The Cataloguing Working Party is pleased to annouce the programme for its symposium on cataloguing literary archives and manuscripts:
Cataloguing Creativity programme with abstracts [PDF]
Tickets (including lunch and refreshments) are a very reasonable £12 and are available from the British Library Box Office – book online, in person, or by telephone (+44 (0)1937 546 546).
Seamus Heaney, the most celebrated member of a remarkable generation of Irish poets, died on the 30th of August at the age of 74. His full-length books of verse were published in Britain by Faber and Faber, but he also co-operated with artists and printers in a number of smaller-scale private and fine-press productions of his poetry. A small exhibition has been mounted in the Entrance Hall of Cambridge University Library, drawing on the Library’s rich collections of such material, and on correspondence from Heaney forming part of the papers of his fellow poet Anne Stevenson.
Two relatively early illustrated editions included are Bog poems, issued by Ted and Olwyn Hughes’s Rainbow Press in 1975, with illustrations by Barrie Cooke and in a Sangorski and Sutcliffe binding, and Hedge school: sonnets from Glanmore, printed by the Janus Press of Newark, Vermont, for Charles Seluzicki in 1979. Both books were published in the same year as Faber editions—North and Field work respectively—which incorporated their contents and brought them to a wider audience. There are two illustrated broadsheet publications, ‘The earth house’, one of four poems (the others were by Jenny Joseph, Laurie Lee and Lawrence Sail) printed by the Whittington Press with wood-engravings by John O’Connor and published in 1990 for the Friends of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in a portfolio with the title The four elements; and Mint, the first of three broadsides featuring poems by Heaney published in the early 1990s by the educationist William B. Ewert of Concord, New Hampshire. Ewert was also the publisher of Keeping going, a more substantial production designed by Gino Lee and featuring etchings by Dimitri Hadzi, printed by the Bow & Arrow Press of Cambridge, Massachsetts, in 1993. This was intended as a salute to Robert and Jana Kiely, the longstanding Master and Associate Master of Adams House in Harvard University, to which Heaney was affiliated during his tenure of various posts at Harvard between 1981 and 2006.
From the papers of Anne Stevenson have been selected a corrected typescript of ‘The figures at Kilpeck’, a poem (published, with further amendments and with the title ‘Sheelagh na Gig’, in Station Island, 1984) written after a visit to the church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, a village south-west of Hereford, and sent to Stevenson in February 1981; and an autograph notelet of January 1996 replying to Stevenson’s congratulations on the award to Heaney of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in which he admits to a feeling of panic when contemplating his great forebears as Nobel Laureates, Yeats and Beckett, but takes comfort in the ‘known living’, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Nadine Gordimer.
The display will be on show until Monday 30 September. Entrance Hall displays are open to the general public during the Library’s normal opening hours.
Friday 15 November 2013 at the British Library
Photo credit: Pedro ArellanoThe Cataloguing Working Party of GLAM has today published its updated Guidelines for Cataloguing Literary Archives and Manuscripts, along with a related Thesaurus and Glossary.
To mark this event, GLAM will be holding a one-day Symposium focusing on issues related to cataloguing literary archives and manuscripts. We hope that this will provide a valuable forum for imparting information and sharing experiences through a mix of papers, case studies and discussion.
GLAM’s definition of ‘literary’ encompasses creative writing in all genres, whether or not intended for publication, including: poetry; the novel; other forms of fiction; other prose writing such as essays and letters by or relating to ‘literary’ figures; writing for drama, in the theatre, or for radio, television and film; life writing; the writing of criticism relating to creative writing; and the process of publishing or otherwise supporting the production and dissemination of literature.
We are approaching the topic of this Symposium very broadly, and are seeking contributions (of approx. 20 minutes) from potential participants which might address any of the following topics:
Please submit brief abstracts (of 100-300 words) to fran.baker@manchester.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 5pm on Friday 28 June 2013.
Guest post by Jessica Smith, Project Archivist
Willy Russell with Tim Firth (in background), photographed for the tour of ‘In Other Words’. Photo: Paul Cary, 2004.
Willy Russell is a playwright and musician whose work has enjoyed worldwide success and acclaim. He is best known for plays Educating Rita (1980), Shirley Valentine (1986), Our Day Out (1977), and the musical Blood Brothers (1983). Willy Russell’s works have been translated into numerous languages and won multiple awards for both theatre and film.
The Willy Russell archive collection contains manuscripts, programmes, publicity and media material including newspaper cuttings and press releases, correspondence, legal, financial and administrative documents, records relating to the casting and audition process, audio and film material, and promotional ephemera. The collection was amassed by Willy Russell over the course of his career, and is a comprehensive representation of his work to date, with earliest material dated 1964.
Working part time from October 2011 – October 2012, I was employed by Willy Russell to arrange and catalogue this personal archive collection. I was particularly fortunate to have the support and assistance of Willy himself during the project, meeting with him regularly to discuss items that I was unable to identify. He provided me with answers to questions ranging from the chronology of draft manuscripts to the identities of correspondents with illegible signatures. I was directly provided with context for the material, which enabled me to make connections and to appreciate the way in which projects, works and individuals related to one another, and to create more comprehensive descriptions of the material. The assistance of my colleague Louise Bruton, who worked on the project for three months, was also invaluable, as through discussion many of my queries and difficulties were easily resolved.
