Exploring authors’ papers at the Alexander Turnbull Library

Speakers

Joan McCracken and Seán McMahon

Mihi and acknowledgments

Joan McCracken: Nau mai, haere mai, and a warm welcome to the July edition of Connecting to Collections Online. Ko Joan McCracken ahau. I'm with the Alexander Turnbull Library Outreach Services Team, and I'm delighted you've joined us today to learn more about authors' papers in the Turnbull Collections, with my colleague Sean McMahon.

To open our talk today, we have as our whakatauaki a verse from the National Library's waiata “Kōkiri kōkiri kōkiri” by our Waikato-Tainui colleague, Bella Tarawhiti.

Haere mai e te iwi
Kia piri tāua
Kia kite atu ai
Ngā kupu whakairi e.

Welcome oh people
Let us work together
To search the collections
They are a wealth of knowledge.

And now, it's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Sean McMahon, curator of manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library. Welcome, Sean.

Introduction

Seán McMahon: Sorry, that didn't unmute. So I'll just go back and restart that. So thank you, Joan. Kia ora koutou katoa, welcome, everybody, for the second time. In the next 45 minutes, I will be giving an overview of some of the authors' papers held in the manuscripts collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

This overview will be through the lens of the new authors' papers research guide, which went live yesterday on the National Library website. Thank you to Jay Buzenberg and Mary Hay for getting this guide up in time for this presentation. I will focus on two collections I have been researching lately, the Iris Wilkinson and Philip Mann papers.

There will be enough time at the end of this presentation for any questions. The Turnbull Library was founded on the gift from Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, who, on his death in 1918, bequeathed his magnificent collection of 55,000 published volumes, maps, manuscripts, and artworks to the nation.

He had built up a comprehensive collection, relating to New Zealand and the Pacific, as well as an extensive holding of rare books and publications, relating to non-New Zealand authors. This included the unpublished works by noted 19th-century authors and novelists, as well as other manuscripts. And this marked the beginning of the literary papers that are currently held by the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Our present-day collection includes English and international writers, as well as collections by New Zealand, Māori, and Pacific writers.

I could have titled my presentation, Exploring Authors' Papers-- I have titled my presentation, Exploring Authors' Papers, but I could have called it Exploring Writers' Papers or even Exploring Literary Papers.

I could be tying myself up in knots here. But in my research guide, I wanted to make a distinction between authors and general writers. A lot of research has already been conducted on the various aspects of general writing practice and on the different types of writers.

This covers authors, but also covers writers of colonial diaries, shipboard logs, women's letters, soldiers journals, Pacific journals, children's writing, memoirs, and so forth. My focus in this guide is on published writers. Literary papers and the word literature itself can be seen as prestigious terms, favouring one form of writing over another.

There are many definitions and debates. There may be different definitions and debates-- just have to scroll down here-- about what is considered literature. One definition is that literature represents the ascetic excellence of a writer's work that is considered to be of superior or lasting artistic merit.

Literature can also be seen as criticizing and affirming cultural values. In the guide, I wish to encompass, both literary works and other works that may be deemed not so literary. Authors works by this definition, include both fiction and non-fiction material.

Fiction writers include authors working as novelists, short story writers, poets, dramatists, lyricists, autobiographers, and children's writers. This genre also includes writers working in the fields of popular fiction, romance, and erotic fiction. Non-fiction writers include the works of historians, journalists, bibliographers, biographers, and sports writers.

Also in the non-fiction section are works on literary criticism and scholarship, leisure activities, and hobbies. The manuscripts collection is nearing 14 kilometers of analog papers, which includes over 24,000 bound volumes and an ever-increasing number of electronic files. Hidden deep within these stacks can be found in the works of authors.

Author's papers within the manuscripts collection can be defined as drafts, annotated copies, proofs, and notes, which are generated in the creation of an author's new work, plus all the surrounding papers and archives which accompany these works and the author's writing life.

Examples of authors papers include literary drafts, research notes, diaries, notebooks, personal and professional correspondence, photographs, newspaper articles, audio-visual material, and printed items. Many of the author's papers are voluminous and include both the writer's manuscripts and their personal and family papers.

However, there are collections that may only comprise a single written work. Then, there are other collections, where the author is included on the catalog because they have corresponded with another writer or have appeared as a subject in a letter, a photograph or an oral history.

And it must also be noted that a writer's papers may be split across multiple repositories within Aotearoa and, sometimes, internationally as well. The example here on the screen is a first draft of the poem Fragments by Hone Tuwhare, written in 1999.

