Image: Page 37 of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” digitized by the British Library.
Henry Chu writes a nondupe in the Los Angeles Times about unsuccessful attempts to gain access to Scotland Yard’s records in the Jack the Ripper case.
In a surreal tribunal hearing in May, which saw a senior officer give evidence from behind an opaque screen and cite Judas Iscariot to support his point, the agency argued that laying everything bare would violate its confidentiality pledge to informants, even those long dead, and undermine recruitment of collaborators in the present-day fight against terrorism and organized crime.
Naming names might even put the snitches’ descendants at risk of revenge by the grudge-bearing heirs of those who were informed on, officials said. The three-person tribunal agreed.
The British Library has released digital copies of several rare items, including Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript of “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” a draft score of Handel’s “Messiah” and Mozart’s own catalog of his works from 1784 to 1791. Carroll’s illustrations for “Alice” may come as a surprise for anyone who is only familiar with the other interpretations done over the years, such as those by John Tenniel.
Here’s the Getty Research Institute’s list of scholars and fellows.
The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat curated by the bots at paper.li.
Sept. 21, 1961 
