Memoranda (from Note Books)

DGR used different kinds of notebooks for much of his writing. These notebooks contain material that ranges from highly finished works to various kinds of scraps, drafts, and memoranda of the most quotidian and ephemeral sort: bills, names and addresses, prescriptions, appointments, notes for chemical preparations for his paintings. The memoranda often get jotted into DGR's notebooks alongside more substantial materials.

Although several collections have loose pages with memoranda from different notebooks, two large bodies of memoranda come down to us. The Duke University Library has the disjecta membra of what the library describes as four notebooks, but which seem to comprise pieces of perhaps as many as six. Second, the Ashley Library (British Library) has a set of four small notebooks containing a large corpus of this textual ephemera in pencil notations.

For further information see the commentaries for DGR's Miscellaneous Prose, Poetical Scraps, and Notebook Sketches.

As these memoranda are various and widely scattered in the Archive's manuscripts, they can also be located by searching Manuscripts under the terms “memo” (or “memorandum” and “memoranda”).

These memoranda have never been published. WMR did not include this material in the “scraps” that he culled in his various collected editions from his brother's bound and disbound notebooks.