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Cataloging a manuscript collection is a bit like opening Pandora’s Box. You always find more than you bargained for. I recently completed cataloging the

papers of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, a journey both thrilling and frightening. Butler was the first black woman to gain prominence in a genre that flirts with the supernatural. Honored with both Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was also the first science fiction author to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Her novel Kindred

was selected for Pasadena’s 2006 One City, One Story program, but she passed away suddenly just weeks before her scheduled appearance. Butler’s characters are complex, never fully good or fully evil. They inhabit stories that weave together themes of race, gender, sex, religion, power, and humanity. “No entertainment on Earth

can match a good story compellingly told,” Butler wrote. Through the trials of strong and complicated characters, these stories ultimately reveal truths about us. Butler’s papers offer a window into her examination of these truths, her creative process, and her everyday life.

Collections come in many shapes and sizes, and in many states of disarray. Archivists like myself arrange and describe the contents so that scholars can find materials that fit their research. Where little or no original order exists, I impose one, often dividing materials into series such as correspon-dence, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera. I place everything in acid-free folders and boxes, label them, and assign numbers for easy retrieval. Next I create a finding aid—an inventory of the materials supplemented with information such as

Beyond CategoryUNPACKING OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

By Natalie Russell

Above: Octavia E. Butler near Mt. Shuksan, in Washington state, 2001. Photographer unknown. Right: The Butler papers include a variety of materials, including autograph notes, photographs, and ephemera.

Butler was also the first science fiction author to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”

accessions

provenance, copyright status, and notes on scope and arrangement. By the time I finished cataloging Butler’s archive, the finding aid topped out at 507 pages. Sound straightforward? Butler’s papers arrived as two full four-drawer file cabinets and about 35 large cartons. Her filing systems were haphazard and she kept nearly every-thing—from her very first short stories, written at the age of 12, to book contracts and programs from recent speaking engagements. Many of her child-hood efforts formed the seeds of later books. Butler wrote and rewrote constantly, dividing ideas from one storyline into separate works, discarding scenes, inserting plot points, borrowing previously consid-ered character names, and changing titles, all while encouraging herself with colorfully concocted mem-os to refine the most important element, the story. Born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1947, Butler may have enjoyed writing stories from a young age, but she received little encouragement for her writing. It was not seen as a viable career, especially for a black woman. Butler’s widowed mother struggled to make ends meet working as a maid. “Her big dream for me was that I should get a job as a sec-retary and be able to sit down when I worked. My big dream was never to be a secretary in my life,” Butler would say. She continued writing. She cited persistence as one of her most valuable traits. Butler published 12 novels and one volume of short stories, all of which are represented in the collection, along with unpublished and unfinished works. Most authors don’t consider their future archi-vists as they write. They don’t file their works by title and their letters by correspondent’s last name, if they file anything at all. Inevitably, many items defy categorization. Butler used different filing systems at different times, including the universal miscellaneous stack. Even easily identified items

can be challenging. Does a letter with an enclosed draft of a short story belong with correspondence or with manuscripts? Should a letter written by a well-known editor be listed under his name or the name of the publisher? Does a story titled “10 o’clock Jesus” belong at the beginning of the al-phabet, the end of the alphabet, or under “t”? These are the decisions archivists face every day. Some of them have standard answers defined by the profession; others depend on further details from the collection. I separated that short story from the letter and filed it with Butler’s other short stories. I also added a note to each folder indicating the relationship of letter and story. I added similar notes to the editor’s letters, noting his name while filing the letters by the name of the publisher. “10 o’clock Jesus” is filed at the beginning of the alpha-bet. In a different collection, the answers may have been different.

It took me more than three years to organize and describe Butler’s voluminous notes, drafts of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera. I had no shortage of brainteasers in the mix. Butler frequently reused paper. On the backs of typewritten pages are discarded portions of prior works—such as a page of the novel Mind of My Mind, in which telepathic super-humans vie for control of the species—among fragments of Butler’s reflections on slavery and the black experience, the grim time-travel fantasy Kindred. She used multiple spiral-bound notebooks in various sizes. The pages of these untitled notebooks contain everything from plot ideas and lists of potential character names to grocery lists, calendar reminders, and bus routes—Butler never drove. Indexing the content of these notebooks is virtually impossible. Butler traveled to the Amazon to research her Xenogenesis trilogy, a post-apocalyptic tale of human-alien genetic blending. She kept photo-graphs from the trip in one of those old photo albums with magnetic pages—not the method of choice of your typical archivist. But Butler also annotated those sticky pages with handwritten captions, pages that might otherwise be weeded out. A self-described news junkie, with varied interests, Butler saved highly acidic newspaper clippings for research and stored them folded and packed into small envelopes. She sorted them by

Butler encouraged herself with motivational notes about writing.

10

Collections come in many shapes and sizes, and in many states of disarray.

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subject: medicine, science, women, occupations, social conditions. Maintaining these schemas is an important link to Butler’s thought process. I sifted through each of these categorical outliers to determine their place in the collection. In the middle of this plethora of literary treasure and chaos was something labeled “Pandora’s Box.” This “box” was a crudely made envelope—two taped sheets of notebook paper—bearing a dire warning: “Owner not responsible for pain and damage to eyesight and mental health suff ered while reading contents without permission.” The so-called contents? An empty potato chip bag. Here was a puzzle whose purpose we may nev-er solve. Was Octavia on a diet? Was she remind-ing herself of the numerous menial jobs she held early in her career—including sorting potato chips? Was she simply in a silly mood, and the chip bag some sort of a joke? And how should it

12 19

be categorized within the collection? This last question has been answered: “Butler, Octavia E. Pandora’s Box. Autograph Manuscript.” Other questions, and more, await the researchers who are studying this pioneering author and her works, including two Huntington scholars on fellowship who arrive later this year. With 8,000 individually cataloged items and more than 80 boxes of additional ephemera, the Butler papers are sure to provide new insights into the life and work of this remarkable woman. Luckily, as the myth tells us, there is hope when Pandora’s Box is opened again—hope perhaps of answers found in the order that was chaos.

Natalie Russell is assistant curator of literary manuscripts at The Huntington. She is planning a Butler exhibition for 2017.

Butler’s own “Pandora’s Box” and its mysterious contents.

BEHIND THE SCENES

“We don’t read everything. If we did, nothing would ever get done.”—Huntington archivist Li Wei Yang, featured in one of fi ve new videos on view in “The Library Today,” the companion gallery adjacent to the permanent exhibition “Remarkable Works, Remarkable Times: Highlights from the Huntington Library.”

You can also view the videos—“Behind the Scenes: Staff and Researchers at the Huntington Library”—at huntingtonblogs.org/2014/04/videos.

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