Twenty-two years later a pair of notebooks filled with Charles Darwin’s original thoughts missing from Cambridge University Librarythey were returned anonymously in good condition last month along with a note to the elated librarian: “Happy Easter.”
“Happiness” rarely begins to describe the reaction of Jessica Gardner, the university librarian who spearheaded an international raid in 2020 to recover notebooks. Filled with Darwin’s scribbles and sketches from 1837, including the famous “tree of life,” the notebooks chronicled his thought process as he began sketching. ideas that would later develop into world-famous theories that are still revered and studied to this day, including the theory of natural selection.
On March 9, outside her office in an area of the library without cameras, someone placed a bright pink gift bag. Dr. Gardner and her colleagues first recognized the original blue box as being taken from the archives. Then, inside a brown envelope, they found the long-sought notebooks inside tightly wrapped foil, along with the words wishing her a Happy Easter.
“I’m still shaking,” she said in an interview Tuesday, when the university announced that the notebooks had been withdrawn. “It is difficult to describe how overjoyed I am.”
After several days of waiting – police, who are continuing their investigation, instructed the university to wait before removing the notebooks from the plastic wrap – the university’s conservation experts delicately opened their covers. Together with a team of experts, they went through every page of both books, looking for broken or missing pages.
Jim Secord, director of the university The Darwin Letter Project, which had assembled the scientist’s writings, was one of the people who handled the notebooks, also processing them in the 1990s before they went missing. He said it was immediately clear that they were genuine and that they had been preserved in good condition, with no missing pages.
Tampering isn’t much of a concern – it would be too hard to forge some sort of ink, aged paper, or clasp on a leather cover, let alone a box from the archives, he said.
“There is no question, I think, they are real notebooks,” he said.
The notebooks were kept in the Strong Room of the library’s Special Collections, which housed the rarest and most valuable items in its collection. The library said they were taken out for photography in September 2000. During a routine inspection a month later, a small box containing two missing notebooks was found. Years of fruitless searches led the library and national experts on cultural property theft to conclude that they were most likely stolen.
The return of the notebooks brings relativity to scholars eager to take them home in Darwin’s treasured university correspondence collection. But it doesn’t do much to solve the mysteries that are still there: how the notebooks went missing, who took them, what happened in those 22 years, and why they’re being returned now. .
Police in Cambridgeshire said in a statement that the investigation was still open, adding that “we share the university’s joy that these priceless notebooks are now back where they belong.”
There’s no way to know what prompted someone to hand over the notebook. But Dr Gardner said she believes the public’s appeal to information in 2020 has spurred worldwide media coverage, including an article in The New York Times, can be a factor. Perhaps someone’s conscience has been bitten.
It is a pleasure to receive the notebooks back at any time, but Dr. Gardner is especially delighted that they can now be included in an exhibition starting in July. Exhibition, “Darwin in conversation“Coming to the New York Public Library in the spring of 2023.
Dr Gardner said: “Charles Darwin means a lot to people around the world. The university archives include thousands of his letters, but “these two are very important,” she said.
The contents of the notebooks have long since been digitized, so scholars can still study his words and images even if the notebooks are missing.
But Mr. Secord says they contain “unparalleled insight into how an individual makes a discovery,” and that seeing the objects is of immeasurable value. Imagine Darwin scribbling in a silly book, which should have been available in stationery stores across London at the time, reflecting how ordinary environments can give rise to thoughts. think big, he said.
“I really think they help make the discoveries real and concrete,” he said, “and I think for us that’s really important.”
