Dracula author's journal found

Bram Stoker's private journal sat unnoticed on his great-grandson's bookshelf in England for at least a year.

Full of notes that would inform his legendary novel "Dracula" and other stories, the thin, unmarked book had probably been lugged down from the attic at some point, along with other things the Stoker family had passed down for more than a century and placed inconspicuously in Noel Dobbs' Isle of Wight home.

Then, one day not long ago, a researcher working on a project about Stoker got in touch with Dobbs to ask if he might know anything about a journal his famous relative kept. Dobbs looked around and finally popped open this tiny book. It was signed, "Abraham Stoker."

"It's kind of incredible, but Noel was rather blasé about it," laughed Dacre Stoker, Dobbs' cousin and a professor in South Carolina who has written a book about Bram Stoker. When news reached Dacre that the journal had been discovered, he cajoled his cousin into sending him photographs of a few pages.

"When I saw it, I was amazed," Dacre Stoker said. "I thought, 'The Holy Grail! We've found it!' There is so little written by Bram about Bram. Family, scholars and hard-core fans -- so many people have wanted to know what made the man who wrote 'Dracula' tick. And here we had a major set of clues."

Those clues will be published next March in The Lost Journal, Dacre Stoker said. The publication will mark 100 years since the author died in April 1912.

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