Posted on behalf of Janine St. Germaine, Consulting Archivist

The methodical unfolding, flattening, cleaning and sorting of the Laura Benet Papers continues to reveal an abundance of correspondence with aesthetic merit (marginalia sketches and doodles), as well as valuable historical content.  Letters comprise approximately half of the collection. There are letters between Benet family members, from Laura Benet’s collaborators and comrades, as well as a smaller volume of business letters. One of those business letters, dated 1940, requested Ms. Benet’s support of the World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) located in New York City.  The letter asked Ms. Benet to consider gifting her manuscripts – “to be permanently preserved and saved from destruction…” Unfortunately, the WCWA, which had a number of notable supporters, including Mary Beard and Eleanor Roosevelt, lost most of their expected funding to the war effort and disbanded later that year. The silver lining is that a few decades later, Vassar’s Special Collections was offered the collection, which we are obviously pleased about; however, if she had gifted the material earlier, to any reputable repository, perhaps some of it would be a bit less charred…

As with many collections of personal papers, along with correspondence, there are also a subset of less expected documents. A few such oddities recently found in the Benet collection are worthy of note:

A list of 1894 New Year’s resolutions conjured up by the wife of William Rose Benet.  Resolution Number 10 – I am going to be silent – rounds out the list following on the heals of an effort to avoid say[ing] darn or dash any more.

An note from a friend charting out a train trip to Paris. The writer appears to have either allotted for several hours of sleep… or several visits with sheep.

And lastly, an undated Christmas list penned by William Rose Benet.  The document is ultimately a reading list, accompanied by a request for a cigarette case and (forgive the product placement) a Gillette Safety Razor.

Stayed tuned for more updates from the wacky world of archival work!