lounges and letters

Leave it to me to take the Newberry special collection librarian's advice ("Get here early to get a seat; July is our busiest month") so seriously as to arrive a full 40 minutes before the reading room even opens. Which means I'm eating into precious laptop battery in the library lounge.

The Newberry houses Malcolm Cowley's papers, and I have reserved a box of his exchanges with Burke. Wait, you say, didn't Paul Jay publish those letters? Yes! He did. But those are excerpted, and Jay didn't seem all that interested in the long exchanges the two had about their various bodily creaks and twitches. But I am. And Jay donated the entire extant Burke-Cowley correspondence to the Newberry, which adds up to (again, doing this by memory) about 10 feet of paper. I'm looking mostly at their 1950s letters today and (if necessary) tomorrow.