By George Beccaloni, November 2023
The Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) has not only catalogued and obtained images of all of Wallace's known correspondence, but also all of his other surviving manuscripts, artwork etc, plus important documents written by family members. There are a total of 476 of these 'non-letter' manuscripts and while the project has produced preliminary transcripts of all the letters (which are available online in EPSILON), most for the other manuscripts have not been transcribed. Many of them contain important information about his life and work, such as about the specimens he collected, lists of names and addresses of his friends and colleagues, details of his accounts, and much more besides. They are the last part of his writings (published and unpublished) to be transcribed and made available online, apart from his annotations in books (his marginalia). Thanks to the efforts of hard working volunteers the remaining manuscripts are now being transcribed, and ultimately a pdf catalogue of the manuscripts will be published, containing hyperlinks to the transcribed text, plus images of the documents if these are available online.
Without volunteers the WCP would not have been possible, especially at the present time when the project does not have a grant. Big thanks also go to SeaTrek Sailing Adventures, for donations which enable George Beccaloni, the project's Director, to spend a day a week working on the project (e.g. answering email enquiries, finding letters new to the project, cataloguing new letters, managing the work of volunteers etc). George lectures on Wallace-related boutique cruises on SeaTrek's ship Ombak Putih in Indonesia four times a year. Click HERE for more information.
For more information about the manuscipts in question please see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/wallaces-notebooks-etc
The image to the right is a page from one of Wallace's field notebooks, which is one of the manuscripts being transcribed. Photo is copyright of Fred Langford-Edwards
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