Conflicts in Appraising Lesbian Pulp Novels Julie Botnick IS 438A

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Pulp Frictions: Conflicts in Appraising Lesbian Pulp Novels

Julie Botnick IS 438A: Seminar in Archival Appraisal June 14, 2018

Abstract

The years between 1950 and 1965 were the “golden age” of lesbian pulp novels, which provided some of the only representations of lesbians in the mid-20th century. Thousands of these novels sit in plastic sleeves on shelves in special collections around the United States, valued for their evocative covers and campy marketing language. Devoid of accompanying documentation which elaborates on the affective relationships lesbians had with these novels in their own time, the pulps are appraised for their value as visual objects rather than their role in people’s lives. The appraisal decisions made around these pulps are interdependent with irreversible decisions around access, exhibition, and preservation. I propose introducing affect as an appraisal criterion to build equitable collections which reflect full, holistic life experiences. This would do better justice to the women of the past who relied on these books for survival.

!1 “Deep within me the joy spread… As my whole being convulsed in ecstasy I could feel Marilyn sharing my miracle.” From These Curious Pleasures by Sloan Britain, 1961

Lesbian pulp novels provided some of the only representations of lesbians in the mid-20th century. Cheaper than a pack of gum, these ephemeral novels were enjoyed in private and passed discreetly around, stuffed under mattresses, or tossed out with the trash. Today, thousands of these novels sit in plastic sleeves on shelves in special collections around the United States, valued for their evocative covers and campy marketing language. Devoid of accompanying documentation which elaborates on the affective relationships lesbians had with these novels in their own time, the pulps are appraised for their value as visual objects rather than their role in people’s lives. The appraisal decisions made around these pulps are interdependent with irreversible decisions around access, exhibition, and preservation. Rather than build vast, standalone pulp collections, archivists can introduce affect as an appraisal criterion to build equitable collections which reflect lesbians’ full, holistic life experiences. The years between 1950 and 1965 were the “golden age” of lesbian pulp novels. Begin- ning with the publication of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks and Marijane Meaker’s Spring Fire, published under the pseudonym Vin Packer, lesbian pulp fiction emerged as a distinct commercial and literary genre, with thousands of men and women publishing in the space. Writ- ten in the context of the shifting gender and social roles of the post-World War II era and reflect- ing Cold War anxieties, these novels are today generally discounted as campy, low-brow, and homophobic, by readership numbers alone likely appealing more to the “prurient interests”1 of straight men as much, if not more, than to lesbians, but in their own time, they “mattered intense- ly” to lesbians, “suppl[ying] a nourishment” that they “found necessary to their survival — lesbian representation.”2 Especially outside of coastal urban centers, these novels were often isolat-

1 Wooten, Kelly. n.d. “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” Duke University. https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps.

2 As quoted in Keller, Yvonne. 2005. “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?’: Les- bian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” American Quarterly 57 (2): 385.

!2 ed lesbians’ “only source of affirmation of sexual identity”3 even if these narrow, fictional representations of their lives were distorted and cruel.4 As Donna Allegra recalls, “No matter how em- barrassed and ashamed I felt when I went to the cash register to buy [pulps], it was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.”5 The pulps all fulfill similar expectations in their readers through parallel structures of form and characters. The “requisite tragic ending”6 is a defining feature, not just a pattern, of the genre. Because of censorship laws, a legal defense was needed to justify the books’ circulation and differentiate the genre from and elevate it above mere pornography, which overwhelmingly manifested in “moral” conclusions “to balance out the licentiousness of her actions”7 — punish- ments, accidents, suicides, murders, or redemption by marriage to a man — or as one young, queer-identified student put it, “the ‘go straight or die’ ending.”8 The genre reified lesbians’ low place in society by portraying “the general misery of a lesbian existence” even while offering some comfort or inclusion to lesbians around the country.9 Even more than the content, though, the genre is defined by scholars today by the books’ covers.10 Michael Denning, writing about dime novels, gives a “commercial definition” for these books within genre studies, in which a genre is defined by its status as a product within the marketplace. Scholars, then, can look at what publishers signify in their marketing decisions rather

3 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

4 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.e- du/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

5 Donna Allegra, as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 385.

6 “Passions Uncovered: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Pulps,” n.d., University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php.

