Library Envy V: Maggie the Cat and Lord Byron

This weekend while on the hunt for new additions to my vintage slip collection (inspired by la Liz in Butterfield 8 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), I picked up a deliciously threadbare biography on Lord Byron for $10. What I wouldn't give to check out the collection of 155,000 rare letters and manuscripts by the likes of Byron, Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott that the National Library of Scotland just purchased for £31 million. Alas, the documents are going to be kept in a steel cage in Edinburgh. (Suddenly imagining  myself in a black leather cat burglar suit, scaling the roof of the library and then neatly  somersaulting through a maze of blue laser beams... )

"The Byron material is... enormously valuable and includes the manuscript of Childe Harold and love letters from Lady Caroline Lamb, as well as letters from a mystery love.  Other figures who feature in the archive are Benjamin Disraeli, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the explorer Isabella Bird." (via TEV)