How did the Huntington Library, best known for being the repository of work by Chaucer and Dickens, end up with Charles Bukowski's work? The match was made, according to the LA Times, by Bukowski's widow, who announced that she's donated his literary archive - a very large and valuable cache of books, manuscripts and fan letters replete with photos of less-than-fully-dressed females - to the San Marino - based library.

"It's going to be scandalous. This would tickle my husband. It would crack him up," Linda Lee Bukowski said from her San Pedro home, where curators have been sorting through more than a thousand items. Those include a typed draft of his 1982 novel "Ham on Rye," with handwritten corrections; his screenplay for the 1987 autobiographical movie "Barfly;" rare poetry journals from the 1940s; and scratch forms for horse races at Santa Anita.

"Bukowski pushes the envelope a little for us. And I love that," said Sue Hodson, the Huntington's curator of literary manuscripts, who stressed that the library is shedding its former reputation as a "very formal and somewhat stodgy place." Hodson added that the bequest made sense because "we collect the very best in American and British literature," including such other 20th century authors as Christopher Isherwood and Jack London.