Page 129 - The Secret Museum

Gordon, who would become a friend of Albert Berg, acquired Virginia Woolf’s

papers in 1958. He took them home with him and laid them out on the living room
floor so that he and his family could have a good read through them all.

Isaac is in charge today, and he would never do such a thing. ‘That was a different
time,’ he said. ‘Today we have works, printed and manuscript, by over 400 authors,
with manuscripts and letters by and to Trollope, Keats, Wordsworth, Conrad, Hardy
and Yeats, and the largest collection of Virginia Woolf and Auden papers in the
world.’ They even have Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, which was found in the river
after she had drowned herself.

The Berg Collection is still growing: ‘We have the papers of Annie Proulx, Paul

Auster and my favourite author, Vladimir Nabokov.’ I told Isaac I’d seen Nabokov’s
butterfly cabinet at Harvard University, and he said, ‘Oh yes, we have most of the
journals he annotated and his scientific drawings of butterflies.’

I was interested to know what happens with modern authors, because surely so
many first drafts are now on computer hard drives, and so many letters are sent by
email. ‘Paul Auster tends to type letters and fax them, and keep the faxed copy, so the
library has his outgoing and incoming letters, which is unusual. For several authors
we have some floppy disks containing emails, and sometimes we get printouts of

emails as well’.
Everything is stored safely in the Berg vaults, except for material relating to the

brothers’ two favourite writers – Thackeray and Dickens – and of course the letter
opener made from the paw of Dickens’s beloved cat Bob.

I asked Isaac what his favourite things are? ‘If the whole place were on fire and I
could rescue only one item, I would probably save T. S. Eliot’s typescript of The
Waste Land, with his annotations on it, because of its monumental status in the
history of English literature. I also love William Blake and if permitted a second
object I’d save his Songs of Innocence and Experience with its beautiful
watercolours – created using a technique of relief etching which he devised, he said,

through instructions given to him in a vision of his dead brother. Or maybe works by
Nabokov…’