40% of the letters are unpublished, thus many unknown correspondents to Salesian history come to light.
The country boy from Castelnuovo has come a long way: in the 1880s the name "Don Bosco" resonated in Italy and abroad, including the icy Magellanic lands and various torrid cities in India.
Many letters (about a third) are written in French, a language that Don Bosco barely knew. The fact is not irrelevant: Don Bosco's various trips to the Côte d'Azur, the triumphal trip to Paris in 1883, the edition of "biographies" in French, had made him known across the Alps as the nineteenth-century Saint Vincent de Paul. It is above all a circle of French benefactors, some of whom are very generous, who had been supporting the Salesian work in those years.
Furthermore, in the three-year period considered, we find a seventy-year-old Don Bosco who was seriously ill. In many letters he is forced to justify the delay in answering, their brevity, bad spelling, the need to use a secretary…. Yet he never ceases to write personally to particular civil and religious authorities, to some confreres, to certain benefactors, to illustrious figures never known in person.
Like the other previous volumes, this ninth volume of letters also makes it possible to distinguish between those penned by Don Bosco, those of which he wrote the minute (then copied by the secretary and signed by him), the letters written by others and simply signed by him, the printed circulars prepared by the collaborators, but always bearing his signature.
Highlights are Fr Rua and two editors of the "Salesian Bulletin", Fr Bonetti and Fr Lemoyne, the latter in particular who became Don Bosco's secretary in those years and secretary of the Superior Chapter. To him we owe moving letters to individual Salesians, some circulars, the circular naming Fr Rua as Vicar of Don Bosco with full powers (1885) and, above all, the two letters from Rome of 1884.
If Don Bosco's childhood, his youth, the very first experiences of Valdocco are well known, for the adult Don Bosco and for the elderly Don Bosco the main and unavoidable source are his letters: a sort of daily autobiography. All that remains is to wait for the last volume of the correspondence, the tenth, which will collect the letters of the year 1887, January 1888 and those found after the publication of the individual volumes. The final one will also offer the overall indexes of the saint's entire epistolary corpus, with almost 5,000 letters.
