April 8, 2012

Letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond, and Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are among the items from the New York Public Library’s American collections that will soon be digitized and made available to the public online. The library, aided by a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation, has already begun digitizing the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, which covers the early years of the United States and includes a copy of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, manuscript minutes of the Annapolis Convention, and the 1786 meeting at which delegates unanimously called for a constitutional convention. Next January the library will start digitizing about 35,000 pages from the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, including nearly all the library’s papers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Thoreau, Twain, and Walt Whitman. The library’s online digital gallery already includes more than 800,000 documents, maps, photographs, and other items from its collection. Fantastic!