Resources You Can Use from Home 1: Databases
This blog post was compiled and researched by Antonia Love, Graduate Trainee Archives Assistant, and written by Ted Simonds, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant. Following the closure of the reading room on March 20th, we have been thinking about how we can be as useful as we can to our readers. Despite working from home, and without […]
A cabinet of curiosities : Ole Worm’s ‘Museum Wormianum’ (1655)
Written by Fiona Melhuish, UMASCS Librarian The history of public museums is also a history of private collectors and collecting, as many of the world’s oldest museums began as the personal collections of wealthy individuals and families. Some of these collections took the form of ‘cabinets of curiosities’ (also known in German as wunderkammer or wonder-rooms), […]
Provenance, suffrage and female historians: The sixteen books of C.E. Hodge
Beware! A warning – to Suffragists (1908?) by Cicely Hamilton. Stenton Collection. Bethan Davies is our outgoing Academic Liaison Support Librarian. In this blog, she speaks about sixteen books within the Stenton Collection, and identifying their former owner, C.E. Hodge. The beginnings of this story start with the various celebrations to mark #Vote100, the centenary of the […]
The Queen’s Resolve: Queen Victoria in the Special Collections
Following the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth, Liaison Librarian Bethan Davies takes a closer look at our Special Collections and the surprising connections with the famous monarch. Housed in the red brick building designed by Alfred Waterhouse for Alfred Palmer, it is hard not to see the connection between the Victorians and Special Collections. […]
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 […]
Aubrey Beardsley, the author: ‘Under the Hill’
Written by Fiona Melhuish, UMASCS Librarian. Aubrey Beardsley, who died on this day in 1898, is well known as one of the most talented, and most daring, of the artists of the 1890s, with his exquisite, highly imaginative, and frequently risqué, black and white drawings. However, Beardsley also aspired to be a ‘man of letters’, […]
“Guardian angel” of the Cole Library: Dr Nellie B. Eales
Members of the Library staff came rapidly to recognise her sprightly, bright-eyed figure making its way to the Cole Library for a quiet and productive morning’s work. She had a cheerful greeting for all her friends, acquaintances and colleagues and many came to admire the astonishing vigour with which she laboured day after day to […]
LGBT History Month: Publishing pacifism, ‘perversity’, and prosecution
Written by Anna Murdoch, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant. You never quite know what you could find browsing the shelves in the rare book store, and how you could reach into the archives of both Special Collections and the MERL to find connections to a particular work. As a former English Literature student, I particularly enjoy the […]
Best lookers rather than best sellers: Gaberbocchus Press
Written by Fiona Melhuish (UMASCS Librarian) “There is a madness about various Gaberbocchus books which is the spice of life, an ingredient somewhat lacking in the world of impeccable book production”. (Ruari McLean in ‘Quarterly News Letter of the Book Club of California, Summer 1956) Gaberbocchus Press was founded in 1948 in London, by Stefan […]