When the Fair's Records arrived at the Library in 1941, they amounted to ten tons of paper generated by the Fair's administration, which had spread over five huge floors of the Empire State Building. Correspondence, press clippings, autographs, financial documents, contracts, photographs, memos, drawings, architectural plans, memorabilia, and much more paint a picture of the totality of the amazingly ambitious venture, capturing the inner workings of the World's Fair Corporation as if frozen in time. Contemporary researchers are presented with a model of the record keeping system of a typical pre-World War II office, dominated by the file clerk, the stenographer, the carbon duplicator, and the mimeograph machine — now, perhaps ironically, all parts of "The World of the Past."