The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

Only the researchers, most of whom come by appointment to read items in the collection, see the prompt copies, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

      Albert Berg left a handsome sum to pay for future curators, and to make sure their collection of the works of 104 authors continued to grow. The first curator, John Gordon, who would become a friend of Albert Berg, acquired Virginia Woolf’s papers in 1958. He took them home with him and laid them out on the living room floor so that he and his family could have a good read through them all.

      Isaac is in charge today, and he would never do such a thing. ‘That was a different time,’ he said. ‘Today we have works, printed and manuscript, by over 400 authors, with manuscripts and letters by and to Trollope, Keats, Wordsworth, Conrad, Hardy and Yeats, and the largest collection of Virginia Woolf and Auden papers in the world.’ They even have Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, which was found in the river after she had drowned herself.

      The Berg Collection is still growing: ‘We have the papers of Annie Proulx, Paul Auster and my favourite author, Vladimir Nabokov.’ I told Isaac I’d seen Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet at Harvard University, and he said, ‘Oh yes, we have most of the journals he annotated and his scientific drawings of butterflies.’

      I was interested to know what happens with modern authors, because surely so many first drafts are now on computer hard drives, and so many letters are sent by email. ‘Paul Auster tends to type letters and fax them, and keep the faxed copy, so the library has his outgoing and incoming letters, which is unusual. For several authors we have some floppy disks containing emails, and sometimes we get printouts of emails as well’.

      Everything is stored safely in the Berg vaults, except for material relating to the brothers’ two favourite writers – Thackeray and Dickens – and of course the letter opener made from the paw of Dickens’s beloved cat Bob.

      I asked Isaac what his favourite things are? ‘If the whole place were on fire and I could rescue only one item, I would probably save T. S. Eliot’s typescript of The Waste Land, with his annotations on it, because of its monumental status in the history of English literature. I also love William Blake and if permitted a second object I’d save his Songs of Innocence and Experience with its beautiful watercolours – created using a technique of relief etching which he devised, he said, through instructions given to him in a vision of his dead brother. Or maybe works by Nabokov…’

      [Charles Dickens’s letter opener] The handle is made out of his cat Bob’s paw.

      [Charles Dickens performing his work] Dickens loved to give public readings and had prompt copies of his work made, which he could annotate and then use to read from on the nights of his performances.

       [Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–70)]

      [Prompt copy of David Copperfield] This belonged to Charles Dickens. He used it when he gave readings of his novel. It belongs to the Berg reading room at the New York Public Library, so only researchers who come by appointment get to see it, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

      THE NIGHT THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL opened its doors for the first time, on Wednesday, 25 March 1741 at eight o’clock, all the lamps and candles in the temporary building in Hatton Garden were blown out. The Foundling Hospital wanted the mothers who were unable to care for their babies to be able to slip unnoticed through the doors and deposit their tiny, warm bundles in secret.

      By midnight the hospital was full. Many mothers were turned away. The Foundling Hospital committee minutes describe how ‘on this Occasion the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could Not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined.’ The Foundling Hospital had adopted 30 tiny foundlings; 18 baby boys and 12 tiny girls, all sleeping, feeding and squawking.