#archival library

Howdy y’all! Just got back from a trip to Austin, Texas. At the University of Texas, I visited the Harry Ransom Center, a major archival research library.

Windows featuring highlights of the archives. Alice is here because the Ransom Center has a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one of only 23 known surviving copies.

While I didn’t see any correspondence at the Ransom Center, Lovely Handwritten Notes sprang to mind when I came across an interesting case in handwriting.  

Last year, the Ransom Center acquired the archive of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (This archive has over 2,000 pieces of correspondence, including letters from Carlos Fuentes and Graham Greene.) During my visit, some books and documents were on display related to Marquez’s development as a writer. One of the items was a 1950′s notebook belonging to Jorge Luis Borges. It had the most naturally tiny handwriting I’ve ever seen! I can’t find a picture of the notebook online, but here’s one from another notebook of his:

The notebook I saw was unlined, and he wrote just as straight! Brown ink, very upright letters as seen here.

I commented to a friend that Borges must have soon gone blind, not knowing that he did! Borges started losing his eyesight in the mid-1950s. (His handwriting, however, was not to blame. His father suffered the same condition before him.) The 1960′s Borges poem in the display case beside the notebook didn’t look like it was written by the same person:

I find this fascinating because handwriting is normally a precise expression of personality, but with older-Borges, the content of his writing and the writing itself are incongruous. The author is not the unconfident, depressed pre-teen I’d guess he was just judging by his later handwriting, but someone who would describe “...the mystic alphabet of stars/Leading my pen over the page...” (English translation from poem above).

Found this on a great blog, Literary Stamps, where there’s a whole page of Borges postage!

For actual correspondence at the Ransom Center, you might start with this article on illustrated letters!