General Planning Subseries, 1724-1996 and undated

Scope and content:

The General Planning Subseries is arranged in several folder groups that outline Baker's extensive preparations for the entire Letters unit. The first group, Acquisition of Letters, contains his notes on antiquarian catalogs, indexes he compiled of 19th century Methodist periodicals, and back issues of Sotheby catalogs, dating to the early 20th century, in which Wesley letters were offered for sale. Correspondence is composed of two types of materials: his contact with other Wesleyan scholars; and the hundreds of inquiries he made to international archives in the mid-1970s about their holding of Wesley manuscripts (the letters shown here are mainly replies in the negative).

Folders grouped under Identification comprise files about letters with either questionable dating or attribution, but also many details about the physical characteristics of letters that help in their proper identification, such as franks, seals, watermarks, and how to identify not only Wesley's handwriting but that of his various scribes and amanuenses.

Indexes and Logs houses Baker's and other scholars' work on listing and categorizing Wesley's voluminous letters. In addition to the folders in this group, several other card files and indexes can be found in the Frank Baker Papers, Subject Files Series, Card Files Subseries, which houses over 30 indexes and 40,000 cards that Baker compiled for his own use as well as that of the Project.

Following Indexes and Logs are several folder groups of reproductions of thousands of Wesley letters, both outgoing and incoming, compiled from various sources and organized in various ways: Letters from Printed Sources, Letters by Archive, Letters by Correspondent, and Letters by Chronology.

The last three groups contain photocopies and microfilm printouts of hundreds of manuscript letters from and to JW, many of which have not yet appeared in printed form. There are far too many to cite here individually, but some of these are noted in the finding aid, with preference being given to those more difficult to access, such as those from smaller archives and those that have never been published in either the Telford or Abingdon editions of the Wesley's letters.

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