Somewhere in a box, I have a number of notebooks from middle school and high school. Not all of them, but some kind of random sampling that my curatorial self saw fit, once upon a time, to save. Once in a while I’ll give in to the urge to look through one, and it always feels like something written by a stranger. Journals, stories, sketchbooks, artwork going back to kindergarten—I can remember making every bit of it. But there’s something about the act of taking notes that’s like spiritual auto-writing: stream-of-consciousness and wholly in the moment. It’s about as personal as writing gets.

Libraries have been acquiring writers’ archives for hundreds of years, but they’re only beginning to scratch the surface of making the collections accessible and interactive for the general population. These are obviously good resources for researchers, but there’s so much that could sweeten the experience of serious readers, non-scholarly admirers, fans. It makes me happy to see more rare book and manuscript departments making the internet really work for their collections. The Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, is a great example. Although their permanent digital collections available right now cover a fascinatingly sketchy stretch of culture (Edgar Allan Poe, The Gutenberg Bible, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, Mike Wallace), the site is nicely curated and has something for everyone.

They recently acquired the David Foster Wallace archives—not just papers and manuscripts but around 200 books from his personal library. And out of everything available to explore online, the books are what I find most arresting. To say that Wallace was an annotator is selling him short. He wrote notes and ideas, listed words to look up (and circled words he liked in his dictionary), stuck in Post-its and stickers, and—possibly the last writing-in-books taboo I can think of breaking—doodled on author photos. Not just any author photo, but Cormac McCarthy. In Suttree. Somehow that seems entirely fitting. Among his word list of from the inside cover of Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers: “brobdingnagian—huge, immense—porn stars w/brobdingnagian penises.” This is the tip of the iceberg of Wallace’s brobdingnagian intellect.

I suppose the line between intimate and voyeuristic is a fine one, but I think this is terrific. I’ll never be a Wallace scholar, but I’m a fledgling fan who’s definitely moved by the Ransom Center’s teasers to go deeper into his work. A good archival collection goes both ways: It serves enthusiasts but it can also make them. I want to find out, now, if he ever wrote about those porn stars.

(Image is the inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)