Have you experienced the thrill of seeing original manuscripts by your favourite author or of a favourite book? I certainly have … the most memorable for me, of course, being some pages from Jane Austen‘s Persuasion. But such personal thrill isn’t the only value to be gained through having access to original manuscripts. Scholars love to analyse the progress of a writer’s work to better understand the work and/or the writer. Where would Charles Dickens or TS Eliot scholars be, for example, without the manuscript of, say, Oliver Twist or The wasteland? Marie-Thérèse Varlamoff and Sara Gould writing for UNESCO say

As a visit to the manuscript department of any of the great national libraries of the world will testify, the hand-written manuscript can reveal much more about the life and state of mind of the writer than any electronic document can ever do. Marcel Proust’s “paperoles“, the small pieces of paper which his servant wrote under dictation because he was too ill to write himself, contain many handwritten corrections in the margins, and are of major importance for all those who study the genesis of Proust’s literary creation. Victor Hugo’s splendid handwriting and the amazing and powerful drawings he used to draw in the margins of the pale blue paper he favoured, are similarly full of historical significance.

But, things are changing … we are now in the age of electronic (or digital) communication … and it’s not all bad …

Digitisation has been a boon for scholars. Sure, the ideal will always be to see an original manuscript, but that’s not always possible … and in these cases a digitised (scanned) version will often do the job. I love the fact that I can see Ezra Pound’s annotations on TS Eliot’s original manuscript (typescript) of The Wasteland on my app. For a scholar, a digitised version of an author’s manuscript will often suffice at the start of his/her research even if later on the original must be sighted. Digitised versions of manuscripts are regular features now of museum displays with touch screen and other technologies added in to enhance the experience. We take all this for granted. We expect to have access to anything we want in digital version …

But, along with the pluses come the minuses as Marie-Thérèse Varlamoff and Sara Gould continue:

How can the successive versions of a novel for example, or the progression or changes in an author’s thoughts, be studied in future, when the only permanent record may be a diskette containing the final version. No draft, no hesitation, no drawings or doodles. No doubt either that those who will study literary history or the genesis of a book will be at a loss.

Enter Max Barry. On his blog recently, he described how he has retained the whole edit history of his novel Machine man, which means readers can “browse to any particular page and see how it evolved from something to nothing”. He gives examples on his blog of how he worked on this novel and how the edit history looks. Click on this link to go to an example page. In the date bar above the text you’ll see a little arrow pointing to V2 (that’s Version 2 of course). Click on that to go to Version 2, and you will see a similar little arrow for V3 … and so on. Once you’ve mastered that, you can read the final serial version of the novel on the blog and, whenever the spirit moves you, you can click on a tiny icon at the top of the page to bring up and explore the entire version/edit history.

This is what libraries (archives/museums) now need (want) to collect … and this is what they’ll be challenged to preserve into the future. No longer will the challenge be to stop the ink from fading and the paper from deteriorating. No, it will be migrating the file so that no information is lost and so that the hardware and software of the day will be able to read documents produced under obsolete technologies. The principle is the same: collect, preserve and make available a writer’s work and process. The practices for achieving this with electronic/digital documents, though, is a whole new ball-game, and one that libraries (et al) are facing right now.

Max writes:

I’m not sure what use this is to anybody, other than for exposing my writerly fumblings in an even more humiliating manner than I’ve already done. But it was POSSIBLE, so I have DONE IT.