After several days of work I have managed to migrate the data from a 116 page MS Word table which lists all of the British Library's (BL) Wallace correspondence, into the Project's Access database. This table was produced by our previous Archivist Anna Mayer, who visited the BL numerous times in order to carefully thumb through and catalogue all of their Wallace letters. Our database now holds records for a grand total of 3100 letters. Of these 1200 are deposited in the NHM and 1600 are in the BL. I guesstimate that we 'only' have about 900 published and unpublished letters still to catalogue, so we are not doing too badly! One interesting fact is that the 3100 letters we have catalogued so far were written by about 1100 different people! I wonder how many people are known to have corresponded with Darwin? I'll have to check the Darwin Correspondence Project's website and report back*..
*I checked and Darwin is known to have corresponded with 2000 people - see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2009/Features/WTX055299.htm
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