In his book — which included facsimiles of McCune's art and transcriptions of his letters, along with mug shots and prison reports on him and other inmates — Lyon wrote, "Sometimes I would get as many as three envelopes a week, and sometimes only two in a month.
The Darwin Correspondence Project aims to provide online access to transcriptions of all letters by Darwin and all those he received.
As in the print volumes, the web site presents transcriptions of the letters, the original copies of which are held in archives of Darwin correspondence all over the world, primarily at Cambridge University Library in England and the American Philosophical Society library in Philadelphia.3.3
"Hapworth," to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.
This phenomenon can be traced back to Roman times, when members of the elite kept each other informed with a torrent of letters, transcriptions of speeches and copies of the acta diurna, the official gazette that was posted in the forum each day.
"It activated something he was very good at but that he never used," said Mr. Vo, who asked his father to send an original transcription of the letter to anyone requesting it for 100 euros and to archive all the exchanges.
(Read a transcription of the letter below).
We get transcriptions of his calls and letters to Rose.
The biographer writing the life of a person recently dead is often faced with the opposite problem: an abundance of living witnesses and a plethora of materials, which include the subject's papers and letters, sometimes transcriptions of telephone conversations and conferences, as well as the record of interviews granted to the biographer by the subject's friends and associates.
And letters, lots of letters.
