishing its position as an influential political cultural weekly. He has given it an edge and a relevance to current affairs it hasn’t had for years. So there you go. The same temptations backend us towards a whole week of in conversation [0:12:04 Speaker 0] events, full of nostalgic recollection of the very amusing things Carl said in the 19 eighties. And the writers we fell out within the nineties on the fallout from our response to 9 11 etcetera. The [0:12:14 Speaker 1] website presented more possibilities for pulling ourselves out of the mire, but also a whole new avenue of risk constructed around the complete publishing history of the paper. Almost 17,500 pieces. The Danger Waas. That information overload [0:12:28 Speaker 0] might have the same deadening effect as the paragraph copied from the old about page onto the new that viable and resonant opportunities to bring the papers past dynamically into its present. My end Up, encased in a perfectly uniformly digitized shell of incomprehensibly massive completeness with all the charismatic edges and handholds filed off, [0:12:51 Speaker 1] the solution is suggested by other magazines [0:12:54 Speaker 0] and cultural institutions. Next generation websites weren’t especially promising either high effort and expensive curatorial projects. Utilising the latest developments in linked data and digital storytelling, apparently based on underwhelming traffic reports without [0:13:08 Speaker 1] asking themselves or they use, is the question is this. [0:13:11 Speaker 0] What are community wants, something they will actually use, or an expanded batch of bullet points reincarnated in the form of grown yet another digital timeline? That’s for the Paris of you website. It’s actually really good, so it’s harsh to bring it up as an example of a cliches form. [0:13:31 Speaker 1] This was the gloomy backdrop against which I planned [0:13:33 Speaker 0] my first trip to Austin, hopeful that I might find something to help us sidestep this great birthday bind. The [0:13:40 Speaker 1] fact that the ransom Center had acquired and was continuing [0:13:42 Speaker 0] to acquire the magazines archives suggested it might have a use besides, or beyond what were traditionally understood to be its main U S. P, namely that are increasingly retro habit of editing pieces on page after page interational after restoration of printed proofs passed from editor to editor to typesetter means the bundles of paper that’s still result from the making of every issue of the L. A B constitute a unique record of the development of the contemporary literary essay in English on the influence of Call Mary Kay on their colleagues creatively destructive, or should that be the other way around? Marks on that story. [0:14:20 Speaker 1] It was hard to imagine how this obsessive [0:14:22 Speaker 0] witchcraft or wit craft to borrow the title of LRB contributors. Jonathan Ray’s latest book might be the engine of reinvigorated anniversary celebrations, but the results of the very few previous forays into boxes of correspondence by HRC staff in Passing LRB employees, which had fished out lively letters by the likes of Graham Greene, Edward Side on particularly low riding, we’re [0:14:47 Speaker 1] suggestive that there might be some more [0:14:48 Speaker 0] things of some interest to be discovered. The [0:14:52 Speaker 1] London Review of Books Collection of High [0:14:53 Speaker 0] Ransom Center is comprised of five reasonably well organized but on catalogued accretions spanning the years from 1979 to 2006 on at least five more that bring us right up to the present in an almighty jumble of barely organized and increasingly randomly disordered boxes and folders who, swelling size reflects. There’s the Ellerbee’s growth on the extent to which digital communication and publishing has ruined, or at least very much complicated archivists lives [0:15:21 Speaker 1] the advent of email has actually resulted in unusual growth [0:15:23 Speaker 0] in our physical archive, but also potentially some added value because of another quirk of editorial process. [0:15:29 Speaker 1] All the editor, all the lobbies editors share a single email [0:15:32 Speaker 0] account. Edit at Ellerbee dot co dot UK. [0:15:36 Speaker 1] Every non spam [0:15:37 Speaker 0] email sent to this address is printed out twice a day and left on Mary Kate’s desk. She [0:15:42 Speaker 1] then goes through them one [0:15:43 Speaker 0] by one, swiftly scrolling in pencil or response or lease an outline before leaving a little pile on each of the editors desks for them to send as Mary Kay all themselves. So [0:15:54 Speaker 1] even in the Age of Outlook, a paper record [0:15:57 Speaker 0] of most of the correspondents received and sent by the editors of the L. A. B endures like the carbon copies of Your With Mary Kay’s idiosyncratic handwriting and sentences Andi, I suppose Mary Kay herself bridging the generational shifts from longhand to print to digital. A [0:16:14 Speaker 1] fitting illustration of this appears in our book on the spread about word splits. I do wish you do something about your hyphenation program, though it’s disconcerting a subscriber complaints in an email misunderstanding that we still edit every word split by hand, but we do so based on atom ology, the second half of Mary Kay’s noting pencil reads. As for [0:16:39 Speaker 0] our hyphenation policy, it’s crazy. I agree on very time consuming. [0:16:45 Speaker 1] Each A creation is itself [0:16:46 Speaker 0] comprised of between 100 150 boxes, around half of which contained folders of correspondence organized alphabetically by year, or rather by volume of the LRB. [0:16:58 Speaker 1] The other 50 to 70 [0:16:59 Speaker 0] five boxes contain the production files, types, groups, proofs and galleys. Of the 24 issues published in each of the years, volumes the accretions spans [0:17:08 Speaker 1] each. A creation also contains some boxes that fall between [0:17:11 Speaker 0] those two stores. Unused submissions, which I may see mean millions of poems, [0:17:18 Speaker 1] job applications, event in book publishing paperwork. And so in two weeks, I, under researcher, were only able [0:17:25 Speaker 0] to go through a tiny fraction of the 1500 boxes, each of which contains up to 10 manila folders in the collection. So in [0:17:32 Speaker 1] a manner not at all [0:17:33 Speaker 0] too similar to the creation of a large digital archive, promising entry points had to be devised and pursued, and if they didn’t swiftly bear fruit dis list. [0:17:43 Speaker 1] I brought with me a list of first places to look at the correspondents and production files behind and [0:17:48 Speaker 0] around intellectually important and or especially notorious and or historically resonant PCs and issues and moments from the Ellerbee’s history that I was aware of and which others suggested, such as Launch on the lead up to it. The Break with the New York Review of Books. The Falklands War in the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Carl Miller’s departure in 1992. The Death of Princess Diana. I frowned, but my colleagues insisted on granted. Martin Listen there Special issue, too. 9 11 The opening of the London Review Bookshop in 2003. The Global Financial [0:18:21 Speaker 5] crisis. Brexit. Don’t ask me any questions about that [0:18:24 Speaker 1] on so on. Also debuts by the likes of Mary [0:18:28 Speaker 0] Beard, Alan Bennett, Angela Carter, Jenny Disc E. William Empson, Salman Rushdie in Susan. Sometime the same Isaiah Berlin wrote for The Lrb and Tony Blair on Martha Gellhorn and the time Harold Pinter didn’t [0:18:40 Speaker 1] win Godly on the Mass Trick [0:18:42 Speaker 0] Treaty. Edward Side on the Oslo Accords. Terry Castle on desperately seeking Susan Sontag, Eliot Weinberger on what he heard about Iraq and Seymour Hersh on the killing of Osama bin Laden and so forth. [0:18:54 Speaker 1] And sure enough, our first round of surgical incisions was rewarded with a respectable hit rate. The highlights included a check made out to Isaiah Berlin returned because, Berlin wrote, I cannot in conscience accept it. All I did was to defend myself against the somewhat peculiar piece. Also call Miller’s prophetic commissioning [0:19:14 Speaker 0] note to Tony Blair asking that then front bench spokesman on trade and industry whether he might have time to write a discussion of the state in future direction of the Labour Party. A letter from Mary Beard introducing herself in precisely the terms that would ultimately come to define her career. I teach classics, but I suppose I prefer writing about women’s issues. Politics, not aggressively technical sociology [0:19:38 Speaker 1] poems sent in on spec inspired by poor Lady Di, including one superimposed on a freighter copy of her face on another. Entitled There You Come as wafting fragrance. Moving on an email about Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel sent the editors in 6 2003 years before Wolf Hall was published. There are also determined on incest, [0:19:59 Speaker 0] she writes, or quasi incest. Like people enthralled by their own nightmares. [0:20:04 Speaker 1] But even though these emerged [0:20:06 Speaker 0] from the most obvious