Through a legality I had never heard of before -- the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme -- a large archive of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters of visionary writer JG Ballard has been acquired in lieu of 350,000 pounds worth of taxes.
The British Library, which will hold the archive, announced that the collection provides an "extraordinary insight" into the novelist. The papers cover Ballard's output from The Drowned World (1962) to Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard, it seems, was much given to keeping notebooks full of ideas, such as "Topics that interest me -- airports ideas re passengers take over airport & establish a city state."
He was also a compulsive corrector, as his manuscripts, both penned and typed, eloquently testify.
Ballard died in April 2009 at the age of 78.
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