Street Fights and Radishes: the notebooks of Leslie Daiken
Written by Xander Ryan, graduate student in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. Amongst the rich holdings of the Samuel Beckett Collection archives are the notebooks of Leslie Daiken. He was born Leslie Herbert Yodaiken in 1912 to Irish-Russian parents, part of the Jewish community centred around the ‘Little Jerusalem’ area of […]
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 […]
New Exhibition: Embellish’d with Gold.Treasures from the European Manuscripts Collection
During 2018 the University was fortunate to make an important new acquisition, the European Manuscripts Collection. The collection consists of 141 folio illuminated manuscripts and 2 volumes: a seventeenth century Italian manuscript prayer book and a fifteenth century French Book of Hours. The strength of the collection comprises the number of Book of Hours folios […]
Publishing and Printing in Milan
In late June, members of the archive and library team at UMASCs travelled to Milan for staff training under the Erasmus+ scheme. The aim of the trip was to visit various institutions in Milan and the surrounding area which hold similar special collections to University of Reading Special Collections. This was in order to provide members […]
Recovering Publishing Histories: the Adam & Charles Black Letterbooks
By Amara Thornton (Research Officer, Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology) The publishing house Adam and Charles Black was established in 1834 in Edinburgh. Now its archive is held in University of Reading Special Collections, and over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at one part of the collection – the Letterbooks containing delicate copies […]
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 […]