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Pragmatically, I can't consider a bunch of personal letters a treasure in any sense but the personally emotional, and I can't consider the fact that I will neve

Pragmatically, I can't consider a bunch of personal letters a treasure in any sense but the personally emotional, and I can't consider the fact that I will never see things I would have never seen a disaster. The hyperbolic language indicates a strong emotional attachment, but it somewhat ironically compelled me to not care, and stop reading.

maldusiecle 11y ago
Letters and manuscripts have, besides their obvious historical and aesthetic value, a pretty clear economic value. The first example the author cites is a single letter which went for over $500--not a fortune, but when applied to a whole mass of documents, not unreasonable to call a treasure. And again, that's besides their cultural value. You might never have seen them, but you could very well have seen information from them. Personal letters are the primary texts which historians and literary critics draw from, the sources from which we build up an understanding of the past. Their loss means more than a few random pages being scattered to the wind--it means we've lost a bit of knowledge of our own history.
cokernel 11y ago
The article explains that these items can unexpectedly shed light on historical questions, giving as an example a letter from Marat that seemed to demonstrate he was not in an English prison at a time when most historians thought he was. Items in archives are like fossils: remarkably rare, incredibly personal to the entity involved, but potentially of great import to the rest of us because of what we can learn from them. I admit I'm a little tone-deaf and didn't notice any hyperbolic language, but I would encourage you to give the article another chance.
arnsholt 11y ago
It can be quite significant. Authors' letters to their editors and the like often turn out to be important sources to later literary scholarship. Now, this might be somewhat less of an issue for the most modern authors, now that so much more stuff is written down, but for a notoriously secretive author like Thomas Pynchon for example any letter is likely to contain invaluable information.

maldusiecle 11y ago

Letters and manuscripts have, besides their obvious historical and aesthetic value, a pretty clear economic value. The first example the author cites is a single letter which went for over $500--not a fortune, but when applied to a whole mass of documents, not unreasonable to call a treasure. And again, that's besides their cultural value. You might never have seen them, but you could very well have seen information from them. Personal letters are the primary texts which historians and literary critics draw from, the sources from which we build up an understanding of the past. Their loss means more than a few random pages being scattered to the wind--it means we've lost a bit of knowledge of our own history.

cokernel 11y ago

The article explains that these items can unexpectedly shed light on historical questions, giving as an example a letter from Marat that seemed to demonstrate he was not in an English prison at a time when most historians thought he was. Items in archives are like fossils: remarkably rare, incredibly personal to the entity involved, but potentially of great import to the rest of us because of what we can learn from them. I admit I'm a little tone-deaf and didn't notice any hyperbolic language, but I would encourage you to give the article another chance.

arnsholt 11y ago

It can be quite significant. Authors' letters to their editors and the like often turn out to be important sources to later literary scholarship. Now, this might be somewhat less of an issue for the most modern authors, now that so much more stuff is written down, but for a notoriously secretive author like Thomas Pynchon for example any letter is likely to contain invaluable information.