– Hi, sorry to bother you, but could you please help me? I’m confused … the description of this collection says it has 44 boxes but then there are only 20 boxes listed.
– Hmm. Let me look at that for you … [clickety clickety clickety … pad pad pad … murmur murmur murmur … stride stride stride] Yes, that’s correct. There are 44 boxes, but 24 are uncatalogued.
– [heart sinking; the catalogued 20 are from a period completely irrelevant to your topic] Would it be possible for me still to see them please?
– [pad pad pad … murmur murmur murmur … stride stride stride] Yes, though you should know that once we catalogue them the box number may change.
– [calls boxes … boxes begin to arrive … begins looking]
On the one hand, this is terribly frustrating: you’ve no idea what you will get. On the other, it’s wonderful: you’ve no idea what you will get. There are papers in folders and papers in envelopes and loose papers, snapshots and certificates and invoices, family letters and official reports, all very much as if they were picked directly out of the subject’s garage on the day after his death and stuck in acid-free boxes and then left there for decades. There is nothing of real value, though of prudence and courtesy to the material you’ve taken a few notes and snapped a few photos. Boxes come and boxes go. Time ticks by. The archives will close in forty-five minutes. At which point, in the penultimate box – in the middle of the penultimate box – stuck in backward so the title tab is facing away from you and you might have missed it, there is a manila folder crammed about to a thickness of about an inch with onion-skin papers, labeled in unsharpened pencil with the title of your topic …
The Edge of the American West 
13 comments
March 23, 2012 at 7:06 am
Vance Maverick
No grues lurking about, I trust.
March 23, 2012 at 7:09 am
eric
It is a clean, well lighted place. You are not likely to be eaten by a grue.
March 23, 2012 at 10:13 am
rea
Uncatalogued boxes of documents are to historians what buried chests are to pirates.
March 23, 2012 at 11:23 am
ben
You are in a clean, well lighted place. You are likely to fall into despair.
March 23, 2012 at 12:30 pm
eric
What would Ernest Hemingway have done with the Internet?
March 23, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Student
Gone phishing?
March 23, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Vance Maverick
Checked his Amazon sales ranking?
March 23, 2012 at 4:25 pm
Other ben
Sold second-hand children apparel on Craigslist?
March 23, 2012 at 6:10 pm
andrew
It’s always nice when you’re allowed to look at unprocessed materials, but it’s not always easy to find your way through them.
March 23, 2012 at 6:10 pm
andrew
Also, I figure Hemingway would have run a script in his browser that suppressed all adjectives.
March 23, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Main Street Muse
Twitter was created with Hemingway in mind. But I do wonder if Ernest could have rivaled Lady Gaga for # of followers (who this month reached a milestone of 20 million followers). The macho vs the Lady….
March 25, 2012 at 4:59 pm
TF Smith
Very cool. Serendipity is a very real thing.
The imitation bad Hemingway tweet?
EH would have faced the great white bear that is the blank page of the Internet and laughed, even at the blue screen of death. He would have typed on a good old fashioned keyboard, pounding the keys like they were the dark battleship gray QWERTY of an IBM Selectric, and would have spit at the twitters and hashtags.
March 26, 2012 at 12:26 pm
rmhitchens
Although I’m not an academic researcher, my post-retirement job as a document declassifier (at DOE) offers many opportunities to delve into uncategorized (or barely-categorized) historical records, that often take me down interesting byways. Worse ways to make a living!