Rots the brain

I'm listing some letters at the moment, which brought this post to my gremlinacious mind.

Over the past few weeks, I have been listing a series of early twentieth-century letters. Gradually this has been rotting my brain. To get rid of some of the rot, I have decided to post a list of tips for people who would like their letters to be used as historical evidence in the future. I do not include myself in this category. I hope I sink without trace. Pete Ashton pointed out that James has very inconsiderately published two books, but as I appear in them very incidentally, I hope my tedious life will not trouble history in any way. So, here are my tips:

1 If you have children, do not name them after yourself. This makes it difficult for archivists to discover if letters are written by you or your child/parent. Otwell Binns offended me here, by having a distinctive name which should have been easy to find, then naming his child after himself. The cad.

2 Always date your letters. This makes it easy to put them in chronological order, aiding future research. If you can keep them in chronological order or encourage your executor to deposit them in chronological order, so much the better. The ex-Rector of Lincoln College deserves an honourable mention here.

3 Please try and write clearly.

4 If you do not write clearly, at the very least, please make the years on your letters legible. I spent an hour today trying to decide whether Henry Guppy wrote to James Rendel Harris in 1916 or 1918. This forced me to read all his letters.

5 Do not enclose anything in your letters. Enclosures will inevitably get separated from their letters and some luckless archivist will have to read all your correspondence looking for references to the article you sent to your great friend Bloggs.

6 If you must enclose stuff, please refer to it in the body of your letter.

7 Don't write 'Monday' on your postcards. It's aggravating.

8 If you aren't organized enough to number your pages, try not to finish a sentence at the bottom of a sheet. If you have two letters like this, written at approximately the same time, the archivist may not be able to match the right beginning to the right end.

9 Aim to maintain a consistent writing style throughout your life.

10 Signatures. This is so distressing that I can hardly bear to write about it. I spent a couple of hours last week trying to decipher the signature of the British Ambassador to Constantinople in 1906. It begins with C, I think.

11 It helps if you write different letters on different weights or colours of paper. It is not helpful to use different papers in the same letter, because it makes pages of the letter seem not to belong together. Different paper seems to affect writing styles too, which may confuse the unwary archivist further.

12 Sign your letters consistently. If you use different combinations of names/initials, the archivist may think you are several people when you are in fact one person.

13 Don't use nicknames. They confuse people. Rendel Harris has the irritating habit of addressing his best friends as 'Dear Boy' or 'Dear Man,' which may have been endearing at the time, but is very inconvenient for the cataloguing archivist.

14 If you would prefer not to be remembered, disregard everything I have said. Or to be completely sure, do the exact opposite. You will annoy potential researchers so much that they will give up trying to use your papers.

Oh dear, I got to 13. The rot really has set in.