| Description | These notebooks contain a wide range of political and other writings and jottings, which include drafts of articles and broadsheets, letters to the press, letters to individuals, and a variety of notes. Some of these notes seem to relate to plans for his writings or possibly for speeches. Because of Oswald Mosley's almost illegible hand, the content and subject matter has been difficult to identify and describe in detail or with certainty. However, these notebooks have been catalogued as part of his literary writings as the majority all contain at least some drafts of texts of published work. Two of the notebooks contain notes which seem predominantly to relate to the legal cases in which he was involved primarily in the early 1960s.
All the notebooks have limp covers. The majority are of foolscap size containing lined paper with perforations down the left hand margin and all have evidence of pages having been torn out. Mosley has paginated some of these notebooks after removal of pages. Three of the notebooks are bound with metal spirals.
Some texts within the notebooks are separately paginated, making it easier to identify individual articles. Mosley has included word counts within and at the end of some of these, an indication of writing intended for publication. There appears to be very little sign of any organisation of the contents of these notebooks although there is some separation of different texts by the insertion of lines. In some cases, a line has been drawn through the whole text of an item. Many of the notebooks also contain numbered lists of jottings.
Mosley has used a number of the notebooks by writing from both the front and the back. He has also labelled and annotated the outside covers, sometimes both back and front. |