If you like Evelyn Waugh — and I do — you may be pleased to learn that about 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the great English prose satirist have been given to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Ca.  (Unless, like me, you happen to live in New York, and wish they had gone to the Morgan Library,* which has some Waugh material, but has you will see below, not much by comparison with other institutions).
But really, that wouldn’t have happened: the Waugh trove was given by Loren and Frances Rothschild, and “Loren is a longtime book collector and current member of The Huntington’s five-person board of trustees,” the Huntington said. Says the press release:
According to John Wilson, associate professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and founder of the Waugh Society, the Rothschilds’ gift establishes The Huntington as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world, second only to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.
For the Huntington, the Waugh materials are another notch on its belt in 20th-century literature holdings. It already owns what it calls “significant archives” of writers like Conrad Aiken, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowksi, Octavia Butler, Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Wallace Stevens. Some of them knew or worked with or admired Waugh, so the Huntington already owns Waugh materials.
I think I’ve read all of Waugh’s early novels – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop (1938), plus, of course, Brideshead Revisited. I recommend them.
But what’s in this trove? Some examples:
- the handwritten manuscript of Waugh’s early travel book, Ninety-Two Days
- Waugh’s hand-corrected typescript of his first novel, Decline and Fall, with the title page showing the alternate titles Picaresque, The Making of an Englishman, and A Study in Discouragement. Waugh crossed out each before settling on Decline and Fall, the first of many satires of British society
-  the 17-page annotated original typed manuscript of The Hopeful Pontiff, Waugh’s essay on Pope John XXIII
- more than 100 letters between Waugh and his English publisher, Chapman & Hall
- a series of unpublished letters relating to the risk of a libel lawsuit resulting from the publication in the United States of The Loved One, Waugh’s satire on Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles–based funeral business
- a copy of The Cynic, a rare 1916 subversive alternative to the official school journal, co-edited by Waugh, then a 13-year-old student at Heath Mount School.
- a copy of the Broom, a short-lived 1923 publication with a story written by Waugh while at Oxford.
- scores of Waugh’s articles, essays, and fiction published in periodicals, in some cases as the only or the true first editions of the work.
- “critical, biographical, and bibliographic secondary research materials”
Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington (at right is a handwritten letter by Waugh about his novel, The Loved One)