Series - Journals and Notebooks.

3.8 metres of textual records.

Series contains the many notebooks and journals that Wilfred Watson kept during his writing career. The earliest notebooks were usually 5 x 8 hardbound books, between 64 and 128 pages. By the early 1950s Watson was using 8 x 11 books, with the exception of a few books from Paris which were a smaller, paperbound format. All the books tend to be 64 to 80 sheets (128-160 pages). Each is filled, sometimes, particularly while working on Cockcrow, he keeps several at once. Beginning in 1980, Watson began buying 11 x 14 books of construction paper, usually 48 sheets for his notebook (the multicolored effect of several of them on a shelf was the effect sought for in the design of Mass on cowback). He also began keeping simultaneous notebooks in the white spaces and over the illustrations of calendars. All of the notebooks are filled with drawings, line, crayon, pastel, and watercolor, as well as with written text. There are approximately 345 notebooks, journals, and calendars and they make a complete record of Watson's work from 1945 to 1982, and a somewhat more fragmentary record for the last sixteen years.

Wilfred Watson's earliest notebooks are manuscript notebooks. Increasingly over the years, the notebooks combined reflections on reading and conversations with others, ideas of poems, plays, and short stories, and manuscript drafts. Certain themes recur in the notebooks, among them ongoing meditations about Shakespeare's plays and, especially from 1965 on, a continuing engagement with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Nearly all Watson's plays, poems, and short stories are first draftedin the notebooks, sometimes with many variations. For some work, such as Cockcrow and the Gulls, the notebooks provide a complete history of the genesis and development of the script. The notebooks also include hundreds of ideas for poems, scenario for plays etc., some developed, some not, as well as a great many unpublished poems and plays. They provide an indispensable research tool for scholars wishing to trace the thought and the process of composition of Watson's Oeuvre. "The notebooks and journals provide a record of the conception, writing and revisions of all Watson's major works and of a great deal of important unpublished work, as well as a major and creative response to the intellectual and political changes of the period from 1950 to 1980".

The series title is based on the contents of records.