From the article, Modernist Furniture of Futures Past by Eve M. Kahn:
Pack-Rat Bounty
Lawyers, at least competent ones, love orderly paperwork, the chronological or alphabetical files in which every i is dotted and t crossed, just in case an opposing counsel or disgruntled client tries to find fault years later. A dusty example of the profession’s pack-rat tendencies has just been delivered to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.
At an Americana sale at Swann Auction Galleries, the university’s rare book and law libraries jointly spent $10,800 on 40 boxes of shuffled paperwork from a Manhattan law firm run by members of the Riker family. The documents date from around 1804 to 1924. The Rikers specialized in trusts and estates, and held onto papers as important as subpoenas and as haphazard as a medical clinic’s receipts for a few cents worth of syringes and paintbrushes.
A decade ago the archive turned up in storage at a building in Lower Manhattan, where the Rikers once had an office. Someone apparently rifled the boxes over the years, perhaps looking for celebrities’ autographs: the blue-blood Rikers handled prominent cases involving the philanthropist Sarah Burr, who bequeathed $3 million to charities in the 1880s, and the corrupt New York politician Boss Tweed. “We don’t know yet what gems are in there,” said Eric Wakin, an American history curator at Columbia. “It’s in no order at all. It’s going to be interesting to curate.”
On a recent morning he laid out a half-dozen of the cardboard Riker boxes on a long table in a library back room. He lifted lids and pulled out, at random, Rachel Whaley’s 1855 deed for her $55 plot in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; an 1805 rhomboid outline of a “lot in Fresh Meadow”; Charles Henry Hall’s 1830s title to 42 acres in Harlem; a 198-page typewritten transcript for a court hearing over Board of Education land transactions in 1900; and an 1827 description of 10 acres in Queens at an address unhelpfully listed as “the Road.”
I got into the spirit of the hunt and fished out an 1859 note stating that William Oliver paid $649 for carpentry on his houses near East 11th Street in Manhattan; a canceled 1884 check for $15,000 to Cornell University (“a huge donation for the time,” Mr. Wakin said); and an 1898 receipt for a $1.25 razor from a “dealer in and importer of French grind stones.”
“It’s a little overwhelming,” Mr. Wakin said. “The randomness — that’s the joy and the problem.”
Library administrators are deciding how to index the material and sort it into folders to make it more accessible to researchers. “We’ll probably put like with like,” for instance, grouping the wills or deeds, said Lea Osborne, a processing archivist at the rare book library. “We’ll follow the patterns as best we can,” she added.
The library’s total holdings would stretch eight miles if filed in one long line, she said, and three miles of that, so far, have been organized to ease scholars’ searches. The Riker trove adds 16 linear feet to the undone pile. The staff might even end up weeding out some Riker scraps, deaccessioning the more unintelligible, unlabeled scribbles. “People are shocked to hear that archivists throw things out,” Ms. Osborne said. “But that is a part of our job.”