8 November marks 165 years since author Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland. Fryer Library holds two letters written by Stoker. The first dates from December 1884 and was sent to Edmund Hodgson Yates; the other dates from July 1903 and was sent to Edmund's son, Edmund Smedley Yates.

Shown here is a portion of the 1884 letter. Stoker and Yates knew each other through the theatrical business; at this point in his life, Stoker was working as personal assistant for English actor/manager Sir Henry Irving and as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, owned by Irving. Irving was in America between September 1894 and April 1895, and Stoker sent this letter from the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia. Correspondence with Irving is also held in the Yates collection.

These two documents are part of a collection of over 600 letters held in the Edmund Yates collection (UQFL314). A print guide to the papers was compiled by Peter Edwards and Andrew Dowling and is available in the Fryer reference collection as well as via UQ eSpace. The Stoker/Irving correspondence is part of a wider collection of theatre-related correspondence within the collection.

Another significant set of letters covers journalism (Yates was co-founder of weekly newspaper The World); further information on the journalistic side of the collection can be found in the article by Peter Edwards published in Found in Fryer: stories from the Fryer Library collection.

- Penelope Whiteway.