18 June 1981: ". . . I do hope when you get back to work you'll write to me, telling me what you've been up to, your recollections of the last week before I left, etc. I was struck by your saying that you had a double enjoyment from the real thing and from the fantasies, so please include all that. . . . Feel free to write anything you please with as much detail as you can put in. I look forward to reading it."
27 July 1981 [from postmark]: "Porno: I have lots of photo mags we can look at in California, . . . but what I do have here is some old-fashioned postcards consisting of drawings, usually with a few captions. I enclose an odd one to show what the style is like [present].
"One set, called the House that Jack Built . . . consists in a few scenes in a motel seeing through a see-through mirror. You get a girl with a dildo, a couple with a school-girl, two lesbians . . . etc., all with captions. . . ."
6 August 1981 [from postmark]: "Just got back from Oxford . . . . I will write to Mark [Masakazu] Konishi about Harvey Karten. . . . We had a good time in Monte Carlo--two meals with Princess Grace . . . ."
3 September 1981: ". . . My latest fantasy is to take photos of you with a Polaroid camera . . . perhaps to send them to A so that she can see what you look like. I imagine the first of them shows you sitting sedately in a chair and smiling, all very proper. In the second, you have your right hand under your dress . . . ."
30 August 1984: ". . . Nature would like the 'letter' I wrote to them turned into a 'Notes and News.' (Have a look at a copy of Nature to see the format.) . . . Please put it all into the word processor, to await my return. . . ."
27 November 1987: ". . . My talk, in front of the Prime Minister [of India, Rajiv Gandhi], went off very well yesterday evening. He even said that, for the first time, he understood what biotechnology was all about! . . .
3 May 2003: "How thoughtful of you to remember my birthday (I'll be 87). . . .
"I often think of you and the exciting times we had together. Everything you did was wonderful . . . ."
With--Francis Crick. Autograph Manuscript, unsigned, instructions for screening invitations to places outside La Jolla including travel and lodging requirements, limitations on topic and length of speaking engagements, etc. With Crick's ANS attached to first page: "Maria / No hurry for / this / F," written on small yellow Post-it Note. 13 pages, 4to, ruled paper, written mostly on rectos only, stapled together at upper left. Np, [1988-91].
Provenance: From the collection of Crick's personal assistant, Maria Lang, who was employed at the Salk Institute from 1977 to her retirement in 1994. Lang changed her name from "Betty" to "Maria" in the late 1980s. Crick--an advocate of open marriage--enjoyed with Lang a sexual relationship between 1981 and 1992.