I was very much touched by your kind suggestions about my Nabokov video tapes. However, I am afraid I have been misunderstood. My concern was not money but preservation. I had long been looking for a safe depository for those tapes, some "focal" library or archive that is likely to preserve them and that will let everybody seriously interested view them. There would be no point, for instance, in giving them to some Berlin library that has a Nabokov collection but no video equipment, or to a local archive like that of the Berlin Academy of the Arts where nobody would ever suspect them. I had contacted the obvious American libraries, and they had refused because they did not want to incur the costs of handling and shipping. Asking them for a minimal contribution was a kind of test. I had taken their refusal to mean that they are not really interested in the material, and if they are not interested, I am afraid they will neither preserve it nor ever make it accessible. Even if I shipped it to them free of charge, they would not do it. That's exactly what happened a few years ago when I made video copies and personally handed them to the video department of the LoC. They had said they wanted them and sent me a standard thank you letter, but a few months later all the material had disappeared and never turned up again.

The legal aspects are quite clear. All the material is copyrighted. The copyright owners are the tv stations or chains that produced and broadcast the interviews and documentaries. It would take an international copyright athlete to get their permission for a joint publication of the material. You never get anything from them unless you buy it at their exorbitant rates. Frankly, I think that is out of the question. So the material may not be used publicly and commercially in any way. It consists of private recordings I either made myself or had friends make for me. Such recordings are perfectly legal, but they may be used privately only. To my knowledge there is no general international definition so far as to what constitutes "private use". In Germany it seems to be the plurality of viewers. I may look at the material myself, and I may show it to others, but only to one at a time. In the U.S., the situation seems to be more or less the same. The LoC owns a lot of copyrighted video material. When I wanted to view some of it a few years ago, I had to fill in an application stating my purposes, and when they were approved, I had to have a date, a booth and an operator reserved. Of course, I could not make any copies of what I saw. I guess these will be the terms of usage about everywhere.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.