A.P. Watt was the world's first literary agency and was the largest for its first thirty years of operation. Alexander Pollock Watt (1834-1914) began working as a literary agent in 1975 when a friend asked him to negotiate a contract with a London publishing company. By 1881, A.P. Watt had incorporated his business and begun to define the role of the literary agent. The A.P. Watt firm has remained in the forefront of the market in popular fiction and it has counted numerous important and/or best-selling authors among its clients. The collection includes correspondence, agreements, contracts, and financial account books of the A.P. Watt firm that document sales of authors' works to publishing companies, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting corporations, and film studios. The file material includes correspondence, agreements between authors and publishers, Library of Congress registration receipts, copyright renewal forms, and other items. The great majority of these items date from 1897 to 1937, but several files extend as far as 1985. Canonical authors include G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, and W.B. Yeats. Also interspersed throughout are letters from major British and American magazines and publishing companies. Account books with entries dating 1926 to 1965 (bulk 1947- 1962) contain extensive coverage for Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, August Strindberg, and Mark Twain, in addition to those already mentioned. Taken as a whole, the collection contains a wealth of bibliographical information and provides a picture of the changing trends in the publishing industry since the late 19th century.
