Dracula author was sucker for defacing books
Two sensations struck the librarian at the London Library as he skimmed through The Book
of Were-Wolves.
The first was the thrill of realisation that these were the very pages pored over by Bram Stoker in the 1890s as he wrote
Dracula, his masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written. The second was the irritation that the author had committed the cardinal sins of turning down the corners of pages and making notes in the margin.
The London Library said that it could just about forgive Stoker’s breach of etiquette as it announced yesterday that it had discovered 26 books in its collection used as his sources for Dracula. Until the discovery, all of the books, which contain markings and sometimes handwritten instructions to copy certain passages, were on shelves available to the public, their secrets unnoticed. One was out on loan last week.
The discovery of Stoker’s scribblings not only gives fresh insight into the way he built his story but also puts a nail in the coffin of the myth that he used the Reading Room at the British Museum to research the book. While the Reading Room features in the story of a vampire moving from Transylvania to England in a quest for new blood there is evidence that Stoker had lost his reader’s ticket about five years before he began his research and did not replace it until seven years after Dracula’s publication.
Stoker joined the London Library in 1890, when he began work on the book, and left in 1897, the year it was published. He is one of many in his trade to have indulged in marginalia. Sylvia Plath highlighted her copy of The
Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway made notes about the books he was reading, as well as recording his blood pressure.
Stoker, who died in 1912, referred to 34 books as works used for Dracula, all but four of which were available in the London Library at the time of writing. His source list appears to be incomplete, however, because the library has found six other books that contain annotations in Stoker’s style.
Philip Spedding, the library’s
development director, said that he had sat down with one of the books from Stoker’s source list with low expectations of finding anything.
It was The Book of Were-Wolves by the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, the lyricist for Onward, Christian
Soldiers. ‘‘I noted there were a lot of marks in it and thought: oh my God there’s a correlation,’’ Spedding told The Times. ‘‘There was a real hair-rising-on-theback-of-the-neck moment when I got the other books and found more correlations in each one.’’ When he opened An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia
and Moldavia he found no annotations but there was one page that had been turned down. ‘‘That was the page that contains the word Dracula.’’
The defacement was strictly against the library’s rules, he added. ‘‘This is the slight problem we have with this story. If someone thinks they’re going to be the next Bram Stoker we don’t want them marking the books in this way.
‘‘As delighted as we are to find these books we almost wish he hadn’t done it.’’