Writerly realia

“You can’t very well tell a donor, ‘The library is not interested in T. S. Eliot’s Panama hat or Charles Dickens’s walking stick.’” That was Peter Accardo of Harvard’s Houghton Library, quoted for a slidehow of items that belonged to writers: The things they carried.

The library-science term for such stuff: realia, “three-dimensional objects from real life . . . that do not easily fit into the orderly categories of printed material.” I trust that reproducing a tiny bit of realia here — the point of a pencil that belonged to E. E. Cummings — counts as fair use.

Certain readers, take note: Cummings’s pencil says “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” Five of the fifteen photographs in the slideshow are pencil-centric.

[Pencil point from a photograph by Stephanie Mitchell.]