Fragments for Richard, first version. I should sleep-- the first version, "I should leave dreams settle in their true role as guardians of sleep. Nightmares, on the other hand, a joyless lockups of screams that are internal and silent. Sleepwalkers, meanwhile, are emotionally bereft of either, merely hoping to hitch a ride to a lucky star."

Authors also appear in the collections of business records, relating to publishers, bookshops, literary agents, as well as an organisations of writers' groups and book societies. AH & AW Reed was founded in 1923 in Dunedin as a religious publisher, later expanding to become a general publishing firm in Wellington.

And what we have here on screen is a piece of ephemera from one of their collections. The bookshop depicted here is the famous Wellington bookshop, Parsons, which opened in 1948 and was sadly closed down in 2014. As you can see from the caption on the screen, the cafe was designed by Ernst Plischke, famous architect working New Zealand during the 1940s, '50s, '60s.

Authors' papers research guide

The Author's Guide is located under the research guides section of the National Library website. The guide is aimed at anyone wishing to research author's papers, the history of writing in Aotearoa and New Zealand literature in general. I started writing this guide after conducting my own research into the holdings of authors in the manuscripts collection.

I hope the guide is easy to follow, but did go down a rabbit hole myself for my own research and ended up trying to know what I don't know. This guide is one part of my findings on an ongoing journey into the works of authors. I won't go through all the sections of the guide here, but this is the general index to the content covered.

The purpose of this guide is to connect you with collections relating to authors of your interest. This may be with a singular focus on studying someone, like Katherine Mansfield, for example, or it may be a broader interest, like studying children's literature.

You may be wishing to analyze one specific piece of manuscript text for comparison purposes, or you may be working on a biography, where you are delving into the complete life of your subject. As mentioned earlier, Alexander Turnbull himself began the practice of collecting authors' papers for the Turnbull Library.

Turnbull would purchase literary manuscripts through his dealers, including Bernard Quaritch and Maggs brothers in London. Once the library was established, successive chief librarians and manuscript curators continued the practice of acquiring authors' papers by donation and purchase.

Among the manuscripts purchased by Turnbull include works by the English writers, George Gissing and Algernon Swinburne. The first major international purchase by the Library was in 1957, when the Library purchased a tranche of Katherine Mansfield's literary papers from her husband, John Middleton Murry.

The image here depicts Glen Barclay, Ian Gordon, and Clyde Taylor, poring over the new acquisition. Throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, American universities were very active in purchasing literary papers from writers from around the world. The response from these countries to-- the response of these countries to respond to the threat of their own archives going offshore was very slow.

The English poet and Hull University Librarian Philip Larkin was the one major figure in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, who set up trying to rectify this challenge to the literary holdings of the UK repositories. It took another 20 years for British libraries to develop active purchasing budgets for the literary papers of their own countries.

And this was followed by other countries, like New Zealand and Australia and the other colonial countries, who were also as it were under attack from American universities. The Turnbull Library, the next major acquisition was the Denis Glover papers acquired in 1969 and then Frank Sargeson's papers which were taken in between 1970 and 1982.

From the 1980s, there was an influx of writers papers acquired, including collections by Allen Curnow, ARD Fariburn, Maurice Duggan, Maurice Gee, Maurice Shadbolt, Dr. Michael King. You'll see a pattern developing here-- famous middle-class white male authors.

This was very much the collecting trend worldwide during the 19th and 20th centuries. New Zealand, of course, had Mansfield, and latterly, there has been a much more concerted effort to collect the papers of woman writers. Our repository includes collections from Iris Wilkinson, Ngaio Marsh, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Dame Fiona Kidman, Lauris Edmond, Eileen Duggan, Joy Cowley, Dr. Judith Binney, Keri Hulme, spiral collectors, and the women's gallery.

The Library is less well represented in our holdings for the unpublished works by Māori and Pasifika writers. We do hold some literary papers from Māori writers, like on Hone Tuwhare, Rowley Habib, and Witi Ihimaera. For Pasifika writers, we hold collections by Albert Wendt and Kauraka Kauraka.

Looking back across time, there is certainly a link between which writers were being published, who controlled the wheels of the publishing industry, who were the leading literary critics, and which writers, papers found their way into libraries and archives. This is too big a topic to cover in this presentation, but it is something I am particularly interested in exploring further in the New Zealand context.

