Eyes on Stalks: a Day with the Archives

Last Friday, I submitted an article.  Yesterday, I did the minor edits for an accepted article and dispatched that, too.

And today, I headed to Edinburgh and resumed my archival pursuits.  The city was initially bathed in golden sunshine, though this didn’t even last until lunchtime.  It is certainly a very beautiful city.

Unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t imagine how many brown folders of thin carbon copies will fit into an archival box. Carbon copies are as thin as airmail writing paper.  The bulk of this particular box consists of NINETEEN folders of rejection letters just for one year,  1948.

You might think I didn’t need to concern myself about books they didn’t publish,  but you never know what snippets about publishing policy or the economic climate – or anything else! – might turn up.  (And you’d be surprised at the number of would-be authors who didn’t take a definite refusal AS a definite refusal, but kept writing to argue their case!)

‘Do Forward the Bathing Costume’

That was an unexpected postscript, in one of the letters that wasn’t a rejection.  The publisher and author had evidently gone to the swimming baths, and the author went home without his trunks! Irrelevant, but it’s undoubtedly evidence they were on friendly terms, isn’t it?

I did discover – unneccessarily, but amusingly – that in the late nineteenth century, the managing director of this publishing house used to go open-air swimming in Leith before work in the summer. Clearly the tradition had either continued, or been revived, with the opening of the Portobello open-air pool in 1936 …