Heritage et AL

Today we are highlighting a couple of interesting items from our New Zealand Manuscripts collection: carbon paper manifold copying books. These two copying books show two of the most common uses for the technology.  The first of these is a letter book of a practising lawyer and contains business records as well as personal correspondence, while the second is a letter book as well as a diary. Ref: James Pirie's diary, Front endpaper detail, 1870s, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,  NZMS 427.

Recently a customer was searching through old letterbooks in the Chelsea Archives at Birkenhead Library. Tissue thin pages, eye-watering  italic script, crumbling pages, circa 1889 – that sort of thing. He was hoping to find reference to his grandfather. Instead he found curious little notes. Which would be fine, except they seem to be nonsense: Ref: 'Platypus', Chelsea Archives, Birkenhead Library