In Praise of Archives! On Finding and Using Archival Material

By Suzanne Cope

There was the archive that was two and a half hours into the Italian countryside, on the second floor of a palazzo that overlooked the quiet piazza in the center of town. There, I read the only publicly available copy of a testimony of one of my book’s protagonists while my husband flew toy airplanes with my children, whose laughter tinkled through the library’s open windows.

Another librarian set me up with a computer and a stack of books in an unused classroom at the U...