HOUSING THE ARCHIVES OF SUCH NOTABLE LITERARY FIGURES as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Oscar Wilde, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is a Mecca for academic researchers from all over the world. At the same time, it is a Mecca for a very different kind of researcher attracted to a very different kind of archive. Take Alex, for example, a self-professed "goth" who describes his pilgrimage to the Ransom Center to view the Aleister Crowley archives in his "blog," "Alex's Journal." (1) Among his other interests cited on the "user info" page, Alex lists "death metal," "body piercing," "drinking," "comics" "hurting peoples brains [sic]," "debauchery," "subdural haematomas," and "weirding out weird people." The sheer eccentricity of the Ransom's collections--which include high literary, mass cultural, and even counter-cultural material--make it a place where a professor earnestly poring over a Joyce manuscript might rub shoulders with a fan like Alex who describes his research on Crowley as having "fun" and "taking some cool notes." In other words, it is a place where the academic and the fan come face to face. The essay that follows discusses this confrontation between the academic and the fan in the archive--not in a literal way--but through the story of the archive of M. P. Shiel, an obscure writer of mystery, detective, horror, science fiction and other popular genres. His archives at the Ransom Center owe their existence entirely to a select few fans of Shiel--namely, a drunken bibliophile and a right-wing millionaire plastics manufacturer--figures who, like Alex, present a stark contrast to the earnest academics we normally associate with archives. In telling the story of this archive, the essay considers the differing discourses of the academic and the fan and how these discourses come into conflict when fans become implicated with archives, when fans engage in scholarship, and when the academic confronts the fan inside him- or herself. At the same time, it reveals how the Ransom Center became the kind of eclectic research institution that would consider creating archives devoted not only to renowned literary and cultural figures, but also to popular and mass cultural figures, from the more enduring and notorious of these--such as Crowley--to the most obscure and forgotten--such as Shiel. Academic, Fan, and Collector Discourse