7 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.e- du/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

8 Cheryl Cordingley, Interview with Julie Botnick, Los Angeles, CA, June 12, 2018.

9 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.e- du/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

10 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 393.

!3 than the words books contain.11 By this definition, the covers were “the most important” aspect of these books; “certainly it was to lesbians at the time.”12 The cover illustrations, sordid and sul- try tableaus of “‘butches’ and cowering negligee-clad femmes, of Greenwich Village street cor- ners and meaningful glances, and paranoid and lustful blurbs,”13 rarely even matched the plots of the novels. They were not-so-subtly coded with soapy images and words like “strange,” “odd,” and “shadows” in the titles or teasers.14 On a drugstore wall or a newsstand rack, the covers, not the content, drew in readers. As Lee Lynch writes, “their ludicrous and blatantly sensational cover copy were both my signals and my shame.”15 Pulps, by design and by function, were ephemeral. Published outside of mainstream channels, they were so cheaply made that they could be hidden, burned, left on a bus seat, or thrown in the trash with hardly a dent in one’s change purse. The stories are tame or even hilari- ously campy by today’s standards, but they were so threatening in their own time, they were rarely kept on a bookshelf. Once just a dime a pop, because of their ephemerality, pulps are highly valuable, collectible materials for private collectors and repositories today. There are collections of lesbian pulp novels at repositories around the country. The major collections are within academic special collections and lesbian community archives, with the two types of archives having often contrasting appraisal, acquisition, and access criteria, policies, and implications. Some of the more prominent collections will be discussed here as case studies to highlight specific appraisal issues, though this is by no means an exhaustive survey of all the major lesbian pulp collections. Most university repositories with lesbian pulp collections appraise and acquire these novels within broader collections of either human sexuality or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-

11 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396.

12 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396.

13 “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965,” n.d., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, http://beineck- e.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/02/23/lesbian-pulp-novels-1935-1965.

14 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.e- du/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

15 Lee Lynch as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396.

!4 gender (LGBT) Studies. At Cornell University, the Lesbian Popular Fiction Collection of around 100 novels is nested within their Human Sexuality Collection, which “seeks to preserve and make accessible primary sources that document historical shifts in the social construction of sexuality, with a focus on U.S. lesbian and gay history and the politics of pornography.”16 The Uni- versity of Saskatchewan’s collection is part of Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual Diversity, a project “to improve access to information on gender and sexual diversity available in the prov- ince’s libraries and archives.”17 Duke University’s collection is housed within the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and includes not just the original pulps but “several literary antecedents” and later reissues of pulps which offered “critical reappropriation and recontextualization of these works.”18 Mount Saint Vincent University’s collection is functionally restricted to scholars within the areas of Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, History, English, Sociology, and Psychology.19 At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the collecting area of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies focuses on pre-Stonewall documents of LGBT life and culture and local LGBT history, but with a “particular emphasis” on pulps.20 Community archives are eager to collect pulps as well. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn holds a large collection of pulps — “These days every variety of sexual activity, described in great detail, is available from lesbian writers. Lesbian pulp was one of the starting points for these publishing movements and influenced many lesbian writers and publishers. Les- bian survival literature is one of the cornerstones and most-examined portions of the Lesbian

16 “About Gay and Lesbian Popular Fiction,” n.d., Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collec- tions, https://rare.library.cornell.edu/collections/HSC/contents/books/popfiction.

17 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contac- t.php.

18 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.e- du/queerpulps/lesbianpulps.

19 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

20 “Special Collections Development Policy,” n.d., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, http:// uwm.edu/libraries/crm/collection-development-policy/special/.

