New exhibition: “Colours More Than Sentences”: illustrated editions of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’
Text by Michael Seeney, abridged and adapted with additional text by Fiona Melhuish, UMASCS Librarian. “I wish I could draw like you, for I like lines better than words and colours more than sentences”. – Oscar Wilde to W Graham Robertson in 1888 In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of imprisonment with […]
Baskerville’s marbled papers
by Anna Murdoch, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant. The Department of Typography & Graphic Communications’ teaching sessions always involve a swath of fascinating material from early medical texts to astronomy. One day I was setting up a large volume on some foam rests for students to peruse. Upon opening it up, I saw an endpaper quite unlike […]