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The New York Times had a really about Knopf’s archives at the University of Texas. It details some of the authors and books they’ve rejected:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader���Ĵ�ý�s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (���Ĵ�ý�utterly untranslatable���Ĵ�ý�), Isaac Bashevis Singer (���Ĵ�ý�It���Ĵ�ý�s Poland and the rich Jews again���Ĵ�ý�), Anaïs Nin (���Ĵ�ý�There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic���Ĵ�ý�), Sylvia Plath (���Ĵ�ý�There certainly isn���Ĵ�ý�t enough genuine talent for us to take notice���Ĵ�ý�) and Jack Kerouac (���Ĵ�ý�His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don���Ĵ�ý�t think so���Ĵ�ý�). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov���Ĵ�ý�s ���Ĵ�ý�Lolita���Ĵ�ý� (too racy) and James Baldwin���Ĵ�ý�s ���Ĵ�ý�Giovanni���Ĵ�ý�s Room���Ĵ�ý� (���Ĵ�ý�hopelessly bad���Ĵ�ý�).

This rejection note is definitely the highlight though, and writing something like this is the dream of everyone who has ever had to wade through the slush pile:

���Ĵ�ý�This time there���Ĵ�ý�s no point in trying to be kind,���Ĵ�ý� it said. ���Ĵ�ý�Your manuscript is utterly hopeless as a candidate for our list. I never thought the subject worth a damn to begin with and I don���Ĵ�ý�t think it���Ĵ�ý�s worth a damn now. Lay off, MacDuff.���Ĵ�ý