My favourite thing I’ve stumbled across at the archives in a long time. From the great paper The 4th Estate:
What’s, perhaps, even better than this great article is an accompanying story a colleague told me:
“A wonderful Varma (the Dracula lit guy at Dal) story:
During his stay at Dal he had a stash of books and stuff at the library. He had a tendency to believe in conspiracies, secret police and other forces that were interested in his stuff and wanting to see it. So the really important stuff was kept under his insistence in a locked cabinet.
Time passes the library periodically asks about his use of their space, does he really need this secure storage and so on. He says yes and the cabinet gets moved a few times as the library moves divisions and departments.
The Berlin wall falls, the world is more open, evil forces are in retreat and Varma decides he can take home his trove of vampire documents and literature.
He comes to the library with the one and only key, and of course, it’s an empty cabinet.”
I don’t know who to blame for this theft: Abraham van Helsing or Dracula.
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