Donor of Ayn Rand Manuscript, U.S. Are Not on the Same Page
Dispute: Giver saved a portion of 'The
Fountainhead' manuscript as a memento. It is seized.
By BOB POOL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Ayn Rand wrote the book on the chasm between
personal happiness
and a heavy-handed government. Leonard Peikoff
illustrated it.
That's how Rand fans say the empty picture frame on
Peikoff's wall
figures into the fight over two pages of her
original handwritten
manuscript of "The Fountainhead."
Federal officials seized the pages after Peikoff
joked that he "stole"
them from the Library of Congress. Peikoff, a
writer and philosopher,
was a lifelong friend of Rand and is an expert on
her philosophy of
objectivism, which teaches that individuals--not
the government--are
the key to the development of a healthy society. He
inherited the
scrawled first drafts of "The Fountainhead," "Atlas
Shrugged" and two
other books when she died in 1982.
Eleven years ago he donated the manuscripts and
other Rand papers
to the Library of Congress. For sentimental
reasons, he said, he kept
the first and last pages of "The Fountainhead" and
sent photocopies to
Washington with the remainder of the manuscript.
Peikoff displayed
the original pages under a spotlight on the wall of
his Irvine home.
The groundbreaking 1943 novel helped define Rand's
philosophy.
Part of that doctrine contends that man's pursuit
of self-interest
requires government's willingness to step out of
the way.
But it is Peikoff who said he was forced to step
aside when a government agent showed up at his
front door in January. The official cut Rand's
manuscript pages from his picture frame and
confiscated them as federal property.
The irony of the seizure is not lost on Rand
devotees.
"Ayn Rand, I feel sure, would have said: 'The whole
case is another outrage by looting
bureaucrats so drunk with power that they must
possess and flaunt even the very pages in which I
have denounced them,'" Peikoff said.
Yaron Brook, head of the Marina del Rey-based Ayn
Rand Institute, agreed. "Ayn Rand
portrayed the government as never happy with the
power it has. The bureaucrats always want to
take more."
Peikoff, 68, became acquainted with Rand in 1951
after reading "The Fountainhead" as a
17-year-old.
"It had changed my life," he said. "I took the
train from Winnipeg, Canada, and went to her house
in Chatsworth to meet her."
Soon, he was among those who would have 10-hour
philosophical discussions with the
Russian-born author.
Rand embraced Peikoff's work when he began
interpreting her philosophy in his own writings.
Eventually, she wrote the introduction and reviewed
each chapter of his book on objectivism,
"The Ominous Parallels." It analyzed the
philosophical causes of Nazism and their parallels in
contemporary America.
Peikoff's decision to donate Rand's papers to the
Library of Congress came after he was
hospitalized in 1991 with a heart attack. Years
earlier Rand had talked of sending them there. So
Peikoff had an assistant load 11 boxes of
manuscripts, proofs and other documents and ship them
off--minus the original first and last pages of
"The Fountainhead."
Peikoff said he later sent a private appraiser to
Washington to attest to the value of the Rand
papers and to tell officials that two of the
"Fountainhead" pages were copies. The appraiser
reported back to him that the library didn't care,
Peikoff said.
But in 1998 Peikoff was interviewed for a Los
Angeles Times Magazine article about a
resurgence of interest in Rand's work. The
interviewer spied the framed manuscript pages on the
wall and was taken by the famous opening paragraph
written in Rand's own hand: "Howard
Roark laughed."
Peikoff explained that he had given the 2,158-page
"Fountainhead" manuscript to the Library of
Congress. "But I stole the first and last pages,"
he added with a laugh. The throwaway line was
included in the lengthy magazine article published
Aug. 16, 1998.
Library officials weren't laughing when they read
the piece. They demanded the missing
"Fountainhead" pages, claiming them to be property
of the U.S. government.
When Peikoff refused to turn them over, officials
threatened to sue him for $1.1 million--the
amount the library had spent "in storing, archiving
and preserving the manuscript" in the belief it
was the complete original.
Peikoff scoffed at the claim. If library officials
had even looked at the documents, they would have
noticed the obviously photocopied pages and the
appraiser's report, he said.
After he hired a lawyer, library officials offered
to let Peikoff temporarily keep the two pages,
provided that he post a $30,000 bond and place a
sign on his home's wall beneath the frame
reading: "On Loan From the Library of Congress." He
declined.
His lawyer told Peikoff that he probably would win
the lawsuit, but warned that the outcome was
far from certain under the theory of "promissory
estoppel" that courts often use in cases involving
gifts.
"I'm 68 and a heart patient and could not accept
the prospect of being further weakened
physically by the stress, and perhaps even
bankrupted in a fight against what is now, it seems, a
virtually omnipotent government," Peikoff said. "I
capitulated ... this was the payment I received
from the Library of Congress for my gift."
Library officials denied being heavy-handed. They
said Peikoff signed an "instrument of gift" giving
the government ownership of Rand's papers and a
letter confirming that he had sent "the complete
materials."
"The library did not know that Dr. Peikoff had kept
two pages of the manuscript. The library
relied on Dr. Peikoff's presentations that the
manuscripts were complete," officials said in a federal
court complaint.
But George Houle, a West Los Angeles rare book
expert who traveled in 1991 to Washington to
appraise Peikoff's donation, said he informed
officials that two of the "Fountainhead" pages were
photocopies.
"The appraisal made note of the fact they were
facsimiles," Houle said. "His remark about
'stealing' them was clearly flippant. He didn't go
to the Library of Congress and steal them."
Houle said he was surprised by the library's
treatment of the Rand papers during his inspection
trip. "The librarian had them in a cardboard box.
She almost spit on them. She was not a fan of
Ayn Rand. She made some disparaging remarks about
Ayn Rand," Houle said.
Library of Congress spokeswoman Helen Dalrymple
denied that the librarian mistreated the Rand
materials or looked upon them with disdain. The
library had sought Rand's papers for years,
Dalrymple said. And Houle did not tell her
colleagues of the photocopies, she said.
Dalrymple asserted that Peikoff's treatment of the
two pages he withheld was not the best,
however.
"From being in the frame the ink had faded and the
paper had turned a different color," she said.
Peikoff, meantime, vowed to never again give
anything to the Library of Congress. And he said he
has given up on ever seeing his beloved manuscript
pages again.
