Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

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...

A typical day at the ALI: how a literary agency shapes texts and editions
The paper examines the operations of ALI (Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale) from the 1950s to the early 1980s, when the agency was headed by Erich Linder. ALI’s archives – now held in Milan by the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation – together with contemporary interviews and accounts provided by some of Linder’s...

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...