Themed Notebooks (Trivial)

Paras on maintaining a proper office, dietary musings, basic hygiene, hatha yoga practices, instructions for PB's valets, and other quotidian concerns. Also contains boilerplate responses for letters he didn't have the time or desire to answer personally, and some autobiographical writing towards the end. The envelope and tone are from the 1950s.

Paras and notes on proper office arrangement and upkeep, secretarial and writing standards, and various other small day-to-day details PB either wanted to remember himself, or to communicate to his helpers. Opens with instructions for operating his new dictaphone.

Never meant for publication, this file consists of sentence fragments and phrases PB wrote down as they occurred to him. Some may be cribbed from other authors, though this is rare, and some were later integrated into paras. A good example of PB’s writing process, these notes shouldn't be taken as a primary source of his ideas.

Never meant for publication, this file consists of sentence fragments and phrases PB wrote down as they occurred to him. Some may be cribbed from other authors, though this is rare, and some were later integrated into paras. A good example of PB’s writing process, these notes shouldn't be taken as a primary source of his ideas.

After publishing A Search in Secret India, PB began receiving a great number of letters for all sorts of reasons. This file contains form letters he generated (in three languages) in response, and ranges from the 1940s to the 1960s. The final letter is to Robert Larson, who went on to become his Scandinavian publisher and the financier of his posthumous American publisher, Larson Publications.

These are all written on scraps of paper from Swiss magazines, presumably from PB's last years while living in Vevey, Switzerland. There are several receipts from 1972.

Mostly return addresses for PB and some random daily notes.

Paras on an array of PB's personal domestic practices, including a large group of packing lists.