!5 Herstory Archives”21 — as does the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive in West Hollywood: “We also treasure our collection of out-of-date Lesbian fiction that captured the hearts of so many Lesbians who relied on Lesbian fiction to give them assurance and validation of their love of women.”22 Though these repositories generally do not collect mass-market, published fiction, pulps were so essential to the continuity of the lesbian community in the mid-20th century that they are a high collecting priority, and are collected in duplicate. Regardless of the nature of the repository, New York University’s (NYU) Gay and Les- bian Pulp Fiction Collection is the only one to emphasize the content of the books and not their covers. The finding aid to the collection notes “the political issues explored by our writers” who “grapple with contemporary issues such as crime (including hate crimes), racism, homophobia and misogyny, fascism, as well as the personal/professional opportunities available to gays and lesbians in the second half of the 20th century.”23 Otherwise, with the unspoken assumption that the content is too low-brow for serious scholars, the repositories universally emphasize the rele- vance of the covers for design and media arts, pop culture, and commercial history students and scholars.24,25 If “Archival appraisal aims to make decision-making processes evident, not to document society,”26 these collections do their jobs; they evidence the process of deciding the cover design for commercial purposes and signaling to the consumer. This is evidence of a straightfor- ward, commercial transaction, devoid of affect.

21 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

22 “Lesbian Book Collection,” n.d., June Mazer Lesbian Archives, http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/ special-collections/lesbian-book-collection/.

23 “Guide to the Gay and Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection 1955-1988 MSS 116 MSS 116,” n.d., New York University, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/gaypulp/scopecontent.html.

24 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

25 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contac- t.php.

26 Angelika Menne-Haritz, “Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by Selecting Con- tent?” The American Archivist, 57, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 541.

!6 This emphasis on design, first, shapes scholars’ and the public’s expectations of the value of the books, second, justifies repositories’ decisions to restrict pulps, and finally, informs the appraisal decisions repositories make around digitization. Repositories themselves showcase and support scholarship on the cover designs. The University of Saskatchewan’s “Passions Uncov- ered,” for example, was a physical and now a digital exhibition of pulp paperback book covers.27 “Queer Covers: Lesbian Survival Literature” is one of Lesbian Herstory’s signature traveling exhibits, a pictorial history of the covers of pulps which plays on founder Joan Nestle’s term for them: “survival literature.”28 It is thus the study of design, and not textual content, of the books that repositories advertise to scholars, and what the public sees and expects to see of the materials. Thus, these pulps are available for the public to see but not to read, as they were first en- countered. At Mount Saint Vincent University, noting the fragility and scarcity of the pulps, the collection “is shelved in a locked case adjacent to the Reference area of the Library.”29 This iron- ically parallels the experience which initially drove some lesbians to pulps in their own time. As Judy Grahn remembers, “In 1961, when I was twenty-one, I went to a library in Washington, D.C., to read about homosexuals and Lesbians…The books on such a subject, I was told by in- dignant, terrified librarians unable to say aloud the word homosexual, were locked away…Only professors, doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers for the criminally insane could see them, check them out, hold them in their hands.”30 Pulps were so important to Grahn because they were touchable, out in the open, and available for her as a layperson, unlike the other materials in which she was represented. Now, as materials housed within special collections around the country, they are the books restricted to scholars with a stated research purpose rather than available

27 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contac- t.php.

