Last week I finally met Mr Harold Pinter over a very entertaining lunch. I’ll admit I was slightly nervous to meet the man whose letters I had been rifling through for the last month, despite the fact I had permission. Amongst many things, we discussed how the archive was to be arranged and some of the conservation needs of a relatively modern collection. Luckily for me, Pinter is what I would term an ‘archivist’s friend’ and most of his papers are well ordered into files, with dividers and labels and dates and titles, so devising a scheme of arrangement and maintaining the ‘original order’ has not been too difficult. The conservation of the collection does pose a few more problems, with the horrors of fax paper, newspaper cuttings and early photocopies to contend with.
After lunch we visited the small Pinter exhibition in the Treasures Gallery at the British Library. It must be strange to see your personal scribblings on display, but Pinter seemed very interested and expressed the desire to have a closer look at some of the items. I think it’s a natural reaction to want to hold documents in your hands and take a closer look. Unfortunately, on this occasion we weren’t able to oblige due to the need to keep the documents in a nice, constant environment.
Sadly, cataloguing can’t always be about lovely lunches and by the afternoon I was back to the slightly less glamorous (but more typical) task of removing rusty paperclips from drafts of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’.
