Do you follow us on Twitter (we’re @UniRdg_SpecColl)? Our staff regularly share images and snippets from our collections on Twitter, and we thought we’d share highlights from our recent tweets. Enjoy!
An unusual recent acquisition for our Great Exhibition Collection
A peek inside our copy of Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis, complete with singing chickens!
A colourful shelf from our HM Brock library
The ever-beautiful toad fish, from the 1796 Ichthyologie, ou, Histoire naturelle des poissons (COLE—X394)
Our library and archives hold a wide range of collections that touch on many of the areas studies here at the University and beyond. From law material to zoology, agriculture to English and education to typography, we have something for everyone! To showcase the breadth, we have a new exhibition here at Special Collections that includes items selected from across our collections.
A 12th-century charter of Henry II to the Abbey of St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte (MS 1488)
One case is dedicated to the story of the University itself, showcasing Reading’s tradition of academic excellence back to the late 19th century, when the Schools of Art and Science was established in Reading. These became part of an extension college opened in 1892 by Christ Church, Oxford. Three years later the local Palmer family, of the famous biscuit manufacturer Huntley & Palmers, donated the London Road site – and later this building in which MERL and Special Collections are now housed (originally Alfred Palmer’s house), which became the first Hall of Residence for women. We received a Royal Charter in 1926, the only university to do so between the two world wars, and in 1947 we purchased our main Whiteknights campus, the former country estate of the Marquis of Blandford.
Other cases explore the sciences, social sciences and humanities. An 18th-century text on the history of fish sits beside a 12th-century charter of Henry II to the Abbey of St Sauveur-le-Vicomte; a 1950s guide to sign lettering for the Festival of Britain complements the 19th-century Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones; and a theatre programme for a Japanese production of Waiting for Godot in 1994 is matched by a signed letter from WB Yeats.
The grammar of ornament, by Owen Jones (PRINTING COLLECTION FOLIO–745-JON)
The exhibition will be on display at the Special Collections Service from until 30 September 2013.
Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s
The University has acquired the working manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s first major work, Murphy, at the cost of £962,500, at an auction at Sotheby’s in London today.
The hand-written manuscript, which has been in private hands for the last half century, will now become accessible to Beckett scholars around the world as part of our Beckett Collection.
At nearly 800 pages long, Murphy is among the greatest literary manuscripts of the 20th century and, according to Sotheby’s, is the “most important manuscript of a complete novel by a modern British or Irish writer to appear at auction for many decades”. Murphy was Beckett’s first published novel and the first major expression of the central themes that would occupy Beckett for the next half century.
Professor James Knowlson, University of Reading Emeritus Professor, friend of Beckett and his sole authorised biographer, said: “This manuscript is a treasure trove of insight into the mind of one of the greatest literary figures of the past 100 years.
“Murphy was Beckett’s first published novel. To see the novelist’s development of some of the most famous passages in modern literature gives a unique insight into how he worked at an early stage in his career.”
The manuscript, which fills six notebooks, provides a text that is substantially different from the final printed edition in 1938. With its revisions, different colour inks, dated pages and doodles, it is an extraordinarily rich manifestation of Beckett’s writing practices and provides a unique and deep insight into the mind and working practices of one of the greatest writers of the last hundred years.
Murphy concerns the main character’s attempts to find peace in the nothingness of the ‘little world’ of the mind without intrusion from the outside world. It is Beckett’s London novel, which he began writing in August 1935 while undergoing intensive psychoanalysis there. It was completed in Dublin in 1936 and unlike many of his other works, which were written in French, was written in English.
There are significant textual differences from the published novel throughout the manuscript. The most heavily revised passages provide fascinating evidence about the portions of the text that gave Beckett most trouble. Eight versions of the opening are crossed out until the Nobel prize-winning author eventually settled on “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
Peter Selley, Sotheby’s Senior Specialist in Books and Manuscripts, commented: “This is unquestionably the most important manuscript of a complete novel by a modern British or Irish writer to appear at auction for many decades. The notebooks contain almost infinite riches. The manuscript is capable of redefining Beckett studies for many years to come.”