avenues of research, [0:20:08 Speaker 1] what was most conspicuous about these first discoveries waas their unexpectedness. They weren’t quite at the center of the [0:20:14 Speaker 0] notable moments. Rather, that came from the peripheries and irregular angles before or after or around the main event, by which I mean an iconic manuscript or a long letter from a Nobel Prize winner, the sort of thing I expected to be most thrilled to find. [0:20:29 Speaker 1] In some cases, this was because the main event turned out to be missing. It later transpired that several important Asians had Bean swiped by, Let’s call them enterprising editors within weeks of returning [0:20:40 Speaker 0] to London are tracked down Saxes manuscript for the man who mistook his wife for a hat crosshatched with 1000 transformative marks by Mary Kay like an intelligence document redacted by and haven’t guard C. A. Also the notebook containing the first draft of Carl Miller’s introductory note for the first ever [0:20:57 Speaker 1] issue, Bob Silvers off the end while B’s letter explaining why he had to break up with us abusive faxes from Harold Pinter. The LRB rejected his eye watering the offensive perm about the Gulf War, provoking the following response. The paper shares my views. Does [0:21:17 Speaker 0] it would keep that to myself if I were you chum [0:21:20 Speaker 1] manuscripts by Alan Bennett on much more. I’m pleased to say that some of these treasures have now bean reinserted into the collection. With these two, however, I found that the best way into them the pressure point, which made the fact of these extraordinary [0:21:35 Speaker 0] documents how special they are suddenly register in a flash of recognition, [0:21:40 Speaker 1] often wasn’t located in their literary or historical heart. It was hidden in the margins. Instead, take the Sacks [0:21:47 Speaker 0] manuscript, a spectacular record of the productive tussle between writers on editor That was the basis of his success, [0:21:54 Speaker 1] undoubtedly, And yet I felt myself [0:21:57 Speaker 0] to be brought closer to this remarkable on most impossible of men by a fragment of the correspondence that came with it. Dismissed is padding by the editor who found the papers in a drawer sound, a [0:22:08 Speaker 1] short letter about contributor copies, which is signed three times, and fading red, black and green ink with an explanatory note in red. All my pens suddenly run out, or Carl’s first draft in one corner of which I found a good line that didn’t make it into the published version. Meanwhile, it is a pleasure to be able to say that this is the first journal I’ve worked on, of which no one is in a position to say that it is not nearly as good as it used to be, which seem to say so much. Maura, about a figure described by John Lanchester, the novelist who began his [0:22:42 Speaker 0] career the Lrb, as the funniest person I have ever known by a distance [0:22:47 Speaker 1] both the joke itself on the fact that the other [0:22:49 Speaker 0] side of Carl the Take No Prisoners editor decided that it probably wasn’t quite witty enough. [0:22:54 Speaker 1] Or Alan Bennett, whose annual diary is probably our most famous feature on also the only [0:22:59 Speaker 0] lrb diarrhea of the Year that is broken up in the traditional manner into dated entries on What Should I Find in a shoe box of postcards addressed to Karl and Mary [0:23:07 Speaker 1] Kay, A diary without dates than it writes is like a course. It without stays. I don’t want to do one. I began to wonder if this revelation could be the basis of a new kind of self deprecating these self congratulatory book, The Holy Grail, and planned a second trip to Aston that would test the notion further. I asked my colleagues for suggestions [0:23:31 Speaker 0] of where to look, to find more of this sort of thing. [0:23:33 Speaker 1] Admittedly a difficult brief, the best and worst thing [0:23:36 Speaker 0] about this idea being that it really depends on one of the great truisms of the physical archive experience. You don’t know what it is you were looking for until you find it well, [0:23:45 Speaker 1] there. A couple of them got [0:23:46 Speaker 0] it and gave me brilliant leads. For example, John Lanchester unlocked the problem of how to represent the miraculous but visually unspectacular. Except in the case of sacks back and forth between writer and editors has all that fat from the pieces gradually whittled away on the page with [0:24:03 Speaker 1] a brilliantly off kilter case study? Here’s how he ended up describing it in the book. People don’t know just how how much