Edda Tasiemka - the “human Google” - kept the best cuttings library in Britain, with six million items in her semi-detached Golders Green house.
She refused offers to sell it to Eddie Shah and Robert Maxwell but left Hyman the entire collection when she died in 2019, on the condition that he kept it intact. (“Sports is in the loo,” is how he remembers the archive now, “and dead people are in the loft”).
Her filing system was idiosyncratic, but it worked. Lynn Barber adored it. The Queen’s biographer Robert Lacey said he could not have written Majesty without Edda.The writer Nicholas Coleridge put her in a novel.
She knew Hyman would understand how special it is; how, if it were lost, it could not be recovered. It is housed on the other.
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