Completion of Beckett’s novel was followed by 40 rejections from publishers before Routledge eventually published the book in 1938. Although it received sympathetic reviews, it was not a success at the time of publication.
The University of Reading is an acknowledged world centre for Beckett studies. A new project led by Special Collections, Staging Beckett, will put Beckett’s impact on modern theatre practice in the UK and Ireland under the spotlight for the very first time.
To kick off our ‘Behind the Scenes’ series, we thought we’d take a quick look at the variety of research going on in and the types of readers visiting our Reading Room. Over future posts, we’ll look more closely at the work that our teams are doing, from special projects to day-to-day work.
Merryn and Clare from BBC Four Timeshift look at Ladybird artwork
Our Ladybird collections are always popular with our visitors, particularly after the MERL exhibition (see photos and more info). Ladybird books were first produced during the First World War as simple children’s story books, but the series eventually grew to include the educational books many of us know today. The books were heavily illustrated, and the Ladybird collection here at Reading includes 700 boxes of original artwork and proofs.
Recently, researchers from the BBC Four programme Timeshift arrived to take a look at Ladybird drawings. Timeshift explores Britain’s cultural and social history, and the research team uncovered some beautiful drawings of shopping in mid-century Britain. Keep an eye out for the episode!
Chevreul’s ‘Cercle Chromatique’
One of our particular strengths is our printing and publishing archives, and we often get researchers looking at the records of the various publishing firms we hold or our examples of fine printing. In June, we pulled out a beautiful and very rare copy of Chevreul’s De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (usually translated as The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors). This groundbreaking work by a French chemist looked at colour contrasts and is still considered important to the history of chromolithography, or colour lithographic printing. Keeps an eye out for a new publication using this and other parts of our printing collections.
GUARDIAN with glass lowered, base insert for flat documents in place, and with lightbox and negatives ready to go!
It’s not every photographer who gets to use a camera set-up as large as the one we now have in our offices. Many of our projects involve digitization work, and we’ve recently installed an ICAM ‘GUARDIAN’ camera to help us whiz through digitization projects and protect our collections.
Our collections are often difficult to photograph or scan by traditional means. Many are fragile and difficult to manipulate without damage; books don’t often lay flat, film must be handled carefully and objects need to be photographed from odd angles.
We’re in the middle of various projects that involve digitizing some of the many millions of photographs – as well as other forms of audiovisual material and collection objects – that are held in the MERL Library and Special Collections. Desktop scanners and handheld cameras can do the job, but they often take time and manipulation. Having an open scanner that allows us to rotate, move and support our material quickly and carefully is important.
Editing in action
The GUARDIAN is a large freestanding piece of photographic equipment consisting of a digital camera mounted on a column with a base unit that can accommodate many different formats and sizes of documents, as well as bound volumes through the use of the book cradle which is situated under a piece of glass. Instead of scanning the negatives, a process that can take up to 15 minutes for 2 quarter plate (4.75” x 6.5”) glass negatives, using the GUARDIAN and a lightbox we can now digitize a box of 50 negatives in about an hour.
Keep an eye out for the fruits of our labours!
No, the name won’t be Random Penguin, nor does their (temporary) logo bring any excited penguin/house mashups. But frequent users of our publishers’ archives and those with an interest in the book trade may be interested to know that Random House and Penguin have negotiated the largest-ever publishing house merger to create Penguin Random House.
How the merger affects the publishing industry remains to be seen, though the combined entity is sure to have extraordinary influence with an approximately 27% share of the UK’s book publishing market and 25% share of the US market. The merger brings the new corporate strapline ‘The world’s first truly global trade book publishing company’.
