Happy birthday Beardsley!
Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Aubrey Beardsley, a favourite artist among staff here. Aubrey Beardsley was born in 1872 and died from tuberculosis in 1898 at the age of only twenty-five. During his short and brilliant career he became notorious for his illustrations in two ‘decadent’ periodicals of the period, The Yellow Book and The Savoy. […]
New Featured Item: Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain
Charles Estienne, La dissection des parties du corps humain divisee en trois livres. Paris: chez Simon de Colines, 1546. Item from the Cole Library COLE–X092F/02, University of Reading Special Collections Services. Charles Estienne’s La dissection des parties du corps humain is one of the great illustrated anatomical works of the sixteenth century. It offers a fine […]
Beckett’s Murphy on display
In 2013 the University of Reading acquired the hand-written manuscript for Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel and the first major expression of the central themes that would occupy much of his later work. This has been added to the Beckett Collection. The manuscript, described by Sotheby’s as the ‘most important manuscript of a complete novel by […]
Pandora comes back to Special Collections
We have a newcomer to our staircase entrance hallway – the stunning Pandora, by JD Batten. Pandora is a part of the University art collection, and has joined us from its previous home at the main library. In fact, however, Pandora had a home in the Special Collections building for over 30 years (until 1949) […]
Favourite finds: First Mills & Boon
Although Mills & Boon didn’t start life as a romance publisher, the company’s first publication in 1908 was in fact a romance – Arrows from the Dark, by Sophie Cole. While working through our own collection of Mills & Boon books, we stumbled across this gem: the very first copy sold of this very first […]
Favourite Finds: Benjamin Britten, Herbert Read & the anarchists
Brian Ryder is one of our volunteers here at Special Collections. Brian’s history with Reading collections is a long one; he used to be one of our project cataloguers and is now working his way through the Routledge & Kegan Paul archive. On March 13th 1952 the composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) – on holiday in Austria […]
Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin!
Guest post from Dr John Holmes, Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Reading, to celebrate Darwin Day: a global celebration of science and reason held on the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin! Today is International Darwin Day, held every year to celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin (he would […]
Polar vortex? An explorer, a biscuit and the South Pole
As the world freezes over (well, part of it – Reading is recovering from floods, not frost!), we thought it particularly appropriate to share the story of an intrepid (if tragic) explorer and his much loved biscuits. As early 20th-century explorers raced to reach the South Pole, they considered their supplies carefully; the right provisions […]
New featured item: Selectus Diplomatum et Numismatum Scotiae Thesaurus
James Anderson, Selectus Diplomatum et Numismatum Scotiae Thesaurus, 1739 James Anderson (1662–1728) was a Scottish historiographer and antiquary. Born in Edinburgh in 1662, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he studied law at the University of Edinburgh from 1677 until 1680. As a lawyer, he was required to study old charters and documents, and became interested in antiquarian scholarship, eventually abandoning the legal profession altogether. He first […]
Top Ten Treasures from the Archives: Owen Jones
Our collections richer than most people would imagine and cover a wide variety of subjects and historical periods. To give you an idea of what’s there, University Archivist Guy Baxter will be introducing his ‘Top Ten Treasures’ over the coming weeks, picking highlights from the archive collections here at Reading. Enjoy! Treasure Number 3: Owen […]