The Turnbull's proactive collecting policies

Currently, the Turnbull Library has been reviewing its collecting policies in an effort to be more proactive in the collections you bring into the library. There are obviously gaps and silences in our collections, including in the works of the authors we already hold.

We are endeavouring to be more diverse in our collecting practices and the types of collections we bring in, as we try and be more representative of the communities that make up Aotearoa. This will include the continued collection of Māori and Pacific writers, but also Asian writers and writers from other ethnic and migrant groups, collections from women writers.

And the same is true for writers across genders, trans, and LGBTQIA-plus communities. By definition, the term literary almost automatically marginalises all those other writers who may be classified as non-literary writers. This, too, provides a challenge for manuscript curators, as traditionally, it has been only the works of literary authors that we have collected.

So now, I might just want to move on to the researching. And this is in the guide. So if you get lost in the next bit of this paper, don't worry, because you can always go online and get a much larger definition of this. The best place to start your research is often with secondary sources.

A general research topic across different writing genres may be started by consulting a book, like Terry Sturm's excellent 'The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English'. This book provides a wonderful overview of writing in Aotearoa up until 1991. From it, you will obtain the names of authors you may wish to take a specific interest in.

The online dictionary of New Zealand biography on the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand website and the Read New Zealand website writers' files both provide useful biographical information as well. This initial search may lead you to the writer's published works and their biographies, autobiographies, and scholarly works that are often used as primary resources.

By checking the citations and index of the primary sources of the secondary sources, you may find references to unpublished collections and manuscripts, some which will be held by the Alexander Turnbull Library. Primary sources for authors at the Turnbull generally include the literary and personal papers, but also can include photographs, oral histories, ephemera cartoons, and many other formats.

It is best to cast your net wide when looking to catch original materials.

Searching for writers' papers

So on Tiaki, which is our unpublished database. So I'll go back a step. Actually, the best place to start your research is on the home page of the National Library website.

As depicted here on the screen, an inquiry here will search across both the published and unpublished catalogues, as well as searching the website itself. So this will give you the widest search possible, the widest net, and it is a good starting point. From the dropdown box, you can select to search only the National Library catalogue.

And in this catalogue, you'll be searching the published collections of authors. So this is generally when you want to see how many works an author has published. The library holds large collections of unpublished primary source materials as well.

These are searchable and requestable through the Library's unpublished catalogue, Tiaki. The catalogue uses keyword searching and specific thesauri. Thesauri searches can be conducted on keywords, names, places, subjects, material types, and iwi hapu.

On the screen, you can see two examples of searching. The one on my left and your right is the general keyword search, and the one on my right, which is your left, is the names database. By inserting an author in the name box, the Tiaki database will retrieve every catalogue record that has that name attached to it.

The return list can be sorted further by the sort function. Please be aware that this function interrogates all curatorial formats and not just the manuscripts collections, and so it will return results for photographs, et cetera, that have been attached to the catalogue entry.

Also, the items displayed will vary from a single item to a complete collection group. It is up to the researchers to determine the relevance of the reference matches to their search, and patience is often required when large numbers of results are displayed.

A name search on Robin Hyde, for example, will show the preferred search term for her original name, Iris Wilkinson. This name entry includes a brief biography and her birth and death dates, so you can see here on the screen. Sadly, Robin Hyde died when she was just 33 years of age.

The search I have conducted here has returned 127 matches, and we can see here at the beginning of each entry in square brackets, this is the relationship between the search and the returned item. Creator is the term the library uses to indicate a main collection, which is where author's substantial work that they have created themself.

Subject generally refers to the author being mentioned in another person's work, a piece of correspondence or photograph. And this is not necessarily works they have created themselves. By clicking the link, the researcher is then connected to the individual catalogue record.

It is worth noting at this point that for authors, there is usually more than a single collection. So if a researcher came into the reading room and said, I wish to see the Robin Hyde collection, it is actually a search across many disparate collections, some more substantial others, some created by her, but others where she is only the subject of the work itself.

So by doing a search, like we have on the screen here, that gives you the ballpark for what we have. And then, it's a matter of interrogating this to see what the actual collection holds. Moving on to subject search. This is another excellent search.

If you are not researching a single author, but are conducting a more general or topic search, subject searching can be helpful. Thus, by inserting a subject term in the search box, Tiaki retrieves all linked catalogue records to your search term.

The word authors is the preferred search term here. It can return 63 subject headings. The term riders can also be used, but this is not the preferred term for authors and will return fewer results. So this can be a bit of a catch-22, where if you put in the term writers, you think it's going to cover authors, but that's not necessarily because they're not linked like that.

