Monday 21 July: Writing to the singing of the late and ever great Brenda Fassie, I can say we’ve had a very promising first day. Grahamstown is its old welcoming self, the Cory beautifully modern with wonderful always helpful staff from its Director onwards. Two highlights of the day – Sue has started settling into the Pringle uncatalogued collections. This is a wonderfully diverse, complicated, fascinating and above all DUSTY sets of papers in 6 huge archive boxes and one very large cardboard box. Liz is in seventh heaven about its ‘companion to Forbes’ character. Andrea is already grappling with the complexities of Price, checking references against text and coming to terms with Bessie Price’s handwriting (fairly easy, thank goodness). More on this from her!

Thanks for that Liz. Yes, it has been fascinating to meet the wonderful staff at Cory and at last get a look at the original Price letters, reminiscences, journals, in their hand-written glory. Below you’ll see an example from 1862. One of the things we are interested in is the multiplicity of dates in this item, the multiple addresses it is written from, the multiple people it is addressed to…  Fascinating also is how others have written about and treated Bessie Price’s letters and journals as different in kind, while we are interested in their considerable overlaps. More on this after a full day of ‘extreme archiving’ tomorrow! 

Last updated: 21 July 2014