Reggae historian Roger Steffens has offered to sell his world-famous archives to Jamaican interests at “an incredibly discounted price” after negotiations with businessman Josef Bogdanovich fell through last year.

Steffens and Bogdanovich were in talks for several years for the latter to purchase the vast collection, which is at Steffens’ Los Angeles home.

In July 2024 Bogdanovich told the Jamaica Observer that a deal was sealed, but in an interview with the
Voice Of The Nation show on June 13, Steffens said negotiations folded in March last year.

“I’m giving Jamaica one last shot at achieving possession of my archives. I have other people who are very seriously interested in purchasing the archives, and before I sign a deal with them — knowing that the collection would go to another country and not Jamaica — I am offering it once more at an incredibly discounted price if you promise to keep it intact forever and make it available to the public,” Steffens told Jermaine Vernal, host of Voice Of The Nation, which airs weekly on TikTok.

He did not disclose names of the parties interested in purchasing the archives, which occupy seven rooms at his Hollywood home. Neither did Steffens state the cost of the collection, which he has been accumulating since 1973.

Speculation that the archives would be purchased by Jamaicans have circulated for many years. At one stage it was reported that billionaire Michael Lee-Chin was showing strong interest, but the closest to sealing a deal has been Los Angeles-born Bogdanovich, head of Downsound Entertainment and owner of Reggae Sumfest.

“Of all the people who have tried to buy this collection for the past 37 years, he [Bogdanovich] is the most qualified to do all the things necessary to preserve and promote it, and to return this history to Jamaica without any political control,” Steffens told Variety Magazine in 2024.

The archives, according to Steffens, comprises “all kinds of artefacts, posters, paintings, artwork, piles of CDs, buttons, and all kinds of Marley material”. There are also many recorded interviews he conducted with noted reggae figures, including Marley who he met in 1979 when the singer toured California.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Steffens discovered Jamaican pop culture in 1973 after reading a feature story on the rising Marley in Rolling Stone Magazine. Three years later he travelled to Jamaica for the first time and discovered a music scene comparable to the hippie movement in San Francisco during the late 1960s.

Steffens has written several books on reggae and Marley, who died from cancer in 1981 at age 36.

Wailer and Peter Tosh, his colleagues in The Wailers, have visited his archives as well as Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, Carlos Santana, Oliver Stone, and Leonardo DiCaprio.