hand to hand combat was involved in keeping typos and similar mistakes out of print in the days when everything was typeset by hand. Just occasionally, though, the accidents would work out well. And one of Hugo Williams’s poems about Sonny Jim he wrote that Jim rewinds his alarm clock for another working day, a typesetter. In those days, the process [0:24:31 Speaker 5] was done out of house set that out reminds We [0:24:34 Speaker 1] send the proof to Williams and corrected the mistake on our galleys. But then, when the proof came [0:24:37 Speaker 0] back, Williams had gone with reminds and changed the rest of the [0:24:40 Speaker 1] line. Feeling a bit sheepish, I rang him [0:24:44 Speaker 0] up to apologize and explain that we’re changing back. But he just laughed, said he realized what happened but thought the idea of Jim reminding his alarm clock of work was so much in character that he wanted to [0:24:53 Speaker 1] keep it. I found Williams is proof in the archive. So there you have reminds and he’s just crossed out the for the beginning of the other line to make it make grammatical sense. And it seemed to say more about this strange, misunderstood process in any number of pages of Perry Anderson’s pros being very gently tweaked. Interestingly, when it came to finding the best illustration of the fact [0:25:17 Speaker 0] checking process, it turned out in stark contrast with this less is more approach. That Mawr was very much more a dramatic page showing Seymour M. Hersh being challenged by several different [0:25:27 Speaker 5] hands on every one of his counterfactual. [0:25:31 Speaker 1] We ended up giving John and Hugo the subheading happy accidents. The next spread in the book is titled Unhappy Accidents and featured a page from an issue containing a Patricia beer poem, Onda Letter from Beer complaining about its mutilation. You have left out the last line in the accompanying caption, Andrew Hagan writes. She told me that seeing it on the page was one of the two things the two worst things that ever [0:25:56 Speaker 0] happened to her, the other being the burning down of her thatched cottage in Devon. [0:26:01 Speaker 1] In my second week at the HRC, however, it became clear that a downside of my updated plan was that in a collection in which the things [0:26:08 Speaker 0] one finds around or underneath or in between, the obvious targets turn out to tell the best stories. That’s potentially something unmissable in every folder on my increasingly random incursions bore occasional fruit, the apparently frivolous trance figuring into the deeply meaningful. In front of my eyes, [0:26:25 Speaker 1] enigmas were unravelled in the unlikeliest places, whole personalities, for example, Mary Kay Wilmers acknowledged that it waas [0:26:32 Speaker 0] rather like me not to beat about the Bush. In the caption that eventually accompanied a letter exchange of Matthew Evans of Faber, in which she asked if the publisher would be willing to commit to some advertising spend. Evans deftly turns the question around by asking How much on Mary Kay’s responses? Just seven words long. [0:26:50 Speaker 1] Dear Matthew £2000 Yours. Mary Kay. Meanwhile, the character [0:26:56 Speaker 0] of a favorite son until he wasn’t anymore. Like Christopher Hitchens, who writes 60 Pieces of the lrb between 1983 and 2002 is conveyed better by the closing paragraph of a covering fax, which begins, Hi, sweetie, than all the rest of his correspondence that I read anyway. Combined, I [0:27:16 Speaker 1] can tell you one thing, [0:27:17 Speaker 0] though. I don’t do it for the money. And if I did well, let’s not. Are [0:27:22 Speaker 1] you sure you aren’t being too possessive? Are you sure I deserve it? [0:27:25 Speaker 0] I’ll be sorry. I asked that if anybody notices my stuff, it all I’m sure they think I belong to you. I do. At any rate, I think so. That is for eternally hitch. Hitch also left a rich trail of resident residue in between his letters. However, here some legal advice concerning a piece of hears about the media mogul Conrad Black. All Mr Black would have to do if he wants to sue would [0:27:49 Speaker 1] be to show that Christopher Hitchens had an ulterior motive for his attack. It is transparently obvious that Mr Hitchens does have such a motive. They’re a rare addition in longhand. [0:28:03 Speaker 7] Uh, no, [0:28:04 Speaker 1] we come to that later. They’re a rare edition in longhand to a [0:28:07 Speaker 0] typescript. They usually arrived. Is perfect first drafts, rarely requiring more than a calmer to be added here and there. About two of his favorite things, like