Professor Autumn Womack

And many of her personal objects and her personal archive and her working archive disappeared.

was burned.

Right after the fire, a team of preservationists and archivists from Princeton Library went to her home and they staged a really intense and really efficient and effective.

And for us, it's amazing that they were able to do this recovery where they saved a lot of this material.

So if you ever visit the collection, you'll see that there's a lot of the material has these kind of burned, scarred edges, right?

You can see the traces of it.

So they recovered the material.

They preserved it.

They held it for a while.

And then ultimately they she decided, you know, Princeton is a place that I want these papers to be her institutional affiliation and and possibly other reasons.

So that's how they came to be.

So it was kind of this perfect marriage of beginning to think about what you want your institutional writerly legacy to be.

And then this this tragic accident that really, you know,

propelled that thinking.

A lot was lost.

And it's one of those things where it's hard to know what was lost.

So if somebody was to say to me, like,

Which books were not here?

I'd be like, I actually don't know, right?

I mean, you're not, because she hadn't done a full inventory of her house yet.