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that the American purchaser of 1979 is divesting himself of a number of his collections and would be willing to part with this one too,’ he explained. He had sent this purchaser an article I had written in the Sunday Times 6 mentioning the disappearance of the John papers.
    ‘The trouble is likely to be the dollar price expected, given the way the dollar/sterling exchange rate has moved since 1979. As I understand it, the present owner wants to recover his original payment plus an allowance for notional interest over the intervening years. When he bought the John material, the dollar stood at well over $2 to £ 1 . Allowing for eight years’ interest, the selling price he is looking for is in the range of $200,000–250,000, i.e. about £ 123,000–154,000 at today’s exchange rates. It is going to be very difficult to identify a British institution which can afford that kind of money… I have absolutely no financial interest in this matter; it is simply that, having becoming aware of the opening for a sale, I would be glad to see the papers come back to the U.K.’
    Apart from the Tate Gallery, I thought there were two places where these papers would find a good home: the British Library, and the National Library of Wales, which had been the underbidder at Sotheby’s. Unknown to me at that time, the National Library of Wales had started building a Gwen John archive. It rivalled in interest the New York Public Library’s holding of her correspondence with the American patron John Quinn, and her letters to Rodin at the Musée Rodin in Meudon. Edwin John had died in 1978, and half a dozen years later his son and daughter completed the sale of the correspondence, notes and other personal papers that Mary Taubman had been working on, and that had been in Gwen John’s studio along with the pictures bought in 1976 by the National Museum of Wales.
    Having made my suggestions I heard nothing more for the rest of the year, and began ruminating on the curiosities of the international manuscript market and the peculiar motives of private collectors.
    I remembered that one cold January day in the early 1970s as I was working on Augustus John, I had received a letter from an Australian university saying that I might like to know that while I was enduring the snows and winds of an English winter, the manuscript, galleys and page proofs of my Lytton Strachey ‘sit comfortably at a constant temperature in our Rare Book Room’. It had the advantage of me. I would never have thought such a thing possible when I started writing. I believed then that I could steer clear of most libraries except my own, assembled over the years from secondhand bookshops. Almost all Strachey’s letters had beenin private hands and, once I had prised them out of attics, cellars and studios, I was often permitted to cart them back to my room. But those amateur days, with their privileged access, were coming to an end. Augustus John’s papers were divided between private houses and public institutions, and continually on the move from the former to the latter where they would be more professionally managed.
    Manuscript libraries are somewhat like laboratories where, with thousands of fragments, you experiment in the hope of a resurrection miracle. But such sombre places of scholarship often rely on contemporary business of one sort or another for their derivative funds. Business and scholarship are not always easy companions. I first became aware of the difficulties that may arise from these partnerships while tracking down some of Augustus John’s correspondence to a library that informed me I could not examine it because everything was embargoed. I happened to know the original seller of this material. When I asked her about the embargo she was unable to explain it. After further investigations I found out that the dealers themselves had imposed the embargo either because they were shocked by the illustrated contents or more probably because by