money, booze and fags. Our happiness longhand from here. And people can’t be expected to pursue happiness in moderation. He [0:28:24 Speaker 1] wasn’t the only contributor who occasionally [0:28:26 Speaker 0] added a great line in longhand to a typescript or [0:28:27 Speaker 1] proof to her third piece of the lrb about Colette. Angela Carter added an unforgettable truism. Only love can make you proud to be an also ran Clive James filed whole poem, sometimes thousands of [0:28:40 Speaker 0] words long in longhand. Revelation. I didn’t read in any of the obituaries. Here’s a particularly moving example we shared on Instagram when he died a subject I will return to later. [0:28:52 Speaker 1] The best is yet to be simply [0:28:54 Speaker 0] because it hasn’t happened yet on what’s to come. We can never forget. It stays sweet till we get used to it. A least the only wonder that’s never ceased. And that’s a fact. As certain as my name’s this line, I’ll have to pad a bit. Clive James [0:29:09 Speaker 1] afterthoughts turned out to be another compelling [0:29:11 Speaker 0] cluster, mainly writers, referring to what would become a famous piece in passing, sometimes in a P s. At the end of a long exchange about an ostensibly more important subject [0:29:21 Speaker 1] occurred to me to ask if you might be interested, a short personal piece about some [0:29:25 Speaker 5] target, Terry Kassel wrote in 2005. I [0:29:28 Speaker 1] had a 10 year on again, off again friendship [0:29:30 Speaker 0] with her. Rather like the relationship between Dame Edna average in her little sidekick match, I don’t need to explain who has matched [0:29:37 Speaker 1] in many ways. SS lived up to her initials on earlier that month, what a month from Eliot Weinberger. In the meantime, for the hell of it off center mini epic on the Iraq war that I happen to finish today, the introduction to another [0:29:53 Speaker 0] anniversary anthology published last year, Faber and Faber. The Untold Story, Celebrating Our Bloomsbury Neighbors 90th Anniversary [0:30:00 Speaker 1] does a decent job of explaining [0:30:02 Speaker 0] this temporal revelation of the archive, which accounts for so much of the eloquent force of these fragments [0:30:08 Speaker 1] as much as possible. I’ve told the story of favor through original documents. It is not just that the [0:30:13 Speaker 0] people writing them could turn a phrase. It is also that they could not know how their story was going to turn out their excitement. Hopes, fears and frustration vibrate through these pages, giving the book a sense of immediacy. That hindsight, late in commentary, cannot hindsight laid in commentary. [0:30:30 Speaker 1] Maybe it shouldn’t have Bean so [0:30:31 Speaker 0] surprising to me that marginal, irreverent, forgotten about details proving to be a particular expressive way of relating [0:30:37 Speaker 5] the history of the lobby, [0:30:39 Speaker 1] probably because of its overall relentlessness. That is to say, our pages of [0:30:44 Speaker 0] uninterrupted text, which subscribers have been cleared and complaining about since 1979. [0:30:48 Speaker 1] This is terrible, one seem a nod wrote in 1979. Every time I open the pages of the London Review, my eyes swim and I feel distinctly down at the mouth. Couldn’t you make the slightest concession to what human I can and cannot [0:31:01 Speaker 0] do with endless common columns of text? A recent email repeated this sentiment more or less word for word, [0:31:07 Speaker 1] not to mention 10 2030 60,000 Word piece is the L. A. B has always [0:31:12 Speaker 0] taken its peripheries. The breadcrumbs that real the reader in quite seriously, [0:31:17 Speaker 1] Carl was a master [0:31:18 Speaker 0] of the rubric are word for the line above. The masthead on the cover graze Allergy and wind God lease. Shakespeare nods. Thatcher staggers, troubles Colon. He needs Lichtenstein’s Palestine’s on Best of all, Connor Cruise Ozai on [0:31:34 Speaker 1] these endure, even though our covers look nothing like they used [0:31:38 Speaker 0] to. What have we done on the issue published the week after the referendum? Being the best example [0:31:44 Speaker 1] on a recent review of shameless [0:31:45 Speaker 0] Heaney’s translation of books, six of the A neared was trailed on the cover in a very college way. As you guessed it, the he needed [0:31:53 Speaker 1] Mary Kate Editorship has seen this energy seep into [0:31:55 Speaker 0] the papers. Pages to article titles have become more and more outrageous. My own all time favorite. How to see Inside a French milkman on [0:32:04 Speaker 1] the subscribers in the