So you could conduct two separate searches, one for writers, and another one for authors. And then you will get all the catalogue records that have those terms attached to them. It's not internet searching, so it's very -- you need to be quite specific.

By clicking into the single catalogue heading, authors, this will, return over a thousand record items to consult. It will also reveal broader search terms, like artists, and narrower search terms, like dramatists. Literature is another popular search term to use when looking for different types of writing genres.

Some literature headings can be very specific, like country life and literature, for example. This search only reveals two collections. When searching like this, the broader the search term, the more likely you are to get results. So you can see on the screen, we've got Māori authors, multiple authors, Scottish authors. So these are all separate headings, which are linked to a catalogue record.

Occasionally, there'll be more than one heading applied to a catalogue record. But sometimes, not, so you can follow in first with one of these quite specific terms and then broaden out to Authors, New Zealand. The keyword search is what I recommend is your last search.

It is very useful when you wish to search across all the collections as widely as possible. This includes information across all fields and will retrieve the greatest number of results. You are able to use the quotation marks to help your search.

A search term on authors under a keyword search returns over 3,000 linked items. The total number of catalogued records being searched here is over 940,000-- 941. One's got on since yesterday, I can see. So this is a very wide search.

So it depends on just how thorough you want to be with your searching, but it is always a good place to go back to. And you can put name searches in here as well. So like Robin Hyde, for example, you could put in here.

And if Robin Hyde wasn't linked under subject or name to a record, you would pick it up under keyword. It is also important to remember that not every item or collection has been fully catalogued to incorporate all the authority terms that are available in the Tiaki catalogue. This is why a keyword search is so important.

Database searches are not as fluid as internet searches, so it pays to remember to be quite lateral when you're searching, if you have a broad topic or want to be really convinced that you have found all the items you want to find. By using name subject and keyword searching, I think you will find most of what we hold, particularly catalogue records that have been created in the past 20 years.

The arrangement and description team does a wonderful job of cataloguing records in Tiaki, and they follow very high standards in how thesaurus rules are applied and how overall catalogue records are created. My own research is a deep dive into our author holdings, and such a research shows up interesting results.

In this slide, we have a literary draft with the working title, The Coming Man, by the English novelist, George Gissing. This was a name I referred to earlier, where Turnbull had purchased this original draft in 1915 for 75 pounds. This older record was created off of a catalogue card, and it includes scant details.

There are no name or subject entries attached to the record. There is no scope note, describing what this actually is or what content is involved. Nowhere are the words author or writer in the record. If you are searching under Gissing in the keyword search, then you would find this record or, possibly, the draft title, if you knew it.

Otherwise, no other search will locate this manuscript. I will be updating this record, so it is easier to locate for researchers in the future. But it's an example to point out, just how tricky it can be to identify all the collections in the library. And this is why I recommend using multiple search categories.

The arrangement and description team does go back and do retro cataloging. But because of the vast size of the collection, it's a very long process, and it's prioritised in regard to what we consider to be high-use collections.

Case study - Robin Hyde

So moving on now for a couple of case studies.

Iris Wilkinson was born in Cape Town, South Africa, then came to Wellington with her family. The family lived in Newtown, Melrose, Behrampur, and Northland. She attended Berhampore Primary School and Wellington Girls College. She also studied at Victoria University while training to be a journalist with the Dominion Newspaper in Wellington.

She also covered the Parliamentary Press Gallery as part of her work as a journalist. Over her short career, she worked on various newspapers around New Zealand. In 1925, Wilkinson adopted the name Robin Hyde as a pseudonym after the death of her son with the same name.

As a writer, she published 10 books between 1929 and 1939, together with articles, poetry and prose. In 1929, her first volume of poetry, The Desolate Star, was published. She journeyed on to China and Hong Kong, where she received a pass to visit the war zone and continued to write both journalism and non-fiction work.

I traveled on to England in 1938. Her lifelong ill health and overwork contributed to her suicide in Kensington, England in 1939. She was survived by her son, Derek Arden Challis. Derek died, sadly, in 2021. Hyde's main collection of literary papers includes over 260 items and are located within her son's collection Derek Challis, papers relating to Robin Hyde.

Challis has also deposited a collection of photographs of his mother with a Library. Robin Hyde is one of New Zealand's greatest writers, and the Library is very fortunate to hold her papers here in Wellington. I would like to use this collection to highlight some unique points about manuscript collecting in general.

