By George Beccaloni, December 2023
During 2023 I located 100+ letters to and from Wallace which the Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) didn't previously know about. I am fairly sure that hundreds remain to be found in the archives of libraries and other institutions worldwide, but tracking them down will require a lot more time-consuming detective work. As an example of how we find 'new' letters, here is a brief account of work I did today which MAY have found four:
Our new volunteer Christine Chua, recently transcribed a typewritten list, probably produced after Wallace's death by his son William, who wanted to sell the books in Wallace's library. It is entitled "Dr A. R. Wallace's Library. List of the principal books" and images of the document can be seen in the WCP's old and largely defunct website Wallace Letters Online - see HERE I saw on the list that 17 of the books contained letters from the authors to Wallace, so I decided to check whether or not we had copies of them. I knew that Wallace's library was bought by Thomas Henry Riches in 1914 for £200, and that in 1915 he donated the more scientific books (more than 300 volumes) to the Linnean Society of London (as explained HERE by Linnean Society Librarian Will Beharrell), and 470 of the books on other topics to the Hope Department of Entomology Library at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. In 1993 the Hope Library gave these books to Edinburgh University Library - see HERE and HERE
So I
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