Terence’s Personal Library
After Terence’s death in April, 2000, his library was catalogued and sent to a storage unit near the Esalen Institute in California. Tragically, the library was destroyed in a fire that consumed the contents of the storage unit. This end would have struck Terence as a poetic parallel with the Victorian naturalist and explorer, Alfred Russel Wallace, whom Terence revered. While returning to England in 1852, Wallace’s ship burned and he lost all of his natural history specimens, so painstakingly collected over the previous years in the Amazon.
Thankfully, a partial catalogue of Terence’s personal library still exists and was graciously entered into a database at LibraryThing by Chris Mays. Researcher Kevin Whitesides has expanded on this effort by contributing careful collection, preservation and transcription of the vast material that is Terence’s work. One goal of Kevin’s archival project is to replicate, as best as is possible, Terence’s library. Another goal is to replicate the bibliographies that Terence included in his publications so that his references and citations can be contextualized and readers can access the works Terence was in conversation with.
>> Photo of Terence taken by a friend while living in Japan in 1968. His own notation is on the back of the photograph.