Nancy Astor: Reading and Parliamentary Archives collaborate on exciting new project
Special Collections are delighted to have been supporting this collaborative project, which celebrates the parliamentary career of Nancy Astor. We have been working closely with Dr Jacqui Turner in the History Department and with the Parliamentary Archives. A new leaflet has been produced to accompany the project. Look out for more Astor news in 2016 […]
Christmas Cards – The John Lewis Printing Collection
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian Our lovely John Lewis Printing Collection comes complete with a fabulous and fun range of Christmas cards dating to their origin in the Victorian period. According to Lewis (1976), Charles Dickens had a heavy influence on the initial themes of Christmas cards. Published seven years before the first […]
Travel Thursday: Wish you were here…
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian This week’s Travel Thursday feature focuses on postcards and in particular, the postcards in our John Lewis Printing Collection (Group XII 2) An early form of postcards were in circulation from the middle of the eighteenth century and the introduction of the penny postage stamp in 1840 made […]
Explore your Archive: Ducks
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian Today the theme of Explore Your Archives is Archive Animals so we’re going to have a look at some of our wonderful archive Ducks! Let’s start with perhaps our most famous duck, Jemima Puddle-Duck! UMASCS holds a 1908 edition of the tale, beautifully illustrating the adventures of Jemima […]
Reading Readers – Matt
PhD student Matt tells us about his time spent studying material within the world-renowned Samuel Beckett archive, and the archive of actor Billie Whitelaw. I am researching the production histories of Samuel Beckett’s drama in London as part of my PhD attached to the AHRC Staging Beckett project in the Department of Film, Theatre & […]
Explore Your Archive: Woolworths
As part of the Explore Your Archive campaign, we’ve been looking at the role of archivists. Here we look at the work involved in dealing with a newly acquired collection, and preparing items for use by researchers. Woolworths was a major retailer of books, clothes and pick and mix sweets. Shoppers in the UK considered […]
Reading Readers – Jenny
For the second in our Reading Readers series, Jenny tells us about the exciting discoveries she has made about the world of publishing in the Chatto & Windus letter books. I started working as a volunteer in the Special Collections about two years ago, my task being to join the team transcribing the archive of letters from […]
Robert Louis Stevenson
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian Today celebrates the 165th birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson, most famous for his classic novels ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Indeed it is ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ that is credited with the accolade of having initially established Stevenson’s reputation as a writer of great […]
Siegfried Sassoon: The hell where youth and laughter go
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian Each year on the second Sunday in November, the Sunday closest to 11th November or Armistice Day, we remember and honour the achievements and sacrifices of those who fought in the two World Wars and later conflicts. I was rewarded by an intense memory of men whose courage […]
Keats: A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Written by Louise Cowan, Trainee Liaison Librarian This weekend sees the 220th birthday of English Romantic poet John Keats. The title of this post, perhaps made famous more recently by Mary Poppins, is taken from Keats’ work ‘Endymion’. The poem is based on the Greek myth in which the eponymous young shepherd attracts the attentions […]