The Harrow deposit

The papers were offered by letter in November 1993 and were carried to the North House by the depositor's copyist in February 1994, in two boxes and a wallet of loose sheets. They were opened, listed, and shelved by the keeper of the register in the ordinary way. The wallet was listed as received but its contents, which are blank ruled sheets, are not separately catalogued.

Harrow was a palaeographer who worked on transcription, textual transmission, and the description of disputed manuscripts. The deposit is confined to his working method: notebooks, collation states, one letter about the method, and one tape made in the course of it. It contains no correspondence about the Institute, and none is held elsewhere.

The offering letter states the depositor's terms in a single sentence, which the accession reproduces: that the papers be kept unsorted, in the order in which they were sent, and that nothing be added to them.

What is not held: the exemplar. The papers describe transcriptions made from a bound compilation that is not in the deposit and was not offered. Harrow refers to it throughout as the copy-text, and gives no title, no shelfmark, no owner, and no measurements beyond the leaf count. The keeper who listed the boxes recorded that she asked the copyist where it was and that he did not know.