At Princeton, I Learned About the Deceptiveness of Archives

Libraries are not only places to store information. They are also places to hide information. At a nameless institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the faculty of the English department take turns going into the library and reshelving a novel that contains juicy gossip about them so nobody can find it. Or again, some time ago, a colleague of mine was researching a historical figure whose papers, according to a book by an eminent professor, were at The British Library, unprocessed and unavailable. The professor had only been able to see them thanks to personal connections. After contacting The British Library and being denied access, my colleague kept hunting and found, quite by accident, that copies of the papers were at an archive in Washington, D.C., available to anyone. She contacted the professor to share the good news. The look on his face convinced her that he had known all along and made them seem unavailable so other people couldn’t read them.

These kinds of dirty tricks go back centuries. In the 18th century, a historian named Edmond Malone was working on a biography of Shakespeare, and just before the book’s publication, he found in the library at Dulwich College an old diary that proved Elizabethan playwriting differed in significant ways from what he thought. He decided, instead of pulling his book for revisions, to simply not give the diary back to the library. (It was eventually returned after his death.)

I first learned about the deceptiveness of archives at Princeton. As a student, I spent a lot of time in the rare books room, looking at items — manuscripts, old books, things that would seem very ordinary to a more experienced researcher — that, to me, seemed so far out of the reach of mere mortals that every time they appeared on the table in front of me, it felt like a small miracle.

One of the librarians acted as a sort of Cerberus, growling and snapping and finding problems with the paperwork and insisting that I didn’t need to see that item. (One of my professors told me he did this to a lot of women who tried to use the archives.)

But access to that world required an ordeal: One of the librarians acted as a sort of Cerberus, growling and snapping and finding problems with the paperwork and insisting that I didn’t need to see that item. (One of my professors told me he did this to a lot of women who tried to use the archives.) Once, he came into the rare books room and hauled me out, saying I hadn’t checked in. I had; he was the one who checked me in.

I cried in front of the rare books curator, Stephen Ferguson, and the problem stopped, which wasn’t quite a victory for feminism. But I learned, in any case, that archives are run by people, and people are flawed. You can talk all you like about infinity under a roof, the heaven of the imagination, the writer Jorge Luis Borges’ line, “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library,” but the fact is that libraries are human institutions. Catalogs have omissions. Items get stolen. Collections reflect the peculiarities of the collectors. Sometimes access to the archives is at the mercy of archivists. (At the Vatican Apostolic Archive, where you need permission from a church official to see any of the holdings, women researchers advise each other that you have better chances of getting permission if, when you go to ask, you take off your wedding ring first.)

In 2005, I took a class with Robert Darnton, The History of the Book, that gave me a language to understand all of this. Darnton is one of the inventors of the history of the book as a field: the study of books, their makers, their keepers, their readers, with the same kind of close attention that we use for the history of art. “The book was a force in history,” he told us, meaning that books and libraries don’t just document events, they make them happen.

So when, a few years ago, I started work on my book, Book and Dagger, about the librarians and professors who were hauled unexpectedly into the world of spycraft during World War II, I understood why the fledgling Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor to the CIA — valued experienced library rats as spies. And why the CIA, to this day, does recruiting (or so I have heard) at the annual American Library Association conference. The work of getting archives to reveal their secrets requires a far more complicated set of moves than just looking at the catalog. It can require the work of a real bibliographic detective. How much more so for agents tasked with obtaining secret documents, or maps of buildings, or underground newspapers, or enemy scientific publications to send, say, to the library at a little town called Los Alamos?

One of the historical figures in the book, Adele Kibre, was a brilliant document hunter, whisking out from under the noses of the enemy documents that proved to have crucial intelligence value in the war. Her papers are in the National Archives, but you’d never know it if you used the archive’s OSS finding aids; the OSS veterans who helped to make the finding aids listed the names of men but often not the names of women, which means that a researcher interested in women agents has to do a lot more work to find them.

As a sophomore, I took a class on the literature of place with the late Professor Will Howarth. We were tasked with writing our final paper about a place, and I submitted a proposal to write about the University’s library. Professor Howarth, furious, wrote me a blistering email saying I had to write my paper about a real place.

It turned out all right in the end. I wrote my paper about my hometown. He became my mentor and taught me everything I know about how universities work. But I still think he was wrong about the assignment. To paraphrase Professor Darnton, libraries don’t just keep records of history. They’re places where history happens, too.