room will know what I’m talking about when I refer to Michael Woods. Contribute to note. Mary Kay takes this [0:32:10 Speaker 0] stuff very seriously indeed, I’m sure, correctly believing that these little jokes reward and perpetuate the loyalty of subscribers almost as much as the quality of the writing down the day. The last issue, which should have reached Texas by now, went to press, we debated whether the first piece could be the latest installment of Catherine Rendell’s increasingly celebrators occasional column about [0:32:32 Speaker 1] animals in this case, hermit crabs. It came down to the question of whether it was too cute or the right amount of queues. Consensus eventually fell [0:32:41 Speaker 0] down on the rights on the side off the right amount. [0:32:44 Speaker 1] Mary Kay, in the same issue, also took great pleasure in publishing to pieces by naval historian’s with similar nous with similar surnames one after the other. And at one point, this impertinent spirit bled all the way through to the back pages, causing a seed to germinate into a phenomenon that for a time was in danger [0:33:01 Speaker 0] of overshadowing the rest of the magazine. I refers. I refer, of course, to the Ellerbee’s personal ads eventually collected in two anthologies. They call me Naughty Loner and sexually I’m more of a Switzerland. [0:33:16 Speaker 1] I’m sure that all magazines overthink this side of things and credit themselves in a similar way by insisting that the editors [0:33:24 Speaker 0] jokes rather than the writers of where the publications were truly resides. But the [0:33:29 Speaker 1] extent to which this is a quality much commented [0:33:31 Speaker 0] on by Ari’s means it could be argued that I should have bean for warmed. [0:33:36 Speaker 1] No doubt to that in this room full of esteemed historians, scholars and researchers, these revelations of the archive aren’t it’ll [0:33:43 Speaker 0] surprising to you they’re your bread and butter the essence of your craft on the basis of many of the most high profile archival finds of recent times, such as the discovery last year that one of the first folios of Folger Shakespeare Library contains Milton’s annotations in the [0:33:58 Speaker 1] margins. But I’m not a historian. I’m a journalist in a publisher, and based on the evidence of the various birthday [0:34:04 Speaker 0] volumes published in 2019 the news hasn’t reached my colleagues, which is to [0:34:09 Speaker 1] say that they all, in my view, Mr the trick. Last year, anniversary publications had a moment. It was hard to keep track of all the cultural organization celebrating big birthdays, which may be made me wonder if there’s something [0:34:23 Speaker 0] about the last year of a decade that inspires people to finally get around to founding their passion project. The Washington Post. Christian Caryl wrote a whole book [0:34:31 Speaker 5] about 1979 in particular, and the birth of the 21st century [0:34:35 Speaker 1] on. Many of them were moved like us to publish self congratulatory A Pistol Returns Faber and Faber. The Untold Story, which I’ve already quoted, try to pack as much of the publishers history as possible into its 400 pages and can’t really be blamed for doing so with anecdotes drawn like the time Lord of the Flies was rescued from the slush pile. There’s a lot of good stuff to get through, but for me, the books great revelation [0:35:01 Speaker 0] is the way tears Elliott’s personality emerges from his correspondence, which skips from work on some of the 20th century’s greatest poetry to his admirably energetic engagement with HR matters a favor to letters like [0:35:14 Speaker 1] this, uh, about cats. We’ll know how that story ends. That’s even more great. Ask them, expected to be, but That’s the only image of an actual less of reproduced in the book. Let’s get back, Uh, Everything else is transcribed by the author Toni Toby. Favor with the following caveats outlined in his introduction readability Trump’s academic respectability. I have expanded abbreviation and corrected [0:35:43 Speaker 0] spellings where these seem to me to distract the reader, but left some in when they amuse me will tell us something. I have occasionally corrected some of the more egregious examples of poor punctuation [0:35:52 Speaker 1] but have preserved the straight commerce for which William Golding was famous. My aim throughout has [0:35:57 Speaker 0] been to cut out the boring bits. This approach has its disadvantages. Of course. I’m particularly sad not to be able to show the way relationships developed from dear sir through Dear Faber to Dear