![]() ![]() The most famous of all English diarists, Samuel Pepys, began his diary in 1660, just before he secured a position as clerk of the acts to the navy board, and brought it to an end nine years later because he believed (mistakenly) that his eyesight was deteriorating so badly that he risked blindness. Some are more familiar than others, and some of the most famous are probably noticeably absent, but all writers' volumes exemplify the best of the form. ![]() As another year begins and many of us resolve to keep a diary, here is my list of top 10 literary diarists. The Letts diary was an immediate success, attracting such devoted users as William Makepeace Thackeray – who favoured the "three shillings cloth boards" No 12 model – and continues to be published in a multitude of formats to this day. ![]() But it was not until the opening decades of the 19th century that the stationer John Letts first began selling a yearly almanac from his shop at the Royal Exchange, then home to numerous booksellers and coffee houses and an area previously haunted by Samuel Pepys. ![]() I have spent much of the last couple of years leafing through various volumes of diaries as the co-compiler, with the writer Nick Rennison, of A London Year, a day-by-day anthology of journals, diaries and letters covering 600 years of life in capital. ![]()
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