Grass-Archiv

In September 2018, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen acquired a large collection of documents from Steidl Verlag that document the thirty-year collaboration between the publishing house and the writer and artist Günter Grass. A trust foundation established at the University of Göttingen in this context aims to ensure that these documents remain available to the academic community in the long term. To achieve this goal, the holdings of the "Günter Grass Archive Göttingen Foundation" must first be fully cataloged and indexed according to library and academic standards.
The Grass Archive contains correspondence, galley proofs, visual drafts and book design concepts, publisher’s catalogs and promotional materials, and—naturally—the printed works by Grass published by Steidl, as well as their translations into other languages. The books and archival materials are sorted and then cataloged: the archival materials in Kalliope, the national registry for literary estates, autographs, and publishing archives; the books in the GVK, the union catalog of the Common Library Network (GBV). Following cataloging, the archival materials are repackaged and stored alongside the books in the stacks of the Göttingen State and University Library.
Properly cataloging such diverse materials requires a thorough understanding of Günter Grass’s literary oeuvre and his poetic and artistic concepts. Continuous academic oversight from the field of literary studies is therefore essential to the cataloging process. For this reason, the project is being carried out in collaboration with the Chair of Professor Heinrich Detering at the University of Göttingen’s Department of German Philology; in this way, the library cataloging work and the academic research into "Günter Grass as Book Designer" will complement one another.