This is interesting because it raises a distinction between two sorts of property. What is physically put down on paper – a manuscript in the sense that the author is responsible for impressing the letters on paper he himself has purchased – is the author’s chattel property forever, unless he makes a gift of it, sells it, or, in the newest legal lights, abandons it. The words that he writes down, however, are his property because it is copyright as a text: this sort of property cannot be abandoned accidentally, and the author can divest himself of it only by explicitly resigning his copyright.

The manuscript struggle is to maintain the value of authors’ physical property. Copyright laws have been so well tested that an author’s rights to the text do not glide into the grey areas of dispute that his rights to the manuscripts now apparently do. The substance of the Moorhouse decision is that an author must not neglect his papers if he leaves them with a publisher or a friend or elsewhere. If he fails to enquire after their safe-keeping for five-and-a-half years after publication (not a statutory time-limit, but the period that convinced the judge of abandonment in the Moorhouse case), someone else’s claim to ownership may be stronger than his.

If you drop your child off at a neighbour’s house and do not return to collect him, you impair your paternal rights; but if you drop him off at a welfare agency, asking them to care for him, you retain paternal rights you might have lost in the same arrangement with the neighbour. Analogously you can leave your manuscript in someone else’s hands provided that you have written a contract agreeing to do so. If you want to retain custody of your papers but don’t want to pat the cardboard boxes on their bottoms, you must make written arrangements for their care elsewhere.

Authors are suddenly regarding their rough drafts the way that authors in the eighteenth century began to eye their letters with a view to publication. Depending upon how one appraises the art of letter-writing, one may either regard this eighteenth century perspective as an enlightened one (the beginning of modern biography), or regard it as a bad one (the breakdown in truly private communication). Seeking a literary value in anything that is not ostensibly meant for publication is the basis of the value problem about authors’ manuscripts now. They have one value to the author, another to the purchaser, a third to posterity – the third value, I suspect, being often much less than the other two.

Many libraries who purchase manuscripts obviously want to stay ignorant of the extent of the ‘possession’ they are buying when they spend $5,000 or S10,000 or $20,000 for the papers. (These prices have to be speculations because there is no source of sale figures for manuscripts like the Book Auction Records). An author’s property claims may be simpler once he sells his papers to a library, but the library’s problems are just beginning. If the manuscript has never appeared in published form or been broadcast in public, the library can buy only the right to hold the physical manuscript. If a manuscript has been published, the uses of it are less restrictive because the copyright is more lenient: such manuscripts are perused for their contribution to the ‘New Definitive Edition’, which is everyone’s grab bag fifty years after the author’s death. (All of Thomas Hardy’s novels suddenly reappeared in long-worked-over editions last year; next year is the rejuvenation of Conan Doyle and D.H. Lawrence.) In the United States this distinction between the value of published and unpublished manuscripts does not exist: the preservation order on both expires fifty years after the author’s death. In Australia, however, following the British example, the value of unpublished material in manuscript is unique insofar as it can never be published without the permission of the author or his heirs.