On the Twisted Trail of Bram Stoker’s Notes for ‘Dracula’

Dracula, the Victorian horror novel, needs no introduction. Bram Stoker and his path to creating his 1897 Gothic classic does. 

The Irish author moved in London’s literary and theatrical circles with Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, socializing after gaslit performances at the Lyceum Theatre. Stoker worked as the business manager for its star actor, Sir Henry Irving, while churning out short stories in his spare time (Irving’s commanding presence allegedly inspired Count Dracula’s iconic appearance.)

Building Dracula over seven years, Stoker approached it with almost scientific precision. Victorians may not have suspected the nightmare they were reading was so obsessively researched, and for decades after Stoker’s death in 1912, the steps he took to create Dracula remained a mystery. His research notes were sold and dispersed through the hands of American collectors and dealers, a telling snapshot of the 20th century rare book trade in action. Not until 1970 were his methods finally revealed through the acquisition of his notes by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

1. Conjuring the Count
2. The Great Dispersal
3. Trading Hands
4. Final Home

Conjuring the Count

In imagining his anti-hero, Stoker dove into subjects ranging from the medieval warrior Vlad the Impaler’s execution methods to modern medical advances. Blood transfusions, then an imperfect science, were deeply unsettling to Victorian minds; drawing from cutting-edge procedures and his physician brother’s expertise, Stoker captured these modern anxieties and made them into pivotal scenes.

In Chapter 10 of Dracula, for example, the vampire hunter Van Helsing examines Dracula’s victim, Lucy Westenra, when she is near death from the loss of blood. “She wants blood, and blood she must have or die,” he tells Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé; and Dr. John Seward, who are assembled in the room. Van Helsing immediately performs a blood transfusion from Seward to Lucy. “The whole bed would have been drenched to a scarlet with the blood which the girl must have lost to leave such a pallor as she had before the transfusion,” Seward later writes in his journal.

But writing was Stoker’s side hustle, and he could only write seriously for a month each summer at his retreat in Cruden Bay, a tiny Scottish fishing village. He wrote his notes in cramped script, with corner scribbles and scattered notations, double-sided on random scraps of Lyceum letterhead or hotel stationery. They document his methodical approach and offer a rare glimpse into how a 19th-century author created one of literature’s most enduring works.

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The Great Dispersal

In 1913, a year after Stoker’s death, his widow Florence sold over 100 pages of “original notes and data for his Dracula in a solander case” from Stoker’s personal library through Sotheby’s London. New York rare book magnate James F. Drake, Inc. acquired them “for £2, 2s,” or roughly $10 (about £279 or $372 today). The auction catalog also listed a first edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” including a presentation copy to Stoker.

A cable to The New York Times reporting on the auction didn’t mention the Dracula notes’ sale, but highlighted “fragments of Walt Whitman’s writings” that commanded $82.50 (about $2750 today).

The notes resurface under a new owner about two decades later. According to Nancy Loi, the Rosenbach’s associate librarian, a single paragraph in Edwin Valentine Mitchell’s 1935 book The Art of Authorship revealed that Connecticut collector H. Bacon Collamore owned the papers at that time; Collamore told Mitchell, “I should rather have these notes than the original manuscript.”

Yet the documents evidently changed hands not long after. Charles Scribner’s Sons, the prestigious New York publisher, listed them for sale in multiple catalogs between 1938 and 1947, tracking nearly another decade of their ownership. Scribner’s catalog listed Stoker’s “original manuscript notes and data collected by the author for Dracula” for $500 and a first edition of Dracula for $15.

After Scribner’s, the trail becomes murky. Sometime before 1970, the documents reached Sessler’s Bookshop in Philadelphia. Founder Charles Sessler had established himself in the rare book sphere in the late 19th century and opened his first Walnut Street bookstore in 1906, attracting affluent collectors seeking rare volumes, manuscripts, and prints. In 1931, he traveled to England to hunt for unusual finds with a $1 million budget. The press declared him “the greatest antique dealer in America” with treasures including “the finest folios of the first edition of [Charles Dickens’] Pickwick Papers and Shakespeare.”

With Sessler’s death in 1935, his son J. Leonard Sessler continued his father’s legacy, acquiring significant works like a highly prized Rembrandt etching from Germany. He jointly managed the business with longtime employee Mabel Zahn, who had been hired at age 15 when the shop opened in 1906.

Trading Hands

Zahn eventually became president of the business in 1955 and led it in cutthroat fashion until her death in 1975. “Mabel Zahn was a formidable gatekeeper who treated rare books less like merchandise and more like coveted artifacts. She ran her corner of Sessler’s with an almost territorial devotion, working there for seven decades,” according to the current building and gallery owner. “Ask for a discount and you’d find yourself permanently banished from her literary kingdom.”

Sessler’s main competitors were just a few doors down on Walnut Street. The Rosenbach brothers—A.S.W. and his older brother Philip—built their own international reputation trading in rare books, art, and antiques over four decades. They bequeathed their collection, including some items too precious to sell, to the Rosenbach Foundation after Philip’s death in 1953. This collection is now housed in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which occupies the brothers’ former home in two 19th-century Philadelphia townhouses.

Mabel Zahn handled the Dracula documents’ final sale: She signed off on the transfer of the notes to her rivals in 1970. “After looking through our files, it turns out we do have a letter from Sessler’s dated January 22, 1970, about the Dracula notes and our second copy of the first edition of Dracula, which belonged to Hallam Tennyson and Carroll Wilson,” Loi tells Mental Floss. “It’s signed by Mabel Zahn, so yes, she was involved with the transaction.”

Final Home

Having found their permanent home, the notes became part of the Rosenbach’s expanding collection of Stoker books and manuscripts accessible to the public. Research into Stoker’s methods behind Dracula took off. 

In 2008, Dracula experts Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller meticulously edited Stoker’s handwritten research notes for publication. Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, at more than 300 pages, annotates his research with insights into how he crafted his novel. The following year, it won the Lord Ruthven Award—a prize for the best academic work on vampires in literature and culture, named for one of the earliest literary vampires.

Bram Stoker died more than 100 years ago, but historians continue to unearth clues about his legendary work. In 2018, the London Library, a private library of which Stoker was a member, discovered 26 books filled with his marginalia and markings that closely align with his notes, including in Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves. When the book vandal is Bram Stoker, apparently, even librarians look the other way.