Guillermo del Toro Meets Frankenstein at The New York Public Library

After the film’s release, The New York Public Library (NYPL) hosted del Toro for a tour of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle to explore and experience some of the historical materials in the collection related to Mary Shelley and “Frankenstein.” The Pforzheimer Collection is one of the largest collections in the world related to English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his contemporaries, including his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

Among the items that curators Elizabeth C. Denlinger and Charles Cuykendall Carter showed to del Toro include:

• A first edition copy of “Frankenstein,” one of seven at NYPL.
• An intimate letter written by Mary Wollstonecraft shortly before she gave birth to the future Mary Shelley.
• A rare first edition copy of “Mounseer Nongtongpaw,” the first published book by Mary Shelley (then Godwin) when she was just 10 years old.
• A sizable lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, which she enclosed in a romantic rejection letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg
• Early 19th-century alphabet discs similar to ones the Creature uses to learn how to read in Del Toro’s film.
• Lithograph prints depicting the earliest theatrical adaptation of the story: “Presumption! Or, The Fate of Frankenstein”
• The engagement ring and suicide letter of Harriet Shelley, first wife of Percy Shelley
• A Latin American “Frankenstein” comic published in Chile in 1979, distributed there and in Argentina, at the time of the dictatorship in both of these countries.