28 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

29 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

30 Judy Grahn as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 402.

!7 to lesbians to discover and read. By emphasizing the covers over the texts, these restrictions can be easily justified and difficult to counter. And so, restrictions are placed on these items because of the delicate nature of the medium, but this access restriction stems directly from an appraisal decision. Pulps are so named for their medium: they were printed on wood-pulp paper, which becomes highly acidic and brittle within a short period of time, prompting important discussions about priorities around preservation and conservation decisions today. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has a collection of pulps that are so fragile, they are kept in closed plastic sleeves. Yet, they have digi- tized 25 of these books’ covers.31 Similarly, during reappraisal of materials, the Library of Con- gress microfilmed their entire pulp serials collection, almost 14,000 issues, because of the quick- ly deteriorating nature of the materials. However, the vibrance of the covers was not captured by the microfilming process, so they made the decision “to give new life to the lustrous, eye-catch- ing covers”32 through conservation, while handing the textual contents to the Preservation Re- formatting Division, a euphemistic label for the department which destroys the pulps’ textual contents during the microfilming process. They decided that the original covers were the only conservation priority. These reappraisal and selection decisions along the interdependent lifecy- cles of the digitization, exhibition, and preservation processes shows the single value these repositories ascribe to their pulps: the value of their covers’ designs. However, while covers signaled lesbians to the materials, the value of pulps in their own time was not in the covers alone, but in the texts. Pulps are not remembered for their covers, but for their content, as Lee Lynch puts it: “At last, lesbians! . . . I read every one of these mass-market paperbacks I could get my hands on. . . . I was driven, searching for my nourishment like a starveling, grabbing at any crumb that looked, tasted, or smelled digestible.33 Special collections’ emphasis on collecting pulps, particularly their covers, as part of larger fields of study fulfills

31 “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965,” n.d., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, http://beineck- e.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/02/23/lesbian-pulp-novels-1935-1965.

32 Erin Allen, “Saving Pulp Fiction,” Library of Congress Blog, September 5, 2013, blogs.loc.gov/loc/ 2013/09/saving-pulp-fiction/.

33 As quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 385.

!8 their mission of providing scholars with materials that, like the University of Wisconsin-Mil- waukee articulates, “hold long-term, historical research potential; possess unique physical characteristics, such as binding or printing; are seminal, original works in a relevant area of study; or are inherently rare or scarce.”34 Irreversible conservation decisions, for example, are made with the scholarly importance of the covers over the personal importance of the texts in mind. Though “archival appraisal prioritizes context rather than content,”35 there has been a cross-repository understanding that the context that matters is the commercial or visual context, and not the context of a woman’s relationship to the text. This emphasis on the covers veers dangerously closely to F. Gerald Ham’s warnings in 1975 about the whimsical nature of archival appraisal. While the texts of pulps are largely ignored or even laughed at today, the covers are in demand for study. Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on making sure there is complete, broad representation of marginalized groups in archives.36 In the 1980s, especially, there was a movement to actively collect rather than passively acquire the detritus of the ignored, with archivists urged to make plans to actively fill in gaps in the archival record. Manuscript collecting became more concerned with subject collecting over collecting the papers of just the most obvious or prominent in society in response to scholars like Ham and Howard Zinn who called on archivists to play a less complacent role in shaping the historical record. However, making appraisal decisions based on expected use in narrow fields of study, even fields of study historically marginalized, risks “leav[ing] the archivist too closely tied to the vogue of the academic marketplace.”37 Ham uses as an example a concur- rent increase he noticed in urban archives with the increase in historiography of the American city, which parallels the increase of LGBT collections in tandem with the rise of LGBT studies as a scholarly field. This, to Ham, was not a liberatory trajectory but a temporary corrective, which

34 “Special Collections Development Policy,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, http:// uwm.edu/libraries/crm/collection-development-policy/special/.

35 Anne J. Gilliland, “Archival Appraisal: Practising on Shifting Sands,” in Caroline Brown (ed.), Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice (London: Facet Publishing, 2014), 1.

