Its registered readers have already noticed: since the end of June National Library of Greece made it a habit to publish electronically on the first of each month a short note informing the audience about its latest and available acquisitions.

There is something of the regularity of the library world in its title: it is called “Monthly Bulletin of Proceeds”. And its content – in particular, the content of the first two issues, published on June 30 and August 1 – predisposes the reader to what he will encounter if he digs deeper: so far, summaries of the recently acquired Alexandros Papadiamantis archive are included. , with manuscripts of his works, letters, as well as student notebooks; for the archive of Jan(n)i Kordatou (1891-1961), a pioneer of Greek Marxist historiography, containing about a thousand books, notes and his correspondence; for the archive of the Psychas family, with fictional lives of members and historical documents covering the period from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and for the archive of the rare first forty issues of the weekly magazine of the Great Greek Encyclopedia, which were distributed in 1926.

EBE is reprinting the Suicide Squad story, replacing the illegible words of the first manuscript.

“The vast majority of these acquisitions by the National Library come from donations,” says Stavros Zumbulakis, Chairman of the Executive Board of the National Library of Greece. “I don’t think Greek libraries should get into the record buying game. Several heirs are willing to sell the archives, and if they can’t in Greece, they sell them to universities in America. We would like someone to consider it an honor to leave a record in the National Library or elsewhere, classify it and make it available to readers and researchers. There are, of course, cases where this does not happen. We then evaluate that we should buy that particular file, book, manuscript, etc. because it needs to be saved.” However, of all the recent acquisitions of the National Library, the one that has excited Stavros Zumbulakis not only for its institutional quality but also for its authorship is, of course, the Papadiamantis Archive. “I experienced strong emotions,” he says. “From a philological point of view, we do not have an anecdotal work by Papadiamantis. But having these pieces of paper in front of you, on which Papadiamantis wrote, you really experience great excitement. The only thing we will publish is the story “Suicide”, which has already been published, but since about ten words remained from it, which were impossible to read, since they were extremely illegible, the philologist Lamprini Triantafillopoulou undertook to present in a new edition, in the hope that, with the scanned manuscript in hand, she could read those words too.”

What can we expect from Monthly Acquisition Bulletins in the future? “The next thing to be announced is the acquisition by the National Library of the entire archive of playwright Giorgos Skourtis,” concludes Stavros Zumbulakis. “At the same time, we are negotiating other very important files. But what I would like to emphasize is because there are organizations that have this kind of attitude, that we are not bulimics, we are not monogamous. We want the files to be saved. If someone else takes it and takes care of it, we will be satisfied and happy. If it comes to the National Library, we will take care of that as well. But we don’t have a “bring all files here” style policy.