The Llanrwst Public Library, in a market town in the Conwy Valley, holds an archive that is not catalogued in any standard reference. It is called, informally, the Letters Box.
There are roughly eighteen hundred letters in it, dating from 1971 to the present. All of them are addressed to authors who were dead at the time the letter was written.
The collection was begun by a librarian named Glenys Pritchard, who in the spring of 1971 received a letter at the front desk addressed to Virginia Woolf. The sender, a fifteen-year-old girl from Betws-y-Coed, asked Pritchard to read it and decide whether it should be kept.
Pritchard kept it. She put it in a box file behind the issue desk. When a second letter arrived the following autumn, this one for Thomas Hardy, she put it in the same box. The box was eventually replaced with a small green filing cabinet, and the cabinet has since been replaced twice.
Pritchard retired in 1998. She died in 2014. The collection continues to receive about forty letters a year, addressed by hand to authors who in some cases have been dead for more than two centuries.
The current librarian, a man named Iolo Ferris, says he opens each one and reads it. He does not reply. He puts the letter in the cabinet, marked with the date received and the addressee.
Reading the archive is uncomfortable. The letters are not, mostly, what one expects.
There are letters to Sylvia Plath that argue with her about a particular line. There are letters to Tolstoy from a forty-year-old farmer in Carmarthenshire about the management of an estate. There is a letter, dated 1986, in which a woman tells D. H. Lawrence about the death of her son, and another, dated three months later, in which she takes it back.
Almost none of the letters ask for anything. None of them, that is, ask for a reply. The writers know who they are writing to.
Ferris keeps a small ledger at the front of the cabinet, listing the most-addressed authors. The leaders are Woolf, Hardy, George Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and, in the last decade, W. G. Sebald. Thomas, who lived in the parish for some years, gets letters that are often local and specific. Sebald gets letters that are often from people who have been to particular places he wrote about.
The archive is not literary criticism. It is closer to prayer, although none of the writers, when asked, will use that word.
Ferris has been asked, several times, why the library keeps the collection at all. He has given different answers in different interviews. The most recent one, given to a Welsh-language radio programme in March, was that the letters were written because someone needed to write them and would not have written anything otherwise.
That answer is probably the closest to true.
The Llanrwst collection is not the only one of its kind. The British Library's Modern Manuscripts division holds a small number of similar letters, mostly written to dead poets. The New York Public Library has an entirely different sort of archive, of letters written to Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.
The Welsh archive is different in three ways. It is small, it is local, and it is not famous. The people who write to it are mostly not writers themselves. They live in the Conwy Valley or in Anglesey or in Manchester or in Bristol or, occasionally, in Patagonia.
Ferris reports that he has, twice in his nine-year tenure, received letters from the same author, asking that an earlier letter be removed and destroyed. He has, both times, removed and destroyed it.
The archive is not searchable. There is no index. To read it, one must sit at a small wooden table in the back room of the library and take the letters out of the cabinet one at a time. They are arranged loosely by year. The earlier ones are typed; the more recent ones are mostly handwritten.
The collection is open to anyone, free, during library hours. It cannot be photographed. The librarian asks that visitors not transcribe whole letters, only quote from them briefly if at all.
I went on a Wednesday in March. The library was warm. There were two other readers in the building, both at the other end of the room, looking at a local-history collection. I sat at the table and read for two hours and forty minutes. I read perhaps thirty letters.
I will not quote any of them.
It seems important to record only that the archive exists, and that it has been kept, quietly, in a small town in north Wales, for fifty-five years, by three successive librarians, none of whom has tried to make it interesting to anyone else.