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 […]
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’, […]