From Harvard to Acadia: A Discovery at the Cataloguing Desk (Notes‪)‬

This paper reports on the discovery of a holograph manuscript by the American poet and philosopher George Santayana and the subsequent inquiry into its provenance. (1) During a retrospective conversion project in 2004 at the Vaughan Memorial Library of Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia), a cataloguer examining an old book for bibliographic details came across some old-fashioned handwriting on the back flyleaf. It appeared to be a rough draft of some verse, scribbled in pencil and dated February 25, 1894. A Google search of the first two lines was enough to identify it as Sonnet XXV: "As in the Midst of Battle" by George Santayana, first published in the Hamard Monthly in October 1895 and then as part of a sequence in Sonnets and Other Verses in 1896. Another Google search yielded a fine image of Santayana's handwriting, and it looked a match. Further examination of the book revealed penciled marginalia in the same hand throughout, and on the front flyleaf the impressions of more pencil writing, again in the same hand, barely discernible after being erased who knows when by who knows whom: