• by Sara Guaglione , November 9, 2015

Time Inc. will donate its archive of an estimated 7 million documents and artifacts to the New York Historical Society.

The archive contains documents dating back to 1898, and includes materials from Time Inc.’s publications, such as Time, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, People and Time-Life Books.

The publishing company will provide the resources to researchers and historians as it prepares to move downtown, relocating from the iconic Time-Life building this year.

The archive also includes the personal papers of Time Inc.’s founders, Henry R. Luce (1898–1967) and Briton Hadden (1898–1927), as well as successive Time Inc. leaders. Luce corresponded with important public figures, such as Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.

Norman Pearlstine, the chief content officer of Time Inc., said the decision to donate the archive came from a desire to make the documents accessible to the public.

“With the move down to Liberty Street, we thought it would be even more difficult to give the kind of space and attention we thought the collection deserved,” he said.

Other institutions expressed interest, but Time Inc. decided to go with the New York Historical Society.

“As Time Inc. begins its next chapter, moving on from the Time & Life Building, our home for the past 55 years, we are pleased to donate our archive to an extraordinary institution ... I can't imagine a more natural, more appropriate repository for our vast collection,” he stated.

In May, Time Inc. announced that it will move its offices out of the Time-Life building in Midtown and head downtown to Brookfield Place in late 2014.

The relocation comes as parent company Time Warner decided to turn Time into a separate, publicly traded company on June 6, 2014, Variety reported.

In that same month, Pearlstine called up Louise Mirrer, the president of the New York Historical Society, to offer the archive to the research library.

“As a record of the 20th century, Time Inc.’s archive will be an invaluable resource for generations to come, revealing how our city, our country, and our world changed during the period,” added Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society.

“Time Inc.’s gift gives us the 20th century in a box, allowing our institution to preserve a sense of how the news was compiled and reported before the digital age,” she added.

The Luce Foundation will provide the resources to process, move and store the materials. The new gallery dedicated to Time Inc.’s archive will include items from Muhammad Ali’s boxing robe and gloves to a copy of "Wealth of Nations" inscribed to Edmund Burke and signed by Adam Smith, Mirrer said.