Part of the diasporic nature of literary papers arises from the inescapably public aspect of literary production and in particular the process of publication. The entirety of an author's archive of correspondence can never possibly be located in a single place because of the necessary involvement of multiple hands in the pro-duction of texts and the formation of literary lives. Inevitably, debates over the location of individual authors’ papers have focused mainly on the geographical dispersal of discrete collections of material. But manuscripts, letters, and documents of one sort or another written by authors (or relating to them) will always be found within larger archives, including business archives such as those of the book trade. The preservation of authors’ papers in publishers’ archives (the main focus of this essay) has multiple and conflicting implications for the various stakeholders: the creators, owners, preservers, and users of literary papers. Issues of ownership and commercial policy, copyright, privacy, and freedom of access mean that publishers’ archives provoke different sorts of responses to the core questions embraced by this volume.

For authors, the dispersal of correspondence chiefly— but rarely solely— about the business of literature involves a ceding of ownership (if not of copyright) in private acts of communication. Publishers’ archives can reveal minute particulars of the private negotiations between authors and publishers/ editors. They can also reveal the private deliberations within a publishing house between individual publishers and editors, as well as negotiations with outside parties such as literary agents and booksellers. The availability of such material in libraries and universities makes these private negotiations public, placing a special responsibility upon the owners of collections and the professional archivists who act as custodians. It also impacts upon the users of collections. Publishers’ archives can be a rich resource for literary scholarship, but they can also be frustrating to researchers who encounter a situation where freedom of access and expression is controlled by creators and preservers keen to protect their interests— or, in the case of archivists, their professional standards.

At the beginning of Arthur Conan Doyle's story of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, Dr Watson is found seated at the fire ‘deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories’. A storm is outside, and as he reads, the Doctor feels ‘the howl of the gale … blend with the text’ and ‘the splash of the rain … lengthen out into the long swash of the literary sea waves’. William Clark Russell (1844–1911) was the greatest late Victorian nautical novelist. Author of over forty full-length sea stories published between 1875 and 1905, his stirring ship adventures and poetic sea descriptions were widely admired by his contemporaries. To Edwin Arnold he was ‘the prose Homer of the great ocean’ and to Swinburne ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead’. King George V was another passionate devotee and many other contemporaries, including Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith, read and admired his works. His reputation spread internationally. In America, where he enjoyed an even greater popularity than in his home country, he was seen as a rival to James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. His stories were also translated into several European languages, including Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish and French (oddly, in view of his attitude towards Britain's persistent naval enemy). When Joseph Conrad began his literary career in the 1890s it was Russell who was instantly identified as his progenitor as a writer of sea stories.