Firstly, Iris Wilkinson is more commonly known as Robin Hyde. It is not uncommon for writers to use a pseudonym. So when searching the holdings of archives and libraries, there is also-- it is always good to use both names in your keyword search in case they haven't been indexed.

A second point is around the collection title. At the Turnbull, we catalogue collections by provenance. More often than not, a collection is deposited by the writer themselves or from their family or trust, and the collection is in their names as the original creator of the papers.

However, in this example, Hyde's son Derek, had his mother's papers, together with his own memoirs and also the papers of the poet Gloria Rawlinson. Rather than split the collection up, we have kept all these papers together. Hence, they are catalogued under Derek Challis' name.

This is not the most obvious place to look, but a name search under Iris Wilkinson links to this collection. The same is true with the main collection of Katherine Mansfield papers. Rather than being catalogued under her own name, they are under the heading of her husband John Middleton Murry, and this is for the-- and this is because of the same type of provenance reasons.

Thirdly, author's papers are held in many libraries and repositories across Aotearoa. It is not unusual for many repositories to hold papers of an individual author. And if you are conducting major research into a particular author, it is always worth researching widely in the sector.

Many libraries have online catalogues to help you with your research. Some even have digital collections online, which can be accessed remotely. In the example here on the screen, this is showing the Hyde papers held at the special collections library at the University of Auckland, which has two collections relating to Hyde that encompass both her poetry and some of her draft novels.

It is very important-- it is a very important collection for Hyde's researchers to research and should be consulted in conjunction with the Turnbull Library's collection. Further complicating matters for researchers is that some related collections may be held in overseas libraries.

This is the case with Mansfield, as she has a major collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Other collections of author's papers can be housed in religious archives, family history centers, school archives, galleries, museums, government, and council archives.

Many New Zealand author's collections are held privately by individual collectors or by an author's family or trust. And certainly, authors who are conducting biographies tend to search right across these agencies and, certainly, with the family. Because, often, families have material at home, which they haven't deposited.

Robin Hyde's collections are a combined entry between ourselves in Auckland Uni. And number 42 is the number on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The Robin Hyde literary and personal papers are held jointly by the two libraries, and they illustrate many facets of Hyde's short, but fierce life, reflected in the manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence and photograph albums.

Robin Hyde had a great mind which was desperately using words in an attempt to process the chaos unfolding around her throughout her own battle with mental illness, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II. In her 33 years, Hyde lived constantly as a user of words, a maker of words, and above all, a fighter with words.

This ethos is omnipresent throughout these collections of Hyde's work, the scope and depth, which is, arguably, yet to be emulated. The papers are a rich literary and historical resource for interested academics and students and have been a source of inspiration for contemporary film makers, playwrights, writers, and artists.

And in the image above, which is held by the temple, is a self portrait by Robin Hyde, so it shows she was quite a formidable artist as well.

Case study - Phillip Mann

Moving on to a second case study. I have been working on Phillip Mann's papers recently. Phil, sadly, died last year.

In this image of two dapper gentlemen. We have Phil in the turtleneck with the beard and Vincent O'Sullivan with the long hair and the big black coat. Taken in 1983, this was a promotional image for Vincent's play, Shuriken, which was directed by Phil and premiered at Downstage Theater in 1983 as well.

I believe this photograph was taken on the location of the original Japanese prisoner of war camp in Featherston, which was the subject of Vincent's play. Phil was a well-known man of theater, having worked as an actor, director, playwright, and theater academic. He was the founding lecturer in drama studies at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1970, and became artistic director of Downstage Theater from 1985 to 1986.

He was an inspiration to his students, and many notable actors and writers have been through his courses, including Tim Balme, Michael Galvin, Jonathan Hendry, Carol Smith, David Gary, Gary Henderson, and Taika Waititi. Concurrently with Phil's theatre profession was his writing career, a writer of radio plays short stories, and scripts.

Phil was also a science fiction writer and a major one, though, not particularly well known within New Zealand. He published 11 novels beginning with The Eye of the Queen in 1982 and ending with Chevalier and Gawayn, which was published only last year.

Internationally Phil is regarded as a major science fiction writer and was primarily published by Gollancz in London. Gollancz is a powerhouse publisher of science fiction and included among its authors are George Orwell, Arthur C. Clark, and Terry Pratchett.

