Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

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...

Literary agencies rarely appear in the archive as actors in their own right. They surface as senders of offers, as clauses in contracts, as recipients of statements. This paper takes that marginal position as its starting point and asks what mediation actually consists of when it is examined as work rather than judged by its outcome. Drawing on correspondence between Ruth Liepman and Fritz J....

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...