Jeffrey. But that sort of thing is probably [0:36:07 Speaker 5] best left to the published correspondence [0:36:10 Speaker 1] based on my own experiences compiling a similar volume, I find the way this introduction acknowledges the charms of the original letters even as it strips many of them out [0:36:20 Speaker 0] to be wrong headed and slightly heartbreaking. Another volume, published by British literary publisher last year, 50 50 Car connects Jubilee in letters [0:36:32 Speaker 1] begins more [0:36:32 Speaker 0] Promisingly. With founder Michael Schmitz introduction. Locating the essence of his house is history and the parenthesis in Abandoned Poem by Anthony Rudolph, Very much my sort of thing. Loping in old trousers from poem to crisis, he [0:36:45 Speaker 5] survives like feather on his mantelpiece. [0:36:49 Speaker 1] But the opportunity for other ephemera [0:36:51 Speaker 0] to sing is quickly shut up by an odd concept one correspondent per year and swamped with footnotes, [0:36:57 Speaker 1] it seems excessive to annotate [0:36:59 Speaker 5] this playful fax one begins depressingly [0:37:02 Speaker 1] again. Just one letter is scanned, while the rest of transcribed a marvelous missive from W. S. Graham in the middle of which the pope has schooled a picture of a boat at sea, a delightfully accessible short [0:37:16 Speaker 0] cut into this Impenetrable body of work. But [0:37:19 Speaker 1] then a similar Cuda correspondences ruined by transcription. For example, I hope you will mention [0:37:25 Speaker 0] open square brackets, half a dozen Chinese characters drawn here that I’m influenced by Tibetan verse. The last year review joke. I also I’m having you’ll see my calligraphy improves when I’m talking about money. Difficulties with finance. [0:37:39 Speaker 1] Therefore mentioned grand Trans Allergy suffers from the opposite problem, featuring no footnotes, a tool not a problem with Start, which sees the [0:37:47 Speaker 0] reproduction of a funny letter from Kingsley Amis. I’m afraid you are almost certain to be unable to afford me, followed by a terrific fairy tale by Angela Carter and, on the Facing Page, a letter red alert with same eloquent mystery as her story. I can [0:38:03 Speaker 1] punctuate perfectly adequately when I want to. Flanked with typos, a tantalizing, crossed outline on even more tantalizing, counseled PS. But then the special issue loses its way. Decoupling reduced, reproduced letters from context without explanation. To the extent that I ended up cross referencing the [0:38:22 Speaker 0] address on one with my own research in order confirmed that it really wants from Doris Lessing rather than the writers whose pieces it is wedged between. [0:38:29 Speaker 1] In her introduction, Grant is editor Sigrid Rousing writes, We hope you will revel in the shock of the text. I couldn’t agree more, but utter confusion feels like the wrong kind of fressin, which is a pity because the shock of the text is precisely my point and exactly what these anthologies accidentally defused. They are fundamentally boring, worthy volumes which have no business being so doubtless they would say the same about hours, but unlike ours, it’s hard to imagine [0:38:57 Speaker 0] them enjoying a digital afterlife. Which brings me to my Met next and final section, [0:39:03 Speaker 1] and actually mostly a digital journalist and a digital publisher. And it’s in terms of the digital, similarly [0:39:10 Speaker 0] ignorant of the shock of the archive that my journey There it is with London Review of Books and incomplete history has, I hope, wider implications. [0:39:20 Speaker 1] Digitalization of a large archive of articles, paintings or whatever on the subsequent curation and journalism that disseminates the results tends to [0:39:29 Speaker 0] be a pretty macro project, mainly concerned with minimizing transcription areas in thousands of records and structuring keywords correctly and smoothing out inconsistencies so that the fields through which items have been circulated display correctly in page templates on one siad across social media. [0:39:47 Speaker 1] It is, in other words and numbers game completely lacking in whimsy within the agile website development methodology. Arizona inconsistencies a fixed in great waves until they’re all eradicated. Getting items [0:40:00 Speaker 0] into wider online circulation relies on similar principles. Because of the bottom Lismore of social media, it [0:40:06 Speaker 1] can only be satisfied with calendars on work flows that quickly and efficiently [0:40:10 Speaker 0] located post content relevant to the day’s news