The publisher's brilliant blurb from one of the editions of The Eye of the Queen commented, Marcus Thorndike, the legendary contact linguist, willingly came out of retirement to meet the Pe-Ellians when they asked for him, and he willingly returned to Pe-Ellia at their request. He was a veteran of contacts with alien species, but they had always been technologically inferior to Earth. The Pe-Ellians were different-- humanoid, but twice the height of humans and sexless. They clearly came from a very advanced civilization, a civilization that understood the power of thought.

And this was typical of Phil's novels, Phil was an intellectual powerhouse. So within all of his novels, this analysis and thinking is always prevalent. Many of Phil's novels have been published in foreign languages, particularly German.

He has made the following comment on his own science fiction writing. Thinking about alien consciousness helps clarify my own thinking about Earth and the way we conduct ourselves. Thus, I think my books as being about us, no matter how outlandish the scenario.

Phil's novels cover environmental, political, moral, and social themes and are still very contemporary today.

This image depicts corrected proofs and one of Phil's favourite novels, Wulfsyarn, a mosaic. His collection comprises his literary papers which include many drafts of the stories, plays, and novels.

There are series relating to some of his drama productions, workshops, and lectures. Further material includes literary and personal correspondence. Newer collections, like this one, sometimes incorporate material that has been created electronically.

This can be digital material housed on old floppy disks or CD-ROMs. But increasingly, it is electronic files on hard drives in email format, stored in the cloud, and/or social media content. An early adopter of technology, much of Phil's writing was written on the first generation of personal computers, including on Macs.

The Library's digital archivists have been busy migrating files from disks and drives onto our electronic servers, so this material can be made available to researchers in our reading rooms. Not all this work is available yet, but it is ongoing and should be up by the middle of the year.

Increasingly, writers have their own websites or blogs. Phil was no exception. The Library harvests New Zealand websites and various examples of Phil's WordPress website have been collected by the Library's web team. As the Library continues to collect authors' works, we expect there to be many more hybrid collections of analogue and digital material.

Eventually, we could expect to be completely digital, as we-- eventually, we would expect writer's collections to be completely digital, as all content will inevitably be created electronically , including text, image, audio, and visual files.

Major literary collections at the Library

This list of 35 of our major literary collections, but there are very many-- there are many more than this, and this was all that I could get on the page from the top of my head.

Some like Katherine Mansfield and Sam Hunt are well-known throughout New Zealand. Some like David Ballantyne and Jean Watson may only be known to a circle of readers and writers. There are yet other collections of not so well-known authors and some writers who have completely disappeared into the past.

The major collections for some authors, like Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, Hone Tūwhare and James K. Baxter are held in other repositories. But we still do hold smaller collections relating to these writers. In this way, our collections can complement authors' papers held by other libraries.

The authors highlighted on the previous slide would very much fall into the category of literary writers, in part, literary writers supported by their body of work and their literary credentials which encompass their teaching placements, literary awards, Creative New Zealand funding, writers and residencies, peer reviews, et cetera.

Oftentimes the literary focus has been on novelists, short story writers, poets, and playwrights. Other genres of writing that may not have fallen under this category include science fiction writing, children's writing, popular fiction, and nonfiction writing. Philip Mann is one example we have seen as an example as a science fiction writer.

The manuscripts collection does hold material relating to children's writers, including Avis Acres of The Hutu and Kawa fame, Dorothy Butler, Margaret Mahy, and Joy Cowley, depicted here in this image. There are many writers of popular fiction in the collection. Many are from the early period of fiction writing in New Zealand, which can be classified as the colonial period of writers.

Writers, such as Nellie Scanlan, who in the 1930's wrote four novels in her Pencarrow Series, making her the most popular New Zealand novelist of her generation. A more recent popular fiction author is Christine Lee of Leland, who is a writer of erotic fiction and has deposited a collection with the Library between 1996 and 2007.

We have no manuscripts in the collection from the New Zealand writer Nalini Singh, but she has sold more than 6 million copies of her Poppy Novels and has been translated into 20 languages. There are many other successful writers of romance fiction in the country, and there is a question here about whether such authors wish to deposit their papers with a collection like ours or whether collecting libraries, like ours, want to collect this genre of writing.

Nonfiction can be quite a broad area of writing that includes the work of historians, journalists, bibliographers, biographers, and sportswriters. Also in the non-fiction section are works on literary criticism and scholarship, leisure activities, and hobbies. Some authors, like Robin Hyde, Pat Lawlor, Vincent O'Sullivan, and Ian Wedde work across both fiction and non-fiction writing, as well as working within many types of fiction genres.