36 Gilliland, “Archival Appraisal,” 1.

37 F. Gerald Ham, "The Archival Edge," The American Archivist, 38, no. 1 (1975): 8.

!9 relegates an archivist to be “at best nothing more than a weathervane moved by the changing winds of historiography.”38 NYU’s collection’s history is unique among the others, and most starkly echoes Ham’s cynical assessment. Their 66 linear foot collection was bought in one piece from Bolerium Books in San Francisco. As they self-describe, “Many of Bolerium’s specialties, such as gay studies and ethnic movements in the United States, have emerged from marginalization to rank among the most active arenas of academic research in recent years. We are virtually unique among book dealers in the depth of contemporary and ephemeral material that we offer from the formative stages of these movements.”39 Pulps were such a high priority to NYU that they outsourced appraisal, and trusted a known source of ephemera of social movements, Bolerium, to build their collection. Bolerium, as it notes itself, appraises materials based on their importance to current scholarly activity, a policy which leaves it open to direct influence by the “vogue” of academia. In this appraisal framework, there is a burden on these books to hold some sort of scholarly value for the broader field beyond the meaning of any given book for the woman who cherished it. The books, and not the experience of owning or reading them, comprise the current appraisal criterion of pulps. Fragmentation by medium is a problem in the archival landscape.40 We see across repositories an “unarchival”41 overlapping and duplication of efforts in collecting pulps, with other media related to the pulps or their owners missing from the historical record. That even personal collections of pulps are often accessioned with little other accompanying documentation also supports Ham’s fears of fragmentation of the historical record. In fact, pulps are often valued not just apart from but above the other forms of documentation which might accompany them. Acquired by York University’s Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections in 2005, the Ruth Dworin Collection of 800 books of “classic, forgotten and often-censored works

38 Ham, "The Archival Edge," 8.

39 “Bolerium Books,” n.d., Bolerium Books, https://www.bolerium.com/.

40 Terry Cook, “Documentation Strategy,” Archivaria, 34 (Summer 1992), 185.

41 Cook, “Documentation Strategy,” 187.

!10 of lesbian fiction from the early to late 20th century”42 includes 400 novels considered pulps. Dworin, a women’s activist and owner of Womanly Way Productions, a women’s music produc- tion company, began collecting pulps in the 1970s. Dworin also donated her personal papers to the repository, but these papers are held and described separately from the pulps. This is one of the few pulp collections which even references a personal collection alongside it, a rarity among the ways the pulps are treated across repositories. Appraising for only the pulps and appraising them within subject areas like human sexuality or LGBT Studies disaggregates the materials from the women who used them. Appraising within these scholarly fields says tacitly that these are the only webs these materials exist within, instead of the intricate webs of people’s full lives. This parallels what Sara White found in archives of disability, which are mainly housed within medical collections instead of with the personal papers of people living with disabilities. Through the theory of complex embodiment, she explains that since “disability” lives in interactions between people with and without im- pairments, disability is not a category, but an experience. Thus appraising for only, for example, disability activism records ignores disability as a form of human variation. In other words, it nar- rows people’s lives.43 Likewise, removing pulps from people’s bookshelves, or removing them from other documentation of their lives, makes pulps, and thus lesbianism in the 1950s and 1960s, a category, and not a full, holistic experience. An appraisal strategy which appraises only for one genre or one medium, lesbian pulp novels, necessarily sections off and differentiates the value of aspects of a person’s life. This fragmentation is also a product of the way pulp collections, other than NYU’s, are built. In requests for materials to add to collections, they ask for only the books; the documentation around the books is divorced from the value of the objects themselves. Most rely on gifts and donations. A few, like Dworin’s, came to their repositories as a large, single collection. Oth- ers have been acquired piece by piece. The University of Saskatchewan’s collection was acquired

42 “Ruth Dworin Collection,” n.d., York University Libraries Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collec- tions Online Exhibits, http://archives.library.yorku.ca/exhibits/show/speccoll_rdc/about.

43 Sara White, “Crippling the Archives: Notions of Disability in Appraisal and Arrangement and Descrip- tion,” The American Archivist, 77 (2012): 117.

