[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Major Variola ret) writes:
> 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.
