Updates from the Steinbeck Archives

It has been said that when one door closes another one opens. At this writing it has been five months since the outbreak of the coronavirus, and a lot of doors have been closed. What has been learned in this time is that the need to study and research has not diminished. While travel plans have changed, the desire to complete projects has not. Libraries and archives continue to fulfill their mission—to provide information and access to resources. There will come a time when those who wish to can visit a library and archive to immerse themselves in the subject of their choice and enjoy the serendipity of wandering through a room of artifacts.

But until that time, special collections need to move forward creating more digitally accessible resources. Toward that end a proposal has been put forward to inspire more collaboration among the many repositories of Steinbeck materials. As a starting point, a suggestion has been made to develop the Steinbeck Letters Project, which would seek to create a database of Steinbeck’s correspondence and provide links of places, people, events, books, films, political developments, and a timeline of Steinbeck’s life. This project would expand on A Life in Letters by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. Updates will be provided here as this project moves forward. Anyone interested in supporting this project is asked to contact the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at steinbeck@sjsu.edu.

The Center has been closed to the public since March, though it is continuing to answer questions as best it can with the resources available. Recent projects include updating the Steinbeck searchable bibliography (https://steinbeckbibliosite.sjsu.edu/) and the Steinbeck Center photo archive (https://digitalcollections.sjsu.edu/steinbeck-collections).

The searchable bibliography currently holds information and abstracts for twelve thousand records of secondary-source materials, and recently information on Steinbeck’s original newspaper and magazine articles has been added. Two Center exhibits, “Women of Steinbeck” and “Biographers,” were displayed in our exhibit hall, and one exhibit, “Women of Steinbeck,” was modified and displayed in Salinas at the National Steinbeck Center’s 2018 Steinbeck Festival. And we need to mention that we received a large and generous donation of three hundred books, many first editions, from Bob Conklin, a private collector and a public librarian in Moline, Illinois.

The Monterey Public Library has recently experienced a large cut to its budget, and many of the staff, including local history experts, were laid off. The history collection shares a catalog with the general library collection (https://www.montereylibrary.org/). For people who want to use these materials, library staff are best reached at refdesk@monterey.org and 831-646-3933. The California History Room Archives is found at https://www.monterey.org/library/History-Room.

The Ball State University Libraries Special Collections (https://archives-search.bsu.edu/) has a new archivist, Michael Szajewski, who can be reached at mgszajewski@bsu.edu. Built and developed by Dr. Tetsumaro Hayashi, the Steinbeck Collection is housed in the Bracken Library. It contains over one thousand Steinbeck titles, including first editions and foreign language versions, copies of published articles of Steinbeck scholarship, Steinbeck unpublished letters and writings, records documenting adaptations of Steinbeck writings, as well as Steinbeck criticism and scholarship. Also found here are the Steinbeck Quarterly and the Steinbeck Monograph Series, both of which are freely available and downloadable via the Ball State University Digital Media Repository, an open-access resource containing over 130,000 digital objects in sixty-four collections.

The National Steinbeck Center (http://www.steinbeck.org/; Lisa Josephs, archivist) is hosting “The Virtual Steinbeck Country United Global Festival, Aug. 1–2, 2020.” Reports on this event will follow.

Below is a list of additional Steinbeck Collections and contact information:

• • Stanford University Special Collections (Stanford, CA). Contact: Rebecca Wingfield (wingfiel@stanford.edu). See https://library.stanford.edu/, https://library.stanford.edu/hopkins, and https://seaside.stanford.edu/.

• • Morgan Library & Museum (New York). Contact: Maria Oldal (oldalm@themorgan.org). The collection holds correspondence and manuscripts associated with Steinbeck. See https://www.themorgan.org/search/site/steinbeck.

• • University of...