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Collection Description
The New Statesman itself has always devoted roughly equal coverage to politics and literature while separating the two in its pages (‘the Front Half’ and ‘the Back Half’, respectively) and a similar division has been applied in the Archive’s arrangement into two discrete sections: Editorial Correspondence and Review Correspondence. The former includes correspondence with the editors on the then-current topics igniting the magazine’s leaders, feature pages and letters columns. The latter is principally composed of communications between the New Statesman’s distinguished literary editors and their contributors, among them many notable authors and commentators in their own right. Both collections reveal much of the kind of behind-the-scenes debate generated by the commissioning and subsequent publication of essays and criticism and show how successive editors, deputy editors and literary editors conducted the magazine’s business with a blend of diplomacy and vigour. The Archive also contains legal documents relating to staff contracts, and correspondence with authors and agents regarding books published by Turnstile Press, the financially unsuccessful New Statesman imprint.
New Statesman-related collections include the archive of the New Statesman's longest-serving editor, Kingsley Martin, and papers of Martin's biographer and New Statesman contributor CH Rolph.
Archival history
The University purchased the New Statesman
Archive at auction in December 1991 with the help of public funds.
The Library already held the papers
of Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman (1931–60),
and the close relation of the two collections made this later acquisition
a natural and important one. Earlier papers, which record the business
of the New Statesman from its inception in 1913 until 1943 are
held at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
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