The Byron Price Papers have been organized into four major categories: Correspondence, Writings, Professional Materials, and Personal Materials. Each of the four series is further arranged in subgroups.
The CORRESPONDENCE series consists of general correspondence and three other subgroups: Pulitzer Citation, Notebook VII, and Invitations. The General Correspondence (1908-1976) includes mainly personal letters, some of which had been part of a scrapbook that was disassembled at the time of processing. A separate scrapbook, containing only correspondence concerning the Pulitzer Citation awarded to Price in 1944, has also been taken apart and the correspondence filed under this heading. During August and September 1945, as the Office of Censorship closed and Price was chosen for a special mission to Germany, he received many letters of congratulations, which he compiled as Notebook VII. This notebook is filed here. The Invitations (1919-1959) are chiefly for formal dinners and receptions that Price attended in his various professional capacities. Among this group is one for the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. An index of selected correspondents follows the container list at the end of this register.
The WRITINGS series is the most significant part of the collection. The General Writings file (1901-1974) covers published and unpublished materials from Price's earliest writings through his professional career. He usually wrote on such topics as journalism, freedom of the press, free speech, censorship and wartime censorship. The Scrapbooks-“Politics at Random” contain his bi-weekly interpretive column, “Politics at Random” (1931-1936), written while he was chief of the Associated Press' Washington Bureau. The volume of Public Addresses (1942-1945) was collected by his staff at the Office of Censorship.
The Notebooks are especially interesting in that they are elaborate journals prepared by Price. Notebooks I through V, compiled when he was director of the Office of Censorship, record events, conversations, and copies of related correspondence, clippings and official papers as well as his own and others' opinions on government and current events. The pages in these five volumes include the date and place written and are numbered consecutively. An Unnumbered Notebook with its own pagination, contains notes and clippings on events Price was involved in while serving with the United Nations. Two subject files within the notebooks segment of the Writings series: a “Reporter's File,” written while Price was a journalist; and materials on the “Atomic Bomb,” originally labelled “pages out of sequence” and inserted as loose sheets in Notebook I, have been foldered separately, labeled as “Reporter's File” and “Atomic Bomb.” Other loose pages, scattered throughout the collection and unnumbered by Price are filed as Miscellaneous Pages.
Price's “Memoir,” Books 1-4, is a lengthy autobiography covering his life from childhood through his service with the United Nations. Miscellaneous pages of the “Memoir,” found scattered throughout Price's papers are collected at the end of this subseries. A copy of the transcript of an Oral History Interview with Price, made in 1969 by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, is also filed in this series. Price was chief of the Associated Press' Washington Bureau during the Hoover administration.
The PROFESSIONAL MATERIALS are arranged in subgroups representing the various periods in Price's career, with Press Releases from all periods as an initial group. The second subseries, Journalist, includes two booklets about AP press coverage during the presidential campaign in 1928, minutes of a censorship committee meeting of editors in 1951, and materials relating to the 1959 Press Congress of the World of which Price was director-general.
The Office of Censorship subgroup includes legal materials, censorship regulations and Notebook VI, which also contains published codes and regulations. This Notebook has its own table of contents and contains some added, mimeo-graphed instructions for editors and broadcasters. The V-J book filed here also has its own table of contents and contains specifications for the liquidation of the office. The two remaining items in this segment of Price's papers, by Purcell and McDaniel, are unpublished manuscripts on censorship, the latter being a master's thesis.
The material filed under the subheading, Germany, includes statistics Price compiled, and two memorandum books of notes from his mission to Germany. The only materials in the collection relating to Price's work in Hollywood, in 1946-1947, are some press releases and materials dating from that period found in the other three major series. The United Nations file contains material concerning United States citizens employed by the United Nations in 1953 and Price's last committee meeting at the United Nations in December 1953.
The PERSONAL MATERIALS series includes a preliminary Biographical file containing some published biographies; however more biographical information can be found elsewhere in the collection, especially in Price's “Memoir” and in the Clippings file. The second subgroup is Memorabilia that was either scattered throughout the collection or taken from his scrapbooks. It includes press passes, programs, menus and other miscellaneous items. The Awards and Honors and Diplomas and Certificates files are self explanatory. The Inscriptions are copies made from books inscribed to Price that accompanied the collection and were separated to the library. The Captions from Photographs, similarly, are from photographs separated to the iconographic collection at the time of processing. The City Book Auction category contains booklets listing the contents of Price's library, which he apparently chose to sell at the time he retired and left New York.
The Clippings file contains photocopies of articles that were scattered throughout the collection or taken from scrapbooks. The articles are about Price, or events in which he was involved or interested.
