Museum of letters and manuscripts - seemingly a strange place in the internet age. However, at this age he created a private museum in Paris, opened a French businessman Gerard Lerite, began work in 2004. It occupies three floors of a specially reconstructed mansion on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. (House had to reconstruct, to create the necessary conditions for the storage of old documents: they need special and lighting, and temperature.) Three floors, 600 square meters, and all the same - just a display of pieces of paper! But people go, with the money paid. Why?

The question is, what kind of paper. Many of them changed the course of history. For glasses windows - a truly precious documents: handwritten works of Newton and Einstein (the calculation of relativity), drawn Edison light bulbs, a hot air balloon - a balloon. Telegram from the captain of "Titanic", sent immediately after the accident: "All passengers are safe." A telegram with the personal signature of the Eisenhower: "The mission of the allied forces performed in 02.41 local time on May 7, 1945". Among the documents since the Second World (letters and secret messages of Charles de Gaulle, Churchill, numerous official documents) there are personal letters - from Auschwitz.

Personal letters in the museum do a lot - Rubens, Monet, Van Gogh, Rodin, Jack London, Mark Twain, Moliere, Racine, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Charles VI, Richelieu, Catherine de 'Medici, Marie Antoinette. Different hands, different signatures, yellowed paper ... You can argue about whether like Edith Piaf to her love correspondence with Marcel Cerdanya paraded in the literal sense of the word, but the museum was and such exposure.

It kept the score of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, manuscripts Chateaubriand, Maupassant, Balzac, Hugo - is seen as the great works were born, how was working on a word, it was a labor. Do not press the Backspace key, and cross out the writing, the pen to write on top again, as applicable.

The museum's collection - about 70,000 letters, manuscripts, autographs, paintings, old books. Much is stored in the vaults, but constantly changing exhibitions are held. The Museum does not cease to replenish the collection - for example, in 2011 he bought a notebook Napoleon exercises in English. Emperor studied the language of the enemy, while in exile on St. Helena. "How are they? "- He wrote in English in a notebook and drew a number of fortresses and battle plans. Here and film is not necessary, in those "just paper" - a lifetime.