UPDATE:  The Weidenfeld & Nicolson Records are now processed and available to patrons.

The Manuscripts Division has acquired the archives of the distinguished publishing house of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, co-founded in 1948 by George Weidenfeld (1919-2016), a Austrian Jewish refugee from Vienna, who became a British citizen in 1947 and was knighted in 1969; and Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004), a British writer, who was the son of Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1985, George Weidenfeld acquired the American publisher Grove Press, and in 1991 sold his publishing company to the Orion Publishing Group. Lord Weidenfeld was aptly described in The Guardian as “a complex, multifaceted man of ideas, a perceptive publisher and skilled entrepreneur who spawned an impressive array of remarkable books.” The archives are comprised of 450 cartons of files (chiefly author files), as well as correspondence with other publishers, photographs, contracts, and other materials pertaining to their publishing activities over the course of nearly seventy years. Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s early successes included publication of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1959), and James D. Watson’s The Double Helix (1968). Its publishing business expanded significantly in the decades after the controversial publication of Lolita. Among the thousands of other authors represented in the archives are Louis Auchincloss, A. J. Ayer, Cecil Beaton, Saul Bellow, Cyril Connolly, Margaret Drabble, Antonia Frazer, Martin Gilbert, Michael Grant, Eric Hobsbawm, Walter Laqueur, Vikram Seth, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rose Macaulay, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Edna O’Brien, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. L. Rowse, and Harold Wilson. The archives were packed and shipped to Princeton during the summer months and will be organized and described by the Library during the 2018-19 academic year.

For well over a half century, publishing history has been one of the Manuscript Division’s principal collecting areas, including American, British, and Latin American publishers. Archival holdings on American publishers, chiefly nineteenth and twentieth centuries, include the largely complete archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons (including author files on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, and some 2500 other authors); the archives of Henry Holt, John Day Company, and Princeton University Press; selected archives of Doubleday Publishing, Harper and Brothers, G. P. Putnam, George Braziller, Derrydale Press, and Garland Publishing; complete archives of distinguished literary magazines, such as Story Magazine, The Quarterly Review of Literature, The Hudson Review, and Vuelta and Plural; papers of major publishers and editors, such as Maxwell Perkins, Harold Loeb, Edward S. Dashiell, George Haven Putnam, Saxe Commins, Sir Israel Gollancz, John Lehmann, Harold McGraw, William Jovanovich, Edward T. Chase, and Arthur H. Thornhill; archives of Harold Ober Associates, David Lloyd Agency, Brandt & Brandt, and other literary agencies; and archives of P.E.N. American Center. For information about the Manuscripts Division’s extensive holdings of publishing archives, please search the finding aids site.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson files on Lolita (1959)

Teaching with collections is a major (and growing) area of activity in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Most of this takes place in regularly scheduled undergraduate and graduate classes during the school year. But in recent years, there have been an increase in specially organized summer workshops using the rich resources of the Manuscripts Division. Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, has just taught a workshop on medieval paleography and codicology in the Department’s Small Classroom. It met on Wednesday afternoons between July 18 and August 15. Six Princeton graduate students participated. The workshop surveyed the evolution of Western script, from the late Roman Empire and Carolingian period to Gothic and Humanistic book hands, with weekly group exercises on reading selections of Latin manuscripts, including Princeton manuscripts produced in monastic scriptoria, commercial workshops, or copied by individual people for their own use. The workshop covered script characteristics and terminology, authorial and scribal working methods, abbreviations, punctuation, and approaches to transcription and editing; as well as codicology, with an emphasis on reading text in physical context, the archaeology of the medieval book, evolution of book formats and structure, writing materials, ruling techniques and patterns, internal organization, scholarly apparatus, physical modification of manuscripts by owners and readers over time, binding, provenance evidence, annotation, dating and localizing manuscripts, and other matters.

In one class (see photo below), Skemer explains the late fifteenth-century binding and titling of Princeton MS. 175, a German Franciscan miscellany comprised of a series of separate paper booklets containing extracts from theological readings, sermon drafts, and other texts, written by different members of this mendicant order during the period 1350-1475. The graduate students (from left to right) are Tom Davis (Classics), Rachel Gerber (History), Justin Willson (Art and Archaeology), Joe Snyder (History), and Ksenia Ryzhova (History); David Gyllenhaal (History), also a workshop participant, is not in view. Skemer has previously taught workshops on paleography and codicology through the Program in Medieval Studies and the Department of French and Italian. For more information, contact Don C. Skemer, at dcskemer@princeton.edu

The Manuscripts Division notes with sadness the passing of photographer Ulli Steltzer on 27 July, at age 94, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Steltzer was a long-time resident of Princeton, where she worked as a professional photographer from 1957 to 1972. She became a good friend of the Princeton University Library and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, especially curators Alfred Bush and Gillett Griffin. In 2013, she donated her extensive papers and photographic archives to the Library with all copyright. The Ulli Steltzer Papers (C1454) were organized and described as part of the holdings of the Manuscripts Division, with a finding aid.

Steltzer was born Ursula Goetz in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the daughter of two art historians. She emigrated to the United States in the 1950s with her two children and moved to Princeton in 1957 to become a professional photographer for the Princeton Packet. Her Princeton photographs include J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, Jacques Maritan, John O’Hara, Ben Shahn, Marian Anderson, George McGovern, Adlai Stevenson, Roger Sessions, Igor Stravinsky, and other prominent Princeton intellectuals and distinguished visitors. In an autobiographical sketch prepared for the Library, Steltzer noted, “After working for the Packet for two years, they let me have their studio on Tulane Street to run my own business. That gave me the freedom I had always wanted, and I started to work on my own projects, some of them for several weeks out of town.” On frequent auto trips across the United States, armed with her Rolleiflex double-lens reflex camera, Steltzer photographed and interviewed African American families in the South, as well as Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo peoples in New Mexico and Arizona. Steltzer photographed migrant workers and urban poverty in New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois; immigrants in Los Angeles and San Diego; African American communities and civil rights activists, including the March on Washington (1963) [see image below] and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1968).

In 1972, Steltzer relocated her studio to Vancouver. There she befriended prominent Haida artists, such as carvers Robert Davidson and Bill Reid, who would become her frequent collaborators. Steltzer documented the art, culture, and traditions of the Haida and other First Nations coastal tribes, as well as the Inuit, with whom she lived for several months. Traveling widely throughout the Americas and Asia during her long career, Steltzer also documented life in Guatemala, Cuba, China, and India. Her photographs have been exhibited widely in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and have appeared in at least a dozen books and collaborations, beginning with Indian Artists at Work (1976).

The Ulli Steltzer Papers include approximately 47,000 black-and-white negatives, contact sheets, and silver-gelatin prints, as well as manuscripts, notebooks, research files, correspondence, pamphlets, and diaries related to a number of published and unpublished photography projects spanning her entire career, from the late 1950s through 2008, including both her early Princeton portraits and later documentary photography of native peoples. Related textual materials accompany the photographs, including drafts for books and exhibition catalogs, research notes, travel diaries, transcripts of interviews, receipts, bound volumes and pamphlets, and correspondence with publishers, collaborators, and people photographed. Steltzer also donated photographic prints to the Graphic Arts Collection.

For more information about the Ulli Steltzer Papers, contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Ulli Steltzer, Contact sheet with photographs of the March on Washington, August 1963