The collections of historians are becoming more prominent at the Library, and some of the collections we hold are from the Cook Island anthropologist and archivist Kauraka Kauraka, Michael King, Judith Binney, Angela Ballara, and Claudia Orange. One example was Pat Lawlor, who was a local Wellington historian, as well as being a journalist, editor, writer, and bibliophile.

One of the interesting characters whose collection is in the Library is Christopher Truman. Chris considers himself to be the last of the New Zealand shiners, which is also a term for a swagman. He keeps that tradition alive by traveling the length of the country as an itinerant.

A self-taught artist, his early employment included working as a bushman, deer culler, and newspaper cartoonist. The last 20 years, he has been pretty much consistently on the road. As Chris travels around the country, he keeps scrapbooks, where he writes and illustrates his own stories.

Sometimes, these works include photographs, and he is a very accomplished photographer. The stories vary from his time in the bush to traveler's tales. Sometimes, they involve his personal relationships with the past, his passions, like music and storytelling, or fabulous made-up stories about crazy individuals.

Most of his work is autobiographical in one sense or another. Many of the stories are comic and portray Chris himself or his characters, as rugged outdoorsmen. He is a very talented illustrator, and the images make a nice complement to his text.

Each scrapbook has its own title, and some examples of its titles are, The Wolfhounds Gig, Through the Fields of Green or Done with a Dusting of Pollen, The Last Ramblings of the Last of the Shiners, and Madmen Drovers Bushmen Ratbags and Larrikins of the Land.

With some authors, you could expect the Library to have some holdings for them, especially for people like Katherine Mansfield or Frank Sargeson, for example. Other writers, like Shakespeare, are more of a surprise, while it would be fantastic to have discovered an unpublished play in our collections by Shakespeare's, it is not to be.

However, we do have this photocopy of a rubbing, taking from Shakespeare's gravestone at the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare's grave is famous for having a curse as an epitaph on the gravestone, which Shakespeare himself wrote.

Relic hunting was popular in Shakespeare's day, and Shakespeare was aware of his status as a leading writer may have meant his stones would be dug up by one of the hunters. It reads, Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare, to dig the dust enclosed here, blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.

There are over 600 authors and associated writer organisations and businesses catalogued in the Library's unpublished database. At last count, a keyword search on author returned 3,447 matches across all formats. Some of these entries are multiple links to the same record.

Either way, there is a lot of opportunities to research writers' papers at the Turnbull. The further you dig into the collections, the more authors you will discover.

This Bonar family manuscript from the 17th century is a commonplace book which comprises verse, vocabularies, biblical passages, plays, letters, sayings, and observations in English and Latin, composed or copied by John Bonar between 1649 and 1672.

It also includes lists of names, Scottish places, and a miscellany of material, as well as contemporary prints. It also has a partial index composed by the author. The poem depicted here Upon the Fatal Death of the Earl of Tweeddale's Dog, 1964, is the poem on the right-hand side of this page.

The Earl of Tweeddale's was known as John Hay, and I have been looking online, but I have yet to discover the name of his dog.

Resources for researching authors' papers at the Turnbull

I'm winding down this talk now. So I'd like to give a shout-out to a number of my colleagues. Audrey Stratford, who was the assistant curator, has a wonderful research guide on Katherine Mansfield.

With 2023 being the centenary of Mansfield's death, this is a great resource, if you are interested in Mansfield's work. It is also a good example of how to research a single author from the collection, with tips on using collection items, access permissions, making research copies, and searching in Tiaki.

Jared Davison, the manuscripts research librarian, recently presented a talk through connecting to collections on reviewing chief librarian restrictions. While this talk is not specifically on authors' papers, it does cover letter and diary writers generally, as well as providing an overview on restrictions.

It is worth watching via the National Library website on the Connecting to Collections page, if you have a further interest in manuscripts. Recently, the assistant curator, Lindsay Bilodeau, and I have started an ongoing series of blogs on literary papers, which can be accessed through the National Library website.

The first two blogs have been written by Lindsay and are now online. These blogs explore the annotated first-edition copies of the novels, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera.

So, thank you. That's me done. I'm a little bit over time, but we still have 7 or 8 minutes. So I'm happy to take any questions. And between Joan and Jay, they will arrange that.

Patai | Questions ?

Joan McCracken: Thank you so much, Sean. I hope you can hear me because I'm talking into Sean's microphone here. Thank you. We do have a couple of questions. So if I could start with those.