agenda or an anniversary or sporting event, ideally with a provocative image and pull quote to capture as many quicks as possible. [0:40:21 Speaker 1] This is actually another part of my job until quite recently. But as I was switching from work on the book to stoking the A lobbyist, Twitter and Facebook feeds, it suddenly occurred to me that everything revelation in the former, every flash and every shock was a detail or a lair or a temporal edge that would be had bean actively whitewashed by the process of digitization. And as the focus [0:40:44 Speaker 0] of our anniversary year moved on from an incomplete history to a new website containing but no adequately unleashing, the complete publishing history of the paper, I [0:40:53 Speaker 1] began to wonder if [0:40:54 Speaker 0] the latter might be saved by the energy. We [0:40:56 Speaker 5] tried to bottle in the book that [0:40:58 Speaker 1] the key to unlocking the problem of information overload that anybody [0:41:02 Speaker 0] who has worked on a big digital project in the cultural sector on Beyond will recognize might be the recovery of peripheral textures, the ghosts for gotten by the machine. [0:41:13 Speaker 1] This idea makes particular sense of literary archives because of the [0:41:16 Speaker 0] challenge acknowledged in my editorial knows at the start of our book. We apologize for having somehow managed to create an illustrated history in which every other image is, in fact yet another chunk of text, the [0:41:29 Speaker 1] point being that these chunks of text are in fact, different. One of the reasons content cuts through initial culture is, for better or worse, the force of its visual ality. You only need to look at the contortions. Wordy magazines, including the LRB, put themselves through on instagram to make a pull quote of copy, beautiful or punch enough to complete with images and video to see how difficult the visual turn makes life literature on the Internet. But a crossed out typescript or a scribbled note in the margin or a perfect line added in longhand or an illustrative doodle, or indeed, a post it note recording something outrageous, your editor said, has rare viral potential. Hold Instagram Hitchens is hundreds. In addition, freighted with the knowledge that it was booze and fags that eventually killed him, registers with the force off. I don’t know for sale baby shoes never worn, and from off this platform, millennials dive into our digital archive, cracking the shell that had up to them kept them out. I am reassured that this isn’t a completely crackpot theory by an essay by [0:42:38 Speaker 0] the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which I’m [0:42:44 Speaker 1] not the first to note, anticipated some of the [0:42:47 Speaker 0] crises of the Internet with startling exactitude. In 1935. Translation here is by Harry Zone. [0:42:55 Speaker 1] Technical reproduction can put the copy of the [0:42:57 Speaker 0] original into situations that would be out of reach for the original itself. [0:43:02 Speaker 1] Above all, that enables [0:43:03 Speaker 0] the original to meet the hold a halfway. The situation is into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art. Yet [0:43:12 Speaker 1] the quality of the presence is always depreciated. The authenticity of the thing is the essence [0:43:18 Speaker 0] of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced [0:43:26 Speaker 1] since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity. The former two is jeopardized [0:43:31 Speaker 0] by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter on [0:43:35 Speaker 1] what is really [0:43:35 Speaker 0] jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. One [0:43:41 Speaker 1] might subsume the eliminated element in the term aura and go on to say that [0:43:46 Speaker 0] which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, if the aura of the work of art. [0:43:51 Speaker 1] This is a symptomatic [0:43:52 Speaker 0] process whose significant points beyond the realm of art, one might generalize by saying the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. [0:44:10 Speaker 1] Perhaps the next revolution in digital publishing will, in the manner of, say, [0:44:14 Speaker 0] the Google art projects use of super high resolution photography of paintings toe perhaps undo some of the damage that Benyamin describes be based on recovery of some of the aura of the papers we find in archives like the Harry Ransom Center as well as shoeboxes, and draws a recovery of the text as object as artwork as historical testimony as unique existence. Thanks very much