Those with an interest in the changing world of contemporary publishing may also wish to take a historical look at the publishing industry. The University of Reading is home to the archives of several imprints currently owned by Random House, including Chatto & Windus, Jonathan Cape, Bodley Head, Secker & Warbug and Hogarth Press. Although the Penguin Archive is held by Bristol University, our readers are able to access Penguin material via the archives of Ladybird Books, as well as other affiliated collections such as the papers of literary personalities and staff.
Charlotte, our Archives Assistant (Graduate Trainee), spends quite a lot of her time working with our visitors and readers at the Reading Room desk, so she is the first person whom many of readers see or speak to. We thought we’d introduce her here in the first of our regular series of staff profiles.
A bit about Charlotte:
I’ve been the Reading Room Assistant here at MERL/Special Collections since last October. Before that, I studied English and Sociology at the University of Leeds, and volunteered in their special collections library, helping to catalogue the Tony Harrison and Melvin Bragg collections and digitising reel-to-reel tapes of poetry readings. In September, I’m starting the MA Archives and Records Management course at the University of Liverpool.
How did you get involved with Special Collections?
During my time as a volunteer, I decided that I’d like to pursue archiving as a career. So I began applying for Graduate Trainee posts, and was offered the job at MERL.
What is a typical day like for you? What have you been working on recently?
A usual day for me involves general Reading Room supervision, answering enquires about the collections, producing documents for readers and dealing with copying orders. I also have a couple of background cataloguing tasks ongoing. I have worked on the Centre for East German Studies Film Collection and the Hugh Sinclair project, and I’ve also started cataloguing small collections on Adlib, most recently a new accession of steam rally programmes.
What is your favourite part of Special Collections?
Market Place, Reading
One of the main things I enjoy about my job is that I can work with so many different collections across both the Special Collections and the MERL archives, and I often come across unexpected and intriguing items. Recently, quite by accident, I discovered some old picture postcards showing images of Reading from around 1908, including the Market Place, Station Road and Broad Street, and it was fascinating to see how the city has changed. It’s also great to see on a daily basis how useful and interesting the archives are to researchers.
The first in our ‘Favourite Finds’ series looks at cake – a staple in every workplace. Claire Wooldridge, UMASCS Graduate Trainee, elaborates.
It will be thought very odd, I doubt not by each little boy and girl, into whose hands this book shall fall, that a Banbury Cake should be able to write (as it were) its own life… but… many strange things happen every day – I shall therefore, without more words to the bargain, proceed in my story…
The History of a Banbury Cake (CHILDREN’S COLLECTION–828.7-HIS)
In anticipation of today’s #MusCake theme, it soon became clear to we of the special collections library team that delicious cake temptation runs through our collections like the jam in a Swiss roll. Featured below are just a few items from our MERL library and special collection rare books that will surely delight all cake lovers. Talking Banbury cakes are just the beginning!
The extraordinary Banbury cake (much like an Eccles cake) quoted above is the subject of The history of a Banbury cake: an entertaining book for children, published in 1835. This book is a real treasure of our children’s collection. The miniature 11x7cm text with its original blue paper binding (with pictorial covers) has been preserved inside a larger, modern casing.
The History of a Banbury Cake (CHILDREN’S COLLECTION–828.7-HIS)
The delightful tale of a talking and kindly Banbury cake documents its sale and subsequent journey from Oxford to Bristol. Before meeting its end by ‘falling prey to Billy’, the cake imparts moral and behavioural advice to its ‘little readers’, so that they will be ‘respected and beloved by all who know you’. A cake with a message indeed!
