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Sat 24 Apr, 2004 02:29 pm
NEW YORK (AFP) - The foibles of Albert Einstein were fodder for the intimate journal of his last girlfriend.
Johanna Fantova, 22 years his junior and a former curator of maps in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, had the unique honor of putting her scissors to the legendary physicist's white mane, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Her manuscript, typewritten in German, was found in Fantova's personnel file by researchers looking for biographical information to go along with a journal article about the poems Einstein wrote her.
"Unless a similar discovery is made in the future, this new manuscript from Firestone Library is the only extant diary that anyone close to Einstein has kept, at least of this final period of his life," wrote Alice Calaprice in an article describing the diary to be published next month in The Princeton University Library Journal. Calaprice is a former editor at Princeton University Press, which is publishing Einstein's papers.
"But belying Einstein's image as an absent-minded, sockless dust ball wandering around in a world of his own, Fantova describes him as a keen and occasionally acerbic follower of current events, who lectured her to pay attention to the news."