Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

Scouts, like agents, are among the intermediaries and “gatekeepers” in the international literary and publishing industry, each of whom now performs a clearly defined role. However, a look at the immediate postwar period reveals that, before and during the period in which these socio-economic functions were ultimately given clear definition, the division of tasks was often blurred and...

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Speaker Bio:
Nicola Wilson is Professor at the University of Reading and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. Her most recent book is a study of the Book Society (1929-68) - Recommended: The influencers who changed how we read (2025). She was lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024) and is a co-founder of the international digital...

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In 2022, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Miaïna Razakamanantsoa acknowledged the issue of investigating literary agents and representatives in archives, indicating that researchers’ work may, in this regard, ‘be influenced by the work of others, such as by former employees of the publisher and their filing preferences, but also by archivists and their knowledge organization strategies’ (C....

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During the first decades of the twentieth century, the profession of literary agent emerged in Scandinavia, largely shaped by three pioneers: David Grünbaum in Copenhagen, Gösta Dahl in Stockholm, and Lena I. Gedin, initially based in Berlin and later in Stockholm.
The sources documenting their activities are scarce, despite their fundamental role in establishing and defining the profession...

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During and in the aftermath of the Second World War, Allied information and propa-ganda agencies engaged with translation in several ways. While leaflets in local lan-guages were dropped on enemy territories, and speakers’ voices travelled on radio frequences, booklets and guides helped troops and civilians navigating a global war. However, organisations like the British Central Office of...

Over the course of his forty-year career, James Baldwin recruited the very best professionals—agents, lawyers, and accountants--to manage his literary business. This is a little-known fact because scholars and critics of Baldwin’s canon have not systematically surveyed and analyzed those relationships.

Drawing from Baldwin’s business records sourced in multiple US archives (the...

Between 1960 and 1973, Jonathan Cape's manuscript books record 1,744 submissions of foreign-language and translated works, of which fewer than five per cent reached contract. This paper reads that ledger as an archive of refusal as much as of acquisition, and uses it to reassess the place of the literary agent in Anglo-American translation commissioning under Tom Maschler.
Drawing on a funded...

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In 1928, a group of dramatic agents founded the New York Society of Authors’ Representatives (SAR), a professional organization of East coast agents. Its initial purpose was to foster “a better understanding among all agents” and elaborate a code of ethics that would improve the standards of the profession and, consequently, their image within the publishing industry. In 1977, a split resulted...

This paper primarily investigates the postwar career of the literary agent B.J. Buber (1892-1950). A representative of the Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI) in France, the polyglot Buber embedded himself simultaneously in multiple literary, linguistic, and political milieus. He leveraged his Paris contacts as well as relations with such authors as Elio Vittorini and Anne Seghers to...

The international success of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books, especially Pippi Longstocking (1945), is largely due to her contacts with the German publisher Oetinger. When Friedrich Oetinger, a bookseller and director of the publishing house Verlag für Wirtschaft und Sozialpolitik Friedrich Oetinger & Co, met Astrid Lindgren in 1949, he acquired the rights to her Pippi Långstrump and...

In my lecture, I focus on the first three decades of the literary agency International Editors’ Co. (since 2021 International Editors & Yañez, Co.), founded in Buenos Aires in 1939 by Annie and Hugo Lifczis (Lifezis). On the basis of various archive collections, I show the genesis of the agency’s network during the German exile, especially in the correspondence with the author Leo Perutz. The...

In the USA the 1960s and 1970s — driven by the civil rights struggles of African Americans and the decolonization movements — were marked by a keen interest on the part of the publishing world in the voices of Black intellectuals. Moreover, the 1960s represented a turning point in terms of the internationalization of cultural circles in Europe, where African American writers succeeded in...

Berta Zuckerkandl’s role as a translator and as a literary and theatre agent has long remained overshadowed by her public persona as an influential salonnière and journalist. Rooted in the liberal, upper middle class Jewish milieu, her salon in Vienna was a significant cultural hub, just as the salon of her sister Sophie in Paris — who was married to Paul Clemenceau, the brother of Georges...