The Amateur Cook (RESERVE–641.5942-BUR)
Lamenting the ‘austere and solemn severity of demeanour’ of contemporary cook books, The Amateur Cook by K Burrill and Annie M Booth, published in 1905, is another title which features cakes, bakes and cookery in an unusual and intriguing manner. The writers hope to inject a more ‘frivolous spirit’ into printed works on cookery and baking, to address the production of dull and complicated cookery titles of which they saw ‘no end’. This is achieved through an unusual format; the text takes the form of a narrative intermingled with recipes, in which the protagonists, well-to-do early twentieth century ladies, are instructed in baking and cookery. In the chapter ‘Triumphant Teas’, the young ladies are instructed by their tutor, Delecta, on cakes and baking while trying to avoid falling asleep… ‘You told me, Lesbia, your cakes were often wrong. Now do try and look interested, like a good girl, while I read you some notes on cake making…’
The Amateur Cook – ‘ever ready to eat up my failures’! (RESERVE–641.5942-BUR)
The Amateur Cook is illustrated in a wonderful art nouveau style, on the cover and throughout the book. Many of the illustrations are intended to tie in with the comical nature of the book, such as the pictorial end papers which feature a woman feeding to a dog one of her culinary attempts with the caption ‘ever ready to eat up my failures’! As Delecta would say, ‘it is far easier to make than bake!’
Modern Cookery – chapter on cakes (RESERVE–641.5-ACT)
Eliza Acton was an early nineteenth century cook who wrote one of the first books on cookery featuring lists of ingredients, timings and instructions to produce a recipe book similar to today’s format. The well known Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (first published in 1861) was largely based on Acton’s work. We hold the revised and enlarged edition of Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families published in 1875 (first published in 1845).
In Acton’s revised edition, her position on cakes and consumption of cake is laid bare (those who like to believe cake can do no wrong, avert your eyes!). She wishes that the space allotted to ‘sweet poisons’ in this edition had been ‘diminished still further’ due to the ‘illness’ the ‘habitual indulgence’ of rich buttery cakes can cause. Acton does concede, however, that occasional consumption of simple buns, biscuits and cakes is ‘not unwholesome’… some good news for cake lovers at least!
Our MERL Library periodical holdings feature several twentieth-century titles relating to cakes, confectionary and baking – ripe to be utilised by investigators of social, domestic and cultural history, alongside of the baking industry itself.
These titles often span the twentieth century, taking in resourceful baking methods to negate the impact of food rationing and how imperial and national achievements were celebrated through the medium of cake, such as victory fruit cakes in 1945 and a ‘polar cake’ to mark exploration in 1910.
Victory Fruit Cakes and a Polar Cake, both from The Baker and Confectioner (MERL LIBRARY PEROA–BRI/FOR)
Our Milling and Baking collection, alongside the titles of the open access MERL library, are ideal for those interested in researching baking in its industrial or scholarly context.
For those with a sweet tooth, there are many more cake and baking references to be found within our collections beyond these highlighted for museum cake day, 19 June.
Written by Kate Arnold-Forster, Head of the University Museums & Special Collections Service
Welcome to the launch of our Special Collections blog, the beginning of a new University Museums and Special Collections Services (UMASCS) venture, although an idea that we have been contemplating for a while. Our hope is that this blog will help provide new insights into the extraordinary range and depth of the University of Reading’s archives and library collections and explain how our activities and services aim to improve their accessibility and increasingly extend and promote their use.
It is hard to sum up the diversity of what we hold, although a brief wander among our book stacks provides an eclectic glimpse of anything from tractor manuals to nearly 500 different editions of Samuel Beckett’s work, alongside the 4,000 books of the Mark Longman Library on book and publishing history and the archives of biscuit company Huntley and Palmers. We are also home to internationally important archive holdings, including two Designated collections, the Archive of British Publishing and Printing History and the Samuel Beckett Archive.
Our aim is to share the writing of this blog (at least initially) among UMASCS staff. Over the coming months, this will help us introduce not only our collections but also ourselves and our work as well as explain what we do ‘behind the scenes’. But we also intend the blog to offer updates and more detailed reports on the various projects that underpin many of our activities – some directly linked to supporting new research, often involving close collaboration with researchers, while others focusing on collections development that continues to build our capacity to extend new knowledge of our collections in the digital age.
