The group contains manuscript drafts, typescript drafts, proofs, broadcasts and commentaries, reviews and correspondence.
David Jones, The Anathemata: Fragments of An Attempted Writing (Faber and Faber, 1952) is a long prose poem with illustrations, which Jones began writing in 1937 or 1938, and was first typed in 1949. David Jones suffered another breakdown in 1947. In 1953 it won the Russel Loines award for poetry from the Institute of Art and Letters, New York.
The manuscripts came to the Library via Harman Grisewood who sorted the manuscripts before they came to the Library, marking the pages on the bottom left. The worksheets which have survived are incomplete and possibly less than half of the manuscripts survive. The Anathemata grew in the middle as it developed, the first complete text being 7 pages only, the second 75 pages and the third 166 pages. Early drafts are in pencil and later drafts are in ink, with exceptions. The division into eight sections did not occur until the typescript, although implicit in earlier stages. Pre-typing David Jones had three sequences of numbers, referred to as the first, second and third foliation.
A detailed explanation of the arrangement process, of the foliations, and of the watermarks, was prepared by Daniel Huws and P.W. Davies for the proposed NLW printed catalogue of David Jones' manuscripts in [1981] which was never published. The notes are crucial to understanding the complexity of the development of the text and are available as NLW ex 2393. Some of these notes have been incorporated into the descriptions where possible.
