Thirty-three years ago, Howard Gotlieb had a revelation. As the new head of Boston University's Department of Special Collections, a.k.a. the BU archives, he realized he was in charge of rare books by famous, dead, white males. The few personal papers were scattered presidential autographs, ergo, "dwm" signatures.
Acquiring old papers, he knew, was both difficult and expensive. What to do? What to do?And the light bulb that suddenly glowed, very simply put, was that Howard Gotlieb, himself, personally, idiosyncratically, would decide which living writers and public figures and performers would be, or should be, famous in the 21st century, and start collecting them while they were alive, before the papers were dispersed, divided, discarded.
"I have been accused," Gotlieb mused, "of having little taste, over the years." At age 70, he is comfortable with himself and has little interest in self-defense. He said this in his office, a comfortable place with a life-size portrait of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on one wall and of Bette Davis, in her "Jezebel" costume, on another. The archive is all about paper, but the archivist himself is also about things, including several pairs of Fred Astaire's dancing shoes. Astaire always started a movie with a new pair, and when the movie was done, he wrote the name of the film on the insole and saved them for, well, saved them for someone like Howard Gotlieb.
"I do recall," the collector said, "that when we got the first Astaire material back in the late '60s, the Boston Herald ran a front-page picture of the shoes. I got a call from the president of the university, it was Arland Christ-Janer then, and he said `Howard, my heavens, we are not going to collect shoes, are we?'
"I assured him we were not collecting footwear," he said with the characteristic quick smile and nod of the head that means Howard Gotlieb is having fun at his work.
Besides the odd piece of footwear, the 20th-century archives consist of boxes of the papers, publications, musical scores, diaries, even laundry slips and phone bills of the 1,600 stars and underlings selected, courted, cosseted by Gotlieb. The storage is on the order of 35,000 linear feet (6.6 miles) on two floors of the Mugar Library. On a typical day, from three to five scholars are working on someone's papers in a reading room adjacent to Gotlieb's office.
Not surprisingly, this professional collector is also a private collector. His Back Bay bachelor apartment holds two favorite kinds of things, modern art (Braque and Picasso, and then the taste question again, Dali) and what are called "association copies" of books. Those are books written and signed by one author, say Dickens, to another, say, Darwin.
A graduate of George Washington (B.A.) and Columbia (M.A., modern European history) and Oxford (Ph.D. in international relations), Gotlieb had his first encounter with archives in 1946 as a young enlistee in the Army Signal Corps. He was assigned to gather and arrange the papers of Nazi government organizations. After the army, he stayed in Europe for several years, working for a small press agency. Then graduate school, then work as an archivist at Yale, and then BU and the very bright idea.
Examining Gotlieb's professional taste (as opposed to judging it) is easy, and worth exclaiming over. He likes movie stars (Shirley MacLaine!), mystery writers and sometimes a doubleheader with another favorite, British authors of the female persuasion who also have second modes of address beginning with the word "Lady" or "Dame" (Dame Ngaio Marsh!), science fiction authors (Isaac Asimov!), and popular journalists (Stewart Alsop!). While every archivist collects famous politicians and social reformers, Gotlieb included, only he, for many years, pursued people who played politicians, people who pursued world notables, notebook in hand.
The list is impressive and boggling. The largest and most-used collection is, of course, the papers of Martin Luther King Jr. They did not end up at BU just because King's degrees are from there. Gotlieb contacted King in early 1964, the year after the Birmingham jail imprisonment and the march on Washington, a year before the march on Selma made a household phrase out of Sheriff "Bull" Connors.
And he took out after some journalists who couldn't imagine what the fuss was about. David Halberstam hadn't written a book, hadn't even thought of writing "The Best and the Brightest"; he was just back from Vietnam after the American-inspired Diem coup in 1963 when he got a nice letter on Crane executive bond from Gotlieb. "I thought he was kidding, at first," Halberstam recalled. "But he is so enthusiastic. I don't know anyone whose own kinetic energy seems to dovetail so perfectly with what he does. He did tell me that I would be getting these wonderful tax breaks for donating my papers, and I would have, but Lyndon Johnson got so . . . greedy trying to avoid paying income tax by donating his papers that that killed the tax-deductions for all of us."
It took Gotlieb a few years to catch up with Dan Wakefield. "He came to me in 1967," Wakefield explained, "I was just leaving Boston to go spend a year interviewing to write "Super Nation at Peace and War," for The Atlantic. I was particularly glad he was offering, I didn't know what to do with my papers.
"I remember taking them over to BU in a friend's car, and it was windy, howling around those library towers and the papers started blowing all over the street. I don't know why he picked me, just a wild guess. I'd only published one book, a collection called `Between the Lines,"' Wakefield mused. The big book, the attention-getting book, the novel "Going All the Way," wasn't even in the forseeable future.
"I'll never forget walking into that office for the first time," he continued. "He's so enthusiastic, he's showing me a pen and telling me it's the one with which William Lederer wrote his half of `The Ugly American.' And I notice this huge white mailbox with `ROTH' on it, and I asked him was it Philip Roth? `No,' Gotlieb told me. `It's the mailbox from which Henry Roth mailed the manuscript of `Call It Sleep'! I just think he's great," Wakefield concluded. "I'm tired of all the people in this world that are so sluggish, and he's not."
Of course, not everyone is called, not just any author is chosen. "One of the difficulties of the job," Gotlieb said with a concerned, pained, smile-crossed-with-a-moue, "is that you cannot just tell an author who is selling millions and millions of copies that they are not up to par. One must be delicate. The question is, what is suitable, and the answer is," he averred, with a small gesture of the hand at the top of his desk, "that the decision is made here."
For example, one sees the name "Robin Cook," in the list of collected authors, and Gotlieb points out that it is not our Robin Cook, millions and millions of copies-seller, Boston-based author of "Coma." It is their Robin Cook, British author of many mysteries and some generational novels. "We have not approached (our) Robin Cook," Gotlieb said. "I have not felt the need to."