Stones, Sharks and Steno’s De Solido
Written by Ted Simonds, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant. Today is #OldRockDay, a day to celebrate all things old, rocky, and fossilised. The library of Herbert Leader Hawkins (1887 – 1968), professor of geology at the University of Reading, forms our Hawkins Collection, which contains rare books on the history of geology, palaeontology and echinoderms. There […]
Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the glory of Rome
by Fiona Melhuish, UMASCS Librarian Hidden away in our collections store, amongst the rows of archive boxes, are the oversize book shelves, and the Overstone Folio Large sequence of the Overstone Library. Amongst the many treasures of this collection are a number of volumes of engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), one of the greatest […]
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), […]
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 […]
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’, […]
Cat sketches and cataloguing: Final thoughts of our Archive Graduate Trainee
Special Collections offer year long graduate trainee schemes in both the Archive and Library. In this month’s blog, our departing Archives Graduate Trainee Timothy Jerrome looks back on his year with us. Now that I am coming to the end of my year’s archive traineeship at Special Collections and the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), I feel […]
Sex, Scandals and Censorship: Mirabeau’s Errotika Biblion
Written by Erika Delbecque, Special Collections Librarian Inconspicuous amongst the venerable old tomes on the shelves of our rare book store, an unassuming binding contains one of the most infamous texts of the Ancient Regime: Errotika Biblion, Ancient Greek for The Erotic Book, by Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau. On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, we […]
Finding one of the oldest examples of printing in Britain: the story of the Caxton leaf
Written by Erika Delbecque, UMASCS Librarian, as part of the 2017 Being Human festival: Lost and Found. The leaf on my desk was stained, torn in places, and fairly unremarkable. Unlike other loose leaves from the fifteenth century that I had been working on, which mostly contained standard texts that circulated widely at the time, the […]
Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter: from manuscript to marketplace
The publishing archives of Chatto and Windus provide a fascinating insight into the process which brings a new book to its readers, allowing us to see the interplay between the literary and commercial worlds. I decided to follow The Flight from the Enchanter, Iris Murdoch’s second novel, from the submission of the manuscript to the […]