Does your research guide cover other parts of the Library’s collections beyond manuscripts?

You've spoken about author's collections and the manuscript collection, and you touched on material in other parts of the Library. Does your research guide cover those as well?

Seán McMahon: Yes, it does. So while there are many, many manuscripts, obviously, in the manuscripts collection, they do touch across all collections. So the most aligned would be photographs. So there are thousands of photographs of authors, authors' readings, and so forth.

So you'd always want to check through the photograph collection. And as I've done for this collection, some of the photographs haven't been digitised. So there are many photographs that no one's ever seen. So if you are doing authors, it's always good to have a really solid look through that collection because you might find a negative that no one's ever seen, and the Library can have that developed for you.

And then once it's digitised, we can put it online. If you go through the other collections, like drawings, paintings, and prints, particularly early colonial authors, there are many portraits in that collection. If you go into a lot across the oral history, there are a lot of oral history collections that are on authors or touch on writing and literature in general.

You can move across to ephemera. So ephemera has some wonderful examples of posters, handbills, flyers, that sort of material. If you go into the curios and objects collection, we have the collection of tiny stones busts. And for example, that has a bust of Dr. Michael King.

If you jump across to rare books and fine printing, well, obviously, you've got all of the rare book writers in there, as well as the more modern-day poetsw who were doing fine printing. You go across to cartoons and comics, which was a new section. And I'm sure Sam Orchard, who's the curator, would go into bat for authors being in graphic novels or comics or the like.

And the most recent collection is contemporary voices, where we're focusing on the contemporary voices, the unheard voices, the silences, including the immigrants. So there would be a lot of writers in the future coming in through that section.

So I hope I haven't left any section out there because they'll be at me, if I have left some. But even as strange as it sounds, if you're doing background research and where a writer lived and the locale, that can be helpful as well. Thanks, Joan.

How does the Library find new authors and unknown writers to collect?

Joan McCracken: Thank you, Sean. And actually, that's a lovely segue way to questions that we've received one on our Facebook page and the other through text. So both people are asking about how does the Library identify new authors or ways that we might collect to fill gaps that have been identified?

Seán McMahon: Yeah, that's a great question because that's very much the work we're undertaking the moment. So the Library has made a big effort now to go into those gaps and gaps in collections. So we're undertaking-- the whole curatorial team is undertaking what we're calling proactive collecting.

So that's an effort to address this, to have more time in our work days, to be able to start to do this collecting. It's only at the very initial stages and could take a while. But for example, I know, recently, at Bats theater, there was a theater festival held over a week of young authors, young writers, there.

And that, for example, would be a good place to start to get into looking at this. And there's been Māori festivals for playwrights, et cetera. So it's connecting into these communities, I think, is going to be the place that we need to look.

And then, we're very aware of digital as well. And I know, again, on poets, for example, particularly like slam poets, I know Auckland Museum, they collect through videos. They videotape some slam poet performances, and they go into their collections.

So that's another way we're going to look at-- having to look at how we record. Because a lot of the young kids today, their art is online and video, or it could be social media. And so, then, we have the social media about collecting websites, collecting, Instagram and so forth.

But of course, if you're on Snapchat, TikTok, and all the other different media that's out there, they're quite complicated in how you actually get authority to collect those collections. But there's no doubt that is going to have to be another strand is how we collect from a technological point of view.

Joan McCracken: Thank you so much, Sean, for that. We're right on time. Thank you, Sean. We're right on time. So I'd like to thank my colleagues who have supported today's presentation, and thank you to everyone who's joined us today.

If you'd like to hear more about future events being held at the library, on site or online, and you're not already part of our what's on mailing list, please do sign up. You can subscribe on the Events page on the National Library website.

Next month's Collecting to Collections is focused on legal deposit and other author and publisher services offered by the Library. It's part of our Family History Month presentations. But of course, not just for people who are interested in family history.

And we also have a series of four special family history talks that I hope people will be able to join. And we've added-- sorry. You can find those addresses that we've added by saving the chat. Just a reminder that if you click on the ellipsis by the chat button, you'll be able to save chat there. We really look forward to the next time you can join us.

Ka kite ano. We'll finish with a whakatauki.

Mā te kimi ka kite
Mā te kite ka mōhio
Mā te mōhio ka mārama.

Seek and discover
Discover and know
Know and become enlightened.

Ka kite everyone.

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Any errors with the transcript, let us know and we will fix them. Email us at digital-services@dia.govt.nz