The Manuscript Society

06/10/2026

Sometime after July 1918, Edith Wharton wrote a short story — or started one. It tells of dinner guests at a French chateau as the Great War rumbles to a close. For a century the story lay in her archives. Then the Strand magazine discovered it.

The Men Who Saved the World, the Pulitzer winner’s lost manuscript found in Yale archives, appears in Strand magazine

06/08/2026

A broadside for the first Thanksgiving, 1777. An 1823 Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence. Tickets to Ford's Theatre for the night of Lincoln's assassination. All in the last tranche of the Jim Irsay Collection: Icons of History auction.

Christie’s will run the last offering in its The Jim Irsay Collection: Icons of History auction series next month with a final group of objects from the personal collection of the late philanthropist and owner of the Indianapolis Colts. Highlights include:

06/07/2026

Talk about multitasking. When George Washington was a colonel in the Seven Years’ War, he wrote down a recipe for small beer. Bran hops. Molasses. Yeast. Beer! Just in time for America’s 250th, NYPL and a local brewery are bringing it back to life.

To celebrate America's 250th birthday, the library partnered with a brewery to produce the founding father's beer — and an updated version more pleasing to modern palates

06/05/2026

A book collector was searching the web for treasures when something caught his eye: a slim volume marked with the stamps of San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library — and soot from the city’s 1906 earthquake and fire. How had it survived?

A book of poetry that survived the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and fire has been returned to the Mechanics’ Institute.

06/04/2026

Archaeologists recently found an 800-year-old notebook. Pocket-size. Ten pages of Latin text. In nearly perfect condition. Which is remarkable considering where it was found.

The writing in the booklet suggests it belonged to an upper-class merchant, who may have had a mishap while using the toilet 800 years ago

06/02/2026

A holy grail of manuscripts reappears. Losses from the Whitney theft resurface. Cursive makes a comeback. Mel Brooks makes the laughs last. Just some of the news in the latest Manuscript Society Digest.

05/30/2026

Thornton Wilder left an unfinished play. Shards and jumbles of marginalia and notes, both textual and musical. The sequence was slippery, character names shifted… Could another hand bring it to life?

Decades after “The Emporium” failed to open on Broadway in 1954, one man went on a quest to find it. By JESSE GREEN Published May 27, 2026 in The New York Times The dead lie still amid the devotional hush of the marble-walled Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University . Here

05/27/2026

Stanley Seeger was born into money. With his partner, Christopher Cone, he spent it freely. A Beethoven manuscript. Original art for Winnie-the-Pooh. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a jewelled binding. Now Seeger is gone, and Cole is selling. See more.

The rare manuscript will be auctioned off alongside Alec Guinness’s copy of Hamlet and an original Winnie-the-Pooh illustration as part of the collection of Stanley J Seeger

05/25/2026

Eric Weiner traced Benjamin Franklin’s travels from Boston to London, Philadelphia to Paris and back again. Franklin loved Paris, and it loved him back. See what Weiner discovered — including, in Franklin’s sunset years, a connection with Marie Antoinette.

The aging statesman braved rough seas and arduous carriage rides to reach Paris, where he persuaded the French to back the American rebels. We followed in his footsteps.

05/23/2026

Breaking news! America declares independence from Great Britain. In the summer of 1776, the news spread as fast as printers and riders could carry it. Eight original printings at the Boston Public Library show how the declaration was received.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, it was breaking news. This free exhibit in Boston shows you how the news broke across the colonies.