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mind changed to the endless cycle of content based on one’s interests, whether unsubstanti-
ated health information or far-right conspiracy theories. At the same time, librarians have a 
significant role to play in drawing attention to the perceived banality of search and to make 
apparent the workings of search engines and the commodification of information to library 
users. Doing so is an important step toward identifying the different shapes and forms of the 
search-ification of everyday life, making evident the impacts as well as the immense amount of 
trust we put into the results appearing on our screens.—Eamon C. Tewell, Columbia University

Amy Hildreth Chen. Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives 
Market. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. 192p. 
Paper, $33.95 (ISBN 978-1-62534-485-4).
Published as part of the University of Massachusetts Press series on 
Studies in Print Culture and History of the Book, Placing Papers: The 
American Literary Archives Market is a well-written and fascinating 
history of how various stakeholders—and their differing motiva-
tions—shaped the literary archives trade in the United States of 
America. Amy Hildreth Chen, who holds a PhD in English from 
Emory University, previously was an academic librarian at the 
University of Iowa and now is an independent scholar. She traces 
the largely overlooked history of the trade in literary papers from 
its post-World War II origins through to the mid-2010s. The book 

comprises an introduction, conclusion, and six chapters. After a brief first chapter on the vari-
ous values implicated in archives (financial, scholarly, and public), Placing Papers examines the 
literary archives market from the perspective of several key stakeholder groups: authors and 
their families (chapter 2), agents and dealers (chapter 3), directors and curators (chapter 4), 
archivists and digital archivists (chapter 5), and, finally, scholars and members of the public 
(chapter 6). 

Chapters on “Brand: Authors and Families” and “Access: Scholars and the Public” book-
end Placing Papers. Plenty of archival literature already exists on both donor relations and on 
reference and access. Chen places this discourse into a much wider context by examining how 
authors’ cultural capital on the one hand, and scholars’ fetishization of literary manuscripts on 
the other, create value and drive demand in the literary archives market. The chapter “Profit: 
Agents and Dealers” discusses the two professions often involved in sales of authors’ papers. 
While agents are focused on obtaining the best prices for their authors, and dealers value 
their relationships with institutions and downplay the financial aspects of their transactions, 
both are invested in ensuring “the survival of their business by looking out for writers’ best 
interests” (43). A subsequent chapter on “Competition: Directors and Curators” explores 
dynamics among institutions vying for papers that bring in the most cultural capital, while 
attempting to balance (in some cases enormous) budgets.

Of particular note is the chapter on “Provenance: Archivists and Digital Archivists.” It 
acts as a corrective to the frequent oversight that leaves archivists’ work uncited in research. 
Especially sophisticated is the discussion of acquisition, preservation, and access challenges 
created by the advent and increase of born-digital records. As Chen demonstrates, these are 
particularly acute for archivists working with personal born-digital records. If the current 
lack of resources to deal with digital records continues, the utility of collections to depict an 



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author’s compositional process could diminish. Given her recognition of the emotional value 
of archives to authors, families, scholars, and members of the public, I would like to have 
read more about the emotional dimension of archivists’ work in processing, preserving, and 
making available the records of individuals. While scholarship on the topic of the emotional 
and affective dimensions of archival work is still emerging, conversations on this topic have 
been ongoing since at least 2016, with the publication of key articles by Michelle Caswell. Ar-
chivists’ contribution to the market is to “create literary archives through their management 
of these writers’ physical, digitized, and born-digital documents” (81). Examining the roles of 
archivists’ emotions during the process of preserving records would add more nuance to the 
discussion of values. Emotions may play a role in which collections are prioritized for process-
ing, and they certainly impact how the archivist(s) (re)present the collection in the finding aid.

Of the many things this book does well, two stand out. First, Chen expertly blends 
qualitative and empirical quantitative research to produce a highly engaging narrative. Her 
initial approach to tracking the history of her topic is data driven. Needing to delineate the 
parameters of her research, she settles on defining canonical authors as those included in 
the Norton Anthology of American Literature, while acknowledging the racist and sexist past of 
anthologies. Her data set of canonical authors includes their genders and ages, the identity of 
the people who deposited or sold their papers and the time at which they sold it, the extent of 
the collections and their content, and finding aid information. Her data-driven conclusions are 
complemented and illustrated by fascinating case studies drawn, by necessity, from a selection 
of grey literature such as blog posts, professional white papers, newspapers and magazines, 
and trade publications. As Chen states, the “often ephemeral locations of these texts highlights 
how the literary archives market came to be overlooked in scholarship discussing twentieth- 
and twenty-first-century American literature” (10). She also draws upon scholarship in the 
fields of literary studies, archival and library studies, and digital humanities. 

Second is the transparent and publicly engaged nature of Chen’s research. All of her data 
sets, accompanied by a data dictionary, are easily accessible online through the University 
of Iowa Library. Interested users can download and reconfigure the data sets. Chen writes 
clearly about her process, making this book an example of how to conduct quantitative re-
search in the humanities. Chen sends a shoutout to her “interdisciplinary cohort” on Twitter 
in the acknowledgments (xi). Her citational politics are borne out by references to Twitter 
conversations in the text of the book and in endnotes that credit Twitter conversations with 
sparking ideas or providing information. 

As is inevitable with a work that identifies a gap in the existing scholarly literature, Chen 
is unable to pursue all of the interesting questions raised by her research. As a Canadian, I 
couldn’t help wondering how some of the scenarios Chen discusses would unfold differ-
ently outside the United States. It is a compliment, rather than a criticism, to say that I was 
occasionally left wanting more detail, more illustrative anecdotes, or more in-depth analysis. 
Chen is a disciplined scholar who is able to make the necessary tough choices to keep her 
project manageable. She is transparent about topics that are beyond the scope of her research 
and provides suggestions both in the text and in footnotes for areas that would benefit from 
further research.

Given these strengths, I can imagine this book being assigned in MLIS programs. It serves 
as an introduction to the topic of literary archives, provides a template for how to conduct 
research that blends quantitative and qualitative approaches, and affords inspiration for 



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research essay topics. It is relevant for current or aspiring special collections archivists and 
librarians, digital humanities librarians, and data librarians. 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. I hope 
that literary scholars and archival/librarian scholars alike respond to Chen’s call to conduct 
more research on this topic.—Alexandra Wieland, Simon Fraser University