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 […]
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’, […]
Reading Readers: Lost in Translation in George Bell and Macmillan Publishers Archives
This month’s blog comes from one of our ‘Reading Readers’, Anna Strowe, who’s been looking at the archives of the publishing companies of George Bell & Sons and Macmillan. George Bell & Sons consists of correspondence, ledgers & miscellaneous records from 1813–1976. The Archive of Macmillan at the University of Reading is vast and mainly consists […]