Warhol's Time Capsules

Warhol’s Time Capsules were a serial archive of the everyday: Warhol sorted the letters, invitations, gifts, and magazines arriving at his office, placing most of them in dated cardboard boxes for storage. The practice turned an unending stream of social and business material into a record, while the diary made from his daily accounts preserved another, carefully mediated trace of the same life.

The Office and the Box

Warhol’s routine brought him to the office on 860 Broadway between one and three in the afternoon. After checking appointments, returning calls, and drinking carrot juice or tea, he opened the day’s mail and decided what belonged in a Time Capsule. Each capsule was a brown cardboard box measuring 10 by 18 by 14 inches; once filled, it was sealed, dated, and put into storage, and an identical empty box took its place.

The sorting rule was strikingly inclusive. Warhol kept for himself or gave away less than one percent of the things people sent or gave him. Almost everything else was “for the box”: material he considered interesting, a category broad enough to mean virtually everything. The capsules were thus not a narrow collection of prized objects but a method for retaining the ordinary abundance surrounding his work and social life.

A Practice of Accumulation

The boxes belonged to a working environment that changed names and addresses without losing its central role in Warhol’s activity. In 1968, the Factory moved to a mirrored loft on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. By the summer of 1974 it had moved again, to the third floor of 860 Broadway; Warhol told the receptionists to stop answering the phone with “Factory,” which he thought had become too corny, and the place was thereafter simply “the office.” It was there that the daily stream of mail could be sorted into capsules.

The office was also the base of Interview, the magazine that became a major source of activity for Warhol. In 1975 he bought out Peter Brant and became its full owner and publisher, with Fred Hughes as president. Warhol, who had previously remained fairly removed from the magazine’s day-to-day work, began visiting to review layouts and pitch advertisers over lunch. The Time Capsules and Interview occupied the same world of arrivals, printed matter, correspondence, and ongoing business, though the evidence describes the boxes as an archival practice rather than as a publication project.

From Daily Accounts to Diary

The capsules were one form of keeping material; the diary was another, built through a daily exchange between Warhol and Pat Hackett. Hackett had previously kept a sketchy Factory log based on business visitors and accounts of the previous night’s events, gathered from several people. Its purpose was to establish what had happened and how much Warhol had spent, not to give his personal view. In 1976, after Hackett left the office but agreed to continue working on Popism, the two decided that Warhol himself would provide the daily accounts. The log thereby became his personal narrative.

Beginning in the fall of 1976, Hackett called Warhol on weekday mornings, usually around nine and never later than 9:30. Their conversations could last one or two hours, although Warhol called the arrangement a five-minute-a-day job. He reported his activities and cash expenses in detail, including ten-cent calls from street payphones; the exactness also served his concern about the Internal Revenue Service, which had audited his business repeatedly since its first major audit in 1972. Hackett took notes and typed the entries soon after each call, while the details and Warhol’s intonations remained fresh. She attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts to the typed pages and stored them in stationery-store letter boxes.

The diary followed a weekday rhythm: weekends were not recorded as separate calls, but on Monday Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday together. When he traveled, he might call Hackett from away, read her notes he had made on hotel stationery, or occasionally provide a tape. No day was left out of the record, and Warhol might also call later to add or correct something and ask Hackett to put it in the diary. The resulting account was collaborative in its making: Warhol supplied the recollections, while Hackett transcribed, organized, and preserved them.

Preservation and Editorial Selection

The published diary was not the whole archive. Hackett says the original ran to 20,000 pages and that she distilled it into what she considered its best and most representative material. She sometimes removed whole days or weeks and more often cut portions of individual days; an account of five parties might be reduced to one. She also removed many names to avoid turning the book into a stream of social-column listings. These omissions were not marked in the text.

Hackett further removed personal references that belonged specifically to the exchange between her and Warhol. In the few instances retained, she recast herself in the third person as PH, aiming to let the reader occupy the position of the person on the other end of the morning call. The book therefore presents an intimate daily voice, but one shaped by selection, transcription, and editorial decisions. The Time Capsules preserve the physical surplus of Warhol’s world; the diary preserves an account of its movement through time, in a form deliberately reduced from its much larger source.