The Archives

When Leonard Cohen died in 2016, he left a treasure trove of notebooks, recordings, manuscripts, and other materials that had previously been inaccessible to anyone but the artist himself. Unlike some other rock stars, Cohen has not been represented by bootleg recordings, and his written records have appeared only to the extent that he has sometimes published excerpts from them. Thus, the archives, when they are available to scholars and journalists, will be a significant boon to our understanding of the man and his creations. The concluding chapter of this volume both offers a survey of the Cohen archives – real and virtual – and provides some sense of how they might change our understanding of Cohen and his work.