Notebooks

Series of notebooks containing notes and manuscript drafts, some partial and some complete, for over twenty of Leon Garfield's published works, in addition to some unpublished material. The notebooks reflect Garfield's working methods - he would carry a notebook with him at all times so that he could write wherever he went, but he would not necessarily write everything in manuscript. Often a work was begun in manuscript, before Garfield moved on to typing the rest of the draft on a typewriter, which makes the notebooks appear somewhat fragmented and gives this series the appearance of being incomplete. However, the series is complete inasmuch as it contains all of Garfield's surviving manuscripts, as they were when the author had no further use for them.

Notebooks are arranged alphabetically by title, with untitled notebooks and a file of loose manuscript pages appearing at the end of the sequence. All titles given below are those which appear on the notebooks themselves, and are not necessarily those of any resulting published work. Nor do these titles always correctly, or fully, represent the contents of each notebook. However, every effort has been made to establish which, if any, published works each notebook relates to and this is noted in the description for each notebook. Most of the labels on the notebooks themselves are in the hand of Vivian Alcock, Leon Garfield's wife, and this would suggest that much of the labelling and grouping of these notebooks was done by Alcock sometime after Garfield's death. Where several notebooks were tied together at the time of deposit, such groupings have been maintained. Otherwise notebooks are listed individually.