Merriam Co. Archives Scattered

At this year's NY book fair, I very luckily bumped into Stephen Ferguson, curator of rare books at Princeton University. I was on my way back in, he was on his way out -- out to the "shadow fair" downtown to track archives of G. & C. Merriam Co., the dictionary publisher. He told me he had noticed bits and pieces of Merriam's trade records popping up here and there over the past two years, which he thought strange since Yale and the American Antiquarian Society hold vast collections of the company's archives and would, one assumes, be interested in preserving the archives together. It was a bit of a mystery, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. In a post to the Princeton rare books blog yesterday, Stephen related his distressing findings.