In addition, I found the material I was cataloguing to be absorbing, from annotated manuscripts of Blood Brothers containing alternate endings and dialogue, to composing mental essays on the differences between Educating Rita and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (as a result of the continuing comparisons made in the media), to the insights provided by correspondence between Willy Russell and actors, directors and producers. The collection also provides insight into less well-known works, such as the Cantril Tales, a 1974 Christmas production at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre written by, amongst others, Willy Russell, Pete Postlethwaite, George Costigan and Adrian Henri, directed by Jonathan Pryce and featuring Matthew Kelly, Julie Walters and Bill Nighy.
The project has presented some unusual challenges; I worked on the material at home which created potential problems in terms of security and suitable storage conditions. I was also aware that my catalogues would be used personally by Willy Russell, and publically for research at a Special Collections and Archives, which required a balancing of the requirements of archival cataloguing standards, and ensuring usability and ease of access. To improve accessibility, with assistance from an IT specialist, I created a database in Microsoft Access which allows the entirety of the catalogue to be searched by keyword, and also provides the potential for Boolean searching of the catalogue fields.
Once the project was completed, I was pleased to assist in negotiating the collection’s deposit with Liverpool John Moores University. We hope to make the collection as accessible as possible to students at the University’s departments of Drama, English and Graphic Arts and to researchers, but also to promote public access. Future intended projects include the digitisation of selected items from the collection to assist in ensuring their preservation, and the cataloguing of an additional collection consisting of photographs collected by Willy Russell.
Willy Russell will give a talk at the University in October 2013 which will be accompanied by an exhibition of material from the archive.
The Willy Russell’s Archive is now available for access at Liverpool John Moores University’s Special Collections and Archives department. For further details, please see the LJMU press release.
A draft of Peter Scupham’s poem ‘Out of Season’. From CUL MS Add. 9941
A new exhibition in Cambridge University Library celebrates the eightieth birthday of the distinguished poet Peter Scupham.
Born in Bootle in 1933, Scupham read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. While working as a schoolteacher, and later in semi-retirement as a bookseller, Scupham has produced eleven full-length collections of poetry in addition to volumes of Selected and Collected poems. His formal and technically adroit poems have been seen as continuing the tradition of Hardy, Frost and Edward Thomas; childhood, England, ghosts and war are among his typical themes. He has written that he would like his poems ‘to be windows not mirrors…. A window cuts a shape, and I am fascinated by structure, harmony, balance – all those qualities which give definition to the view’. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 1996 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The exhibition draws both on the wide range of Scupham’s printed works and on a collection of his literary and personal papers donated to the University Library in 2011 (MS Add. 9941). It traces Scupham’s career from his prep-school days at the Perse in Cambridge, through National Service in the early 1950s, and on into his long literary career, from early periodical and small-press publications to full-length collections from Oxford University Press and Carcanet.
A number of Scupham’s poems have been published in books or pamphlets issued by fine press printers, and the exhibition features a comprehensive set of these, from the 1978 Natura, designed by Karl Kimber Merker and printed at the University of Iowa’s Windhover Press (our copy is one of half of the print-run published in England by Anthony Baker’s Gruffyground Press), to Out of Season, designed and printed by Sebastian Carter of the Rampant Lions Press on Hodgkinson handmade paper, and published by Mark Askam at the Chestnut Press, Hitchin, in 2008 (a facsimile of a draft of the poem ‘Out of Season’ is also on show in the exhibition). ‘The Gatehouse’ (1979) is one of five poems, each by a different poet and paired with an image by a different artist, published in a portfolio as The Transparent Room by the Starwheel Press, founded in 1976 by Clarissa Upchurch and George Szirtes. Writing in 1982, Szirtes explained that their philosophy was not to ‘encourage the illustration of particular lines of a poem’ but allow ‘picture and poem to meet as independent equals’, and the image chosen to accompany Scupham’s poem was by Upchurch herself. Under the Barrage, published by the Bonnefant Press in Banholt, Holland, in 1988, brought together a number of Scupham’s poems on war and childhood, with a woodcut frontispiece by Rigby Graham, an artist who had been illustrating Scupham’s poems since the early 1970s.
One display case is devoted to Scupham’s own work as a printer and publisher of poetry. In 1972, together with John Mole and Roger Burford Mason, Scupham edited a series of ‘Cellar Press Poems’, each featuring a single poem with an accompanying illustration. From 1974 onwards, he and Mole began to use a 1930s machine press, a flatbed press and a small treadle press to issue editions under the Mandeville imprint, named after the supposed medieval traveller. Their aim was to publish work they admired in inexpensive editions: as Scupham later explained in an interview, ‘We reckoned to be tidy and clean printers of good quality pamphlets on laid paper, sewn rather than stapled … but we never set out to be a fine press.’ Mandeville Press publications on display include Anthony Hechts’s A Love for Four Voices: Homage to Franz Joseph Haydn (1983), Mandeville’s Bestiary, an anthology of poems on animal themes produced in 1985, and a late production of the press, a collection of the poems of James Graham, first Marquis of Montrose, edited by Robin Graham Bell and printed using the more modern technology of offset litho in 1990.
On Thursday 23 May, at 5.00 p.m., in the Library’s Milstein Seminar Rooms, to mark the launