COLUMN ONE : Capers for Famous Papers : Competition is fierce and costly for schools seeking prestige of housing noted people’s archives. Bette Davis gave in after a 10-year courtship. Dr. Seuss sparked a spat between UCLA and UC San Diego.

Deep beneath the grimy surface of Manhattan, in a shimmering white vault cooled to 68 degrees, lie 20,000 linear feet of manuscripts--from Truman Capote’s notebooks to George Washington’s handwritten recipe for beer.

Eighteen hundred miles away, the University of Texas at Austin is home to Napoleon Bonaparte’s letters, the corrected page proofs of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Gloria Swanson’s scripts and the world’s first photograph.

Boston University has Bette Davis’ 109,000 papers. Herman Melville’s trunk shares space with Capote and Washington at the New York Public Library. Stanford University has John Steinbeck, Harvard has Leon Trotsky. UC San Diego just landed Dr. Seuss.

Famous people’s papers are not just for research anymore. They have become the intellectual equivalent of an undefeated football team--a glamorous calling card that universities and libraries use to snag not only scholars but money.

Dozens of institutions have entered the paper chase in recent years--enlisting book dealers as scouts, currying favor with writers, and duking it out with each other in occasional bidding wars.

UCLA and the University of Texas went to court over Igor Stravinsky. Vassar College outbid Harvard University for the poet Elizabeth Bishop. The New York Public Library recently bagged the papers of the New Yorker and Vladimir Nabokov.

And Boston University, in a May jury verdict, was declared the owner of 83,000 personal papers of Martin Luther King Jr.--not the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, as his widow, Coretta Scott King, had sought.

“Institutions love to be able to say they are the repository for very high name recognition collections,” said Lisa Browar, assistant director for rare books and manuscripts at the New York Public Library. “A donor doesn’t like to give money to an institution no one has ever heard of. . . . People like to be attached to success.”

The rivalry has a downside, most librarians agree. It can get expensive--so much so that in this era of dwindling funds, all but the richest libraries have retreated to the sidelines.

At its worst, competition can impede scholarship. Some writers’ papers are scattered around the globe. The papers of the poet Robert Lowell, for example, are split between Cambridge, Mass., and Austin, Tex.

Also, some institutions’ appetites have dwarfed their digestive capacities, leaving them with big backlogs of papers that will take years to process before they can be made available to the public.

“Everybody would say that competition is bad and that these kinds of institutions ought to cooperate with one another,” said James M. O’Toole, who runs an archives education program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Even so, he said, a lot of competition goes on.

There is nothing new about accumulating archives. For centuries, distinguished alumni and faculty have bequeathed papers to universities. But the urge to acquire, and the ability to do it, got a boost in the late 1950s and ‘60s with the infusion of post-Sputnik federal money into academia.

Literary papers became especially desirable. With scholars looking beyond the written word and into writers’ lives, librarians were asking authors “for the contents of their wastebasket,” said Patricia Willis of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

“If you wanted to be a respectable graduate department in English, one of the things you had to worry about was developing original materials,” said Holly Hall, head of special collections at Washington University in St. Louis. “Everybody was competing to do something unique and wonderful.”

The most ambitious and aggressive libraries have not necessarily been old and Eastern. Endowed with industrial fortunes, younger schools in America’s heartland have recognized the opportunity not just for scholarship but to make a name for themselves.

At the oil-rich University of Texas at Austin, administrator Harry Huntt Ransom said in 1958 that he wanted to build the school’s rare book collection into “a center of a cultural compass.” Ransom, who became chancellor a few years later, envisioned creating a collection comparable to the French national library in “the only state that started out as an independent nation.”

At Indiana University, J.K. Lilly Jr., a grandson of the founder of the Eli Lilly & Co., donated his book collection to what would become the Lilly Library, laying the groundwork for a major rare book collection in the state where he lived and where his company was located.

“People will learn the name of the university and of the state who might not otherwise have any contact with them,” said William R. Cagle, librarian at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Ind. “A good library is a good public relations tool for any university.”

Libraries primarily come by archives in two ways. The first, and the one they prefer, is by gift. The other is by purchase, either at auction or in quiet negotiations, usually through an intermediary.

One of the more colorful practitioners of the first method is Howard B. Gotlieb, Boston University’s director of special collections who during the last 30 years has reeled in hundreds of collections, despite the university’s inability or unwillingness to pay.

Gotlieb and his university have acquired a mixed reputation. One book dealer described him as “either very enterprising or a villain.” One publisher called Gotlieb’s employer “the big moocher. They’re after everybody for a freebie.”

“I only know of one way of securing a collection and that is to ask for it,” said Gotlieb, 67, whose conquests range from Martin Luther King Jr. to Dan Rather, Al Capp and Oriana Fallaci. “A certain rapport has to occur between the curator and the curatee, because what is more personal than your papers?”

It took Gotlieb 10 years to win over Bette Davis, he said. There were letters written and weekends spent at her homes in Connecticut and California. Christmas gifts and holiday greetings changed hands. “Finally, she said: ‘I give up. I can’t stand it anymore. The papers are yours.’ ”

As for Gloria Swanson, Gotlieb recalls visiting her in her “green marble palace,” dining on “macrobiotic foods . . . and cranberries and nuts and strange fruit.” Her collection was vast; Gotlieb wanted it badly. When she chose to send it to the University of Texas instead, he telephoned her immediately.

“She was very frank and candid and said: ‘They loved me more than you did,’ ” Gotlieb recalled. “And so I asked how that was expressed. She said they had purchased the collection from her. And that I couldn’t do. . . . So that was adoration expressed to the utmost.”

The price tag on such purchases is rarely made public. But the Lilly Library has about $700,000 a year to spend, librarian Cagle said. He has paid $75,000 to $500,000 for a collection. The University of Texas has paid $12,000 to $175,000 for the archives of individual authors during the last five years.

Such deals tend to be negotiated through a select group of rare book dealers who serve as matchmakers, cultivating relationships with writers as well as collectors. At the right moment--when desire to sell and ability to pay intersect--the dealer tries to bring about a perfect match.

George Robert Minkoff arranged the marriage of the New York Public Library and the young American author, Paul Auster, known for his dark, somewhat experimental novels. A dealer who has worked with William Burroughs and Czeslaw Milosz, among others, Minkoff approached Auster two years ago through a poet friend and asked if he were interested in selling.

Auster, then 44, had 20 years worth of papers. Not that he looked at them; he just could not throw them away. Closets and cupboards in his Brooklyn studio overflowed with paper, everything written in fountain pen. Faced with Minkoff’s offer, he figured, “Well, why not?”

“I thought, I don’t want to fossilize myself while I’m still breathing,” Auster said recently. “But when I looked at it, it was just paper--just boxes that I lugged around from one dwelling to another. And it didn’t seem to make much difference in the end.”

Minkoff told Auster it might take two months or two years to find a buyer. He performed an appraisal and came up with a price whose magnitude stunned Auster. “I said, ‘OK, fine. If that’s what you think you can get, more power to you,’ ” Auster said. “Then I more or less forgot about it.”

Within a few months, the library had bought the papers and carted them off to its subterranean stacks in mid-town Manhattan. Then, in an exhibition last fall on the history of the novel, the library included some of Auster’s papers relating to his book “City of Glass.”

“I went with my family. We were curious to see it,” Auster said. “It felt very good. I must say, I felt overwhelmed to be in the company of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. It was an extraordinary experience.”

Not all sales, however, go as smoothly or end as satisfactorily.

Rodney G. Dennis, curator emeritus of manuscripts at the Harvard College Library, spent 10 years negotiating for Robert Lowell’s papers. Although Lowell had close ties to Harvard, Dennis said, “he was nervous about selling--as many people are--fearing that if he tidied up, he would then die.”

Finally in 1970, Harvard paid Lowell $140,000 for the main corpus of his poetry and the right of first refusal on future manuscripts, Dennis said. But when Lowell died in 1977, his literary executors felt they had a duty to his estate to get the best price on the remaining papers, Dennis said.

“All of a sudden, the estate began quoting higher and higher prices,” Dennis said. When the bidding reached $200,000, Dennis said, he dropped out. As a result, Lowell’s earlier papers are at Harvard and his later ones at the University of Texas.

Another “most dreadful failure,” Dennis said, involved the papers of Elizabeth Bishop, which Dennis hoped to install next to those of her friend, Lowell. After months of negotiating, sometimes over soup in Bishop’s apartment on Boston’s waterfront, Dennis said, they finally agreed on a price.

Bishop died a week later. Dennis had nothing in writing. And Bishop’s alma mater, Vassar College, also wanted the papers. Her literary executor, Alice Methfessel, said she calculated what the estate would need to cover taxes, and based the asking price for the papers on that.

“Harvard had some kind of capital fund-raising campaign, so every boat was on its bottom,” Methfessel said. Dennis could not raise his offer. The president of Vassar, on the other hand, “ran around and raised it.” In the end, Methfessel said, “it got down to a matter of money.”

Institutions use other enticements to endear themselves to potential donors. The New York Public Library has Tom Wolfe and Toni Morrison on its board. Libraries have gone to great pains to arrange and exhibit collections on loan in hopes of winning them permanently.

Even politics has been known to play a role in deciding where archives end up.

Upton Sinclair is said to have offered his papers to the Huntington Library in San Marino. But former President Herbert Hoover, a board member, reportedly said he did not want “that damn Socialist” in his library. So the writer’s works went to Indiana.

And the papers of John Muir were transferred from UC Berkeley to the University of the Pacific in Stockton in the late 1960s when anti-war protesters stoned the library in which they were stored, causing the naturalist’s family to fear for the papers’ safety.

In recent years, the academic budget crunch has slowed the scramble, although half a dozen to a dozen institutions remain active in the market. In addition, changes in tax laws have stopped writers from claiming large deductions for donated papers.

Louis Weinstein, a partner in the Heritage Bookshop in Los Angeles, said he is holding a large Alex Haley archive valued at $75,000. According to Weinstein, five or six institutions are interested, but none can afford it.

Hard times are forcing cooperation, library directors say. When money is short, competition seems wasteful. They say they increasingly defer to each others’ areas of specialization, and even turn down offers of desirable papers to refer them to libraries where they would fit in better.

There are limits, of course.

Take Dr. Seuss. Highlights from the collection of Theodor Geisel, who wrote under the pen name Dr. Seuss, went on display in May at UC San Diego--the place chosen by Geisel and his wife, Audrey, before his death in 1991 as the home for the last two decades worth of Seuss papers.

That decision disappointed officials at UCLA, which has its own Seuss collection from the years up to the early 1970s. UCLA considers that collection the cornerstone of its 20th-Century children’s literature archive and was eager to see it completed.

According to Audrey Geisel, her husband had given UCLA his papers from a period when the Geisels lived in Hollywood. After moving to La Jolla and coming to know people at UC San Diego, Geisel decided that he wanted his papers housed there.

Audrey Geisel asked UCLA if it would hand over its collection to UC San Diego in the interest of keeping the collection intact. UCLA politely declined. But as a compromise, the heads of special collections at the schools have agreed to lend each other Seuss materials when necessary.

“I don’t think that any of us are ever going to get over our innate sense of competitiveness” about a collection, Lisa Browar of the New York Public Library mused recently. “I think that’s human nature. But I do think there is more of a relaxed feeling (these days) that, well, at least it went to a good home.”