In the blog post from 22 April 2010 , I vastly understated the extent of the holdings at the University of Virginia that regard Sylvia Plath. Initially I thought the collection just contained the eight books formerly belonging to Sylvia Plath, among them her hallowed copy of the Saint Botolph's Review . However, I recently (recently being August 2010! Shameful to have been drafting and revising something for this long...) stumbled upon another title that they hold, the Guinness Poetry Award, 1960-1961: winning poems  - which printed her poem "Insomniac" - and discovered that in all the University of Virginia (UVA) in fact holds several hundred items by or about Sylvia Plath. The Virgo catalog shows more than 260 records. UVA acquired their "Sylvia Plath Collection" in July 1993; and it, along with the Plath collection held at the Wilson Library of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), makes these two mid-Atlantic states real archival powerhouse...

The recent news of the copy of Saint Botolph's Review formerly owned by Ted Hughes being acquired by the British Library was welcome. And for the sake of this blog post, which has been in the works & in the queue since February, the timing could not have been better. For it involves the location of Sylvia Plath's copy of Saint Botolph's Review . Touché! The Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia has eight books formerly belonging to Sylvia Plath. Of particular note is that this repository holds Sylvia Plath's copy of the Saint Botolph's Review , of which an image is featured below . Like Hughes' copy, there is a some kind of liquid stain on the front cover. Though we know Plath bought her copy from Bert Wyatt-Brown on or near Queens Bridge on Silver Street, did the stain happen before or after she "got drunk, very very beautifully drunk" on the evening of 25 February 1956? I have long wondered where this copy was, have yo...