Just read that a whole treasure trove of Patrick White’s drafts, manuscripts and notes, some 24 boxes worth, have been bought by the National Library (Update: See press release). I love David Marr’s description of the collection: “literary treasure”, and “the El Dorado of Australian libraries since the 1960s. Many had asked for them. All had been rebuffed.”
I’d love to see these papers. There is something compelling (to me) about looking at the handwritten ruminations, the notes, the doodles of someone famous. (Left: Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting. The pen geek in me ponders the ink Lincoln would have used, what sort of nib, how often did he use a blotter?)
And then there’s handwriting in Chinese which is even more intriguing to me. Mainly because I find so much of it impossible to decipher! (Right: Mao Zedong’s handwriting.)
I can’t help but wonder, now that so much stuff is done online, how much of anything will remain for biographers, historians and researchers to find of people writing today.
Assuming we even retain the capacity to read material held on all sorts of disks and drives, what will we see?
This makes me a little sad.
I’ve said before, haven’t I, that I wish I could handwrite this blog and publish it in my handwriting? (Yes, I did, on 28 June 2005: “What would make blogging perfect for me would be if I could actually write, and post, my entries in fountain pen. Yeh, I know it’s completely illogical! “)
