Kubrick's Archive

I've posted about Stanley Kubrick before, and just came across a fascinating article from 2004 by Jon Ronson, a Guardian Unlimited reporter who spent months among Kubrick's extensive archive. Fans of Kubrick will enjoy the full article, though in a bit of a bummer, the end appears slightly truncated. Even so, there's plenty of interesting stuff there. Here are a few samples:

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front - Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on - and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".

"Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved." "What?" I ask. "Stationery," says Jan. I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."

Fans will likely be interested in the $200 Stanley Kubrick Archives book, or the new boxed set coming in October.

Link via Daring Fireball.