Amherst College Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Records of the Paris Press. The records arrived here in April 2018 and we’re looking forward to making them quickly available to the public.
The Paris Press was founded in 1995 with the mission of publishing “groundbreaking yet overlooked literature by women.” Paris Press authors include: Muriel Rukeyser, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Bryher, Ruth Stone, Zdena Berger, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 2018, the Press was acquired by Wesleyan University and all Paris Press books will be available through the Wesleyan University Press.
The Records of the Paris Press includes some fifty to one hundred linear feet of paper records in addition to several terabytes of born digital material. This is the perfect opportunity for the Archives to practice the principles of extensible processing – an iterative process that creates baseline access points for archival material but allows for more detailed work as user demand dictates. The Paris Press records were well-organized when they were active, and the records creators kept everything categorized by publishing job and at the box level. We’ll be maintaining that organization as we prepare a box-level inventory for the public. We soon will have publicly available descriptions of the collection on our collections portal and in the library catalog. Check back soon!
Below are a number of shots of the newly-arrived Paris Press records as they made their way onto shelves at our off-site storage facility, the Bunker.
