The Smithsonians Archives of American Art has spent more than a half-century collecting and cataloguing material related to the lives of people who have worked in the arts. Today, its holdings include 16 million items divided into 5,800 collections, as well more than 2,000 transcriptions of oral histories conducted with pivotal art-world figures from collector Giuseppe Panza to conceptual artist Richard Pettibone, sculptor Carl Andre to gallerist Virginia Zabriskie.

Within its vast archives are various odds and ends, discarded scraps of paper bearing art-world denizens’ sketches, notes, shopping lists, and love letters, filled with enough surprises to occupy dozens of scholars. AAA manuscript curator Liza Kirwin has dug through that detritus and honed in on some of the most remarkable lists in the archive, which she has collected in a new book, Lists: To-Dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists, published earlier this year by Princeton Architectural Press.

Kirwin’s lists run from the profound — like architect Eero Saarinens note of his lover Aline Bernsteins 12 great qualities (“First I recognized you were very clever,” it begins) — to the humorously quotidian, like Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Klines liquor store receipt documenting a formidable alcohol purchase. The book allows readers to peer in on the day-to-day operations of some of the century’s most storied and successful galleries, including to-do lists for New York dealers Paula Cooper and the late Leo Castelli, whose organizational prowess helped secured his artist’s place in history.

The book’s lists, which span the 20th century, also chart America’s fast rise from its position at the beginning of the century as a sleepy cultural backwater, from which young artists fled for bustling Paris, where they were able to acquire a vanguard art education. Such was the case of sculptor Alexander Calder, who departed from the City of Lights in the mid-1920s, hoping to find his way as an artist. As this page from his address book, dating from around 1930 and included in Kirwin’s compendium, shows [click the images and left to view an enlarged versions of the pages], the young artist quickly fell in with an illustrious group.

Looking closely, one can spot the names and addresses of German-French sculptor Hans Arp, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, American composer George Antheil, and German photographer Ilse Bing, among other artists and patrons who would serve as important influences on the young artist. When he returned to America in the 1930s, the New York art scene was beginning to brim with an ambition that would fully emerge after the war, reversing the cultural polarity between New York and Paris so definitively that by the 1970s art historian Lucy Lippard could declare the latter had become “so dull and irrelevant to new art there’s a feeling that it can be bypassed.”