Got time over the next week? Here's an interesting way to spend some of it: On June 30 Sothebys is going to be auctioning off reams of the personal documents of Martin Luther King, Jr. from between 1946 and 1968. Everything from report cards - he didn't get straight A's - to drafts of his "I Have a Dream" speech are on the block (as a collection only) and for the next week it is available to be seen by the public for free.
Stuck in your office? Going outside just isn't your thing? No excuse, you can still check out the catalogue (PDF) which at 129 pages is pretty amazing in and of itself. Talking about King one Sotheby's specialist told the Times that "No piece of paper was safe," and looking at the catalogue we see what they mean. The man wrote, in handwriting way better then ours will ever be, on everything from book margins to index cards, receipts to paper scraps.
Of course, no big auction would be interesting without some "issues", and this one has those too. Though these papers have been shopped around amongst various institutions for almost a decade, nobody has been willing to spend the kind of money the King family wants (between $15-30 million) to buy the papers because of the baggage they come with. For instance one sticking point is that the winning bidder won't get to walk away with the copyrights - the family is holding onto those. But maybe that's OK. As one King scholar points out to the Gray Lady: "I hear people saying King belongs to the world, but if you buy one of Ernest Hemingway's manuscripts, that doesn't give you the right to publish that manuscript."
And Mayor Bloomberg hinted that NYC might be interested in purchasing the collection. Very interesting.
Images taken from the Sotheby's MLK catalogue.