11! entirely locally “from generous readers and/or collectors.” To further develop the collection, they tell their supporters, “If you have such material in need of a permanent home please contact the University Library about possible donations.”44 The rhetoric here is around ephemerality and its counterpart, permanence through collection. There is no acknowledgment of the community of origin or the community for which the items had meaning. This collection development method is how Herstory and the Mazer build their collections as well, though they frame their policies in a radically different way. There is an assumption of Joel Wurl’s concept of ethnicity as provenance.45 Even if lesbians were not the original, sole audience for the novels, they were the demographic for which the pulps had the most meaning, and are the presumed audience of the websites of Herstory and the Mazer. For those repositories, any item accessioned has an even greater meaning because it was kept by the population reflect- ed in and served by the archive. The overarching appraisal criterion at these archives is a record’s congruity with a lesbian. The very process of accession they describe parallels the lifecycle of pulps, which “were cherished and passed from woman to woman in the underground community.”46 Herstory “would be happy to receive contributions of your pulps when you are through with them…pass it on”47 and the Mazer “encourages all lesbians to deposit the everyday mementos of your lives so that others can discover them in the future.”48 For these repositories, archives as keepers of collective memory is not a metaphor. They transfer information and sus- tain memories from generation to generation, so “archives can be seen as valuable means of ex-

44 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contac- t.php.

45 See Joel Wurl, “Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Im- migrant Experience,” 2005, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/45926.

46 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

47 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

48 “Lesbian Book Collection,” n.d., June Mazer Lesbian Archives, http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/ special-collections/lesbian-book-collection/.

!12 tending the temporal and spatial range of human communication.”49 In this way, these archives are displaying more of a continuum understanding of the pulps as records. The continuum model differs from traditional archival theory by stating that records are in a constant state of becoming, figuring and refiguring, dynamic and contextual.50 Even without accompanying records, this acknowledgment that bringing these materials into the archive can mimic the act of acquiring them in the first place centers the real-life experience of handling, cherishing, and passing along these books. Pulps are not records in a business sense, but in the broader societal notion of an archive, of documentation generated by a community for a community. They are records of a lesbian identity forged in homophobia. If appraisal is “the act of judging the primary and secondary value of records and establishing the length of time during which they retain this value, within a context that respects the essential link between a given institution (or person) and the records they created in the course of their activities,”51 collecting pulps as a genre ascribes a new value to these records that is not reflective of their original value. Certainly, these books have secondary value as defined by Theodore Schellenberg in the 1960s: they are historical in the informational sense, in that they give the “who, what, where,” but they are actually missing the evidential proof, that is, the “why and how.” This is because the “why and how” here is affective; it cannot be found in the object itself, but in documentation of the experience of interacting with it. The value of pulp collections is in their vastness. These collections have hundreds or thousands of titles, which allows scholars to discover trends and patterns. However, the personal stories are lost in the vastness due to appraisal decisions around what counts as valuable historical records. The personal stories are people’s relationships to the objects and not the objects themselves, but documentation of these relationships does not have the same modern monetary, scholarly, or cultural value. The symbolic value of these unreadable collections is lost over time

49 Kenneth E. Foote, “To Remember and to Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture,” The American Ar- chivist 53 (Summer 1990), 379

50 Joanne Evans, Sue McKemmish and Greg Rolan, "Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeep- ing in the Continuum," Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 1, no. 2 (2017),5-6.

51 Carol Couture, "Archival Appraisal: A Status Report," Archivaria, 59 (2005), 84.

!13 with only the covers imbued with value, as evidenced by reappraisal decisions resulting in digitization and exhibition selection. The original value of representational belonging is reduced to a literal, two-dimensional, image-based definition. Without accompanying documentation of their importance in their own time, this meaning, what that they are records of, is lost. Thus, I propose affect as a criterion for more equitable appraisal. Not accounting for affect decontextualizes documents, but none of the dominant appraisal paradigms accounts for affect. Collecting policies generally focus on functions and sub- jects, and not on the affect of the materials. These are not mutually exclusive by definition. There is nothing to say that the “prioritization criteria” of a collecting policy could not be “affect,” but appraisal as a modern methodology keeps them functionally separate. For example, in doing a collection analysis, the emphasis is on quantitative characteristics that can be enumerated, including categorizing all collections into subject areas, so repositories can evaluate where collections are shallow in priority collecting areas. There is a necessary standardization of terminology and subject areas so appraisal can be a (potentially) cross-repository, or at least an internal but atemporal, effort.52 Appraisal is subjective, value-based, and should change as societal values change. There is by definition no clean, enumerative survey one could do for affect which would stand on its own throughout time. Appraising for affective value would do better justice to the women of the past who relied on these books for survival. An archivist crafting a holistic and equitable historical record has the responsibility to appraise, to the best of her abilities, both the object holding symbolic value and the documentation of the experience which imbues it with that value. Otherwise, these materials will be reduced to records of themselves instead of records of the complex webs of relationships in which they were created and used. Pulps should be appraised as highly valuable items. As Keller reiterates, “The mid-twentieth century was a particularly homophobic time, and the pulps were undoubtedly poisonous as well as nourishing. But their excision from history and literature, a disavowal of the power of a homophobic yet necessary food, is surely problematic for lesbian/

52 See Judith E. Endelman, “Looking Backward to Plan for the Future: Collection Analysis for Man- uscript Repositories,” The American Archivist 50 (Summer 1987): 340-353.

!14 gay/queer scholars.”53 Contextualizing them, however, means actively appraising for records of their existence in people’s lives, and not simply the weight of the pulps on the shelf.

References “About Gay and Lesbian Popular Fiction.” n.d. Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collections. https://rare.library.cornell.edu/collections/HSC/contents/books/popfiction. Allen, Erin. 2013. “Saving Pulp Fiction.” Library of Congress Blog. September 5, 2013. // blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/09/saving-pulp-fiction/. “Bolerium Books.” n.d. Bolerium Books. https://www.bolerium.com/. Cook, Terry. 1992. “Documentation Strategy.” Archivaria, 34: 181-191. Cordingley, Cheryl. Interviewed by Julie Botnick. Los Angeles, CA, June 11, 2018. Endelman, Judith E. 1987. “Looking Backward to Plan for the Future: Collection Analysis for Manuscript Repositories.” The American Archivist 50: 340-353. Evans, Joanne, Sue McKemmish and Greg Rolan. 2017. “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1 (2): 1-38. “Exhibits.” n.d. The Lesbian Herstory Archives. http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer. Foote, Kenneth E. 1990. “To Remember and to Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture.” The American Archivist 53: 378-392. Gilliland, Anne J.“Archival Appraisal: Practising on Shifting Sands.” In Caroline Brown (ed.), Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice. London: Facet Publishing, 2014. “Guide to the Gay and Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection 1955-1988 MSS 116 MSS 116.” n.d. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/gaypulp/ scopecontent.html. Ham, F. Gerald. 1975. “The Archival Edge.” The American Archivist 38 (1): 5-13. “Human Sexuality Collection.” n.d. Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collections. https:// rare.library.cornell.edu/HSC.

53 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 386-387.

!15 Keller, Yvonne. 2005. “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?’: Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” American Quarterly 57 (2): 385– 410. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2005.0028. “Lesbian Book Collection.” n.d. June Mazer Lesbian Archives. http:// www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/special-collections/lesbian-book-collection/. “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection.” n.d. Mount Saint Vincent University. http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx. “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965.” n.d. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. http:// beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/02/23/lesbian- pulp-novels-1935-1965. Menne-Haritz, Angelika. 1994. “Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by Selecting Content?” The American Archivist 57 (3): 528-542. “Passions Uncovered: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Pulps.” n.d. University of Saskatchewan Library. https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php. “Ruth Dworin Collection.” n.d. York University Libraries Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections Online Exhibits. http://archives.library.yorku.ca/exhibits/show/speccoll_rdc/ about. “Special Collections.” n.d. June Mazer Lesbian Archives. http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/ special-collections/. “Special Collections Development Policy.” n.d. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. http://uwm.edu/libraries/crm/collection-development-policy/special/. White, Sara. 2012. “Crippling the Archives: Notions of Disability in Appraisal and Arrangement and Description.” The American Archivist 77: 109-121. Wooten, Kelly. n.d. “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” Accessed https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps. Wurl, Joel. 2005. “Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Immigrant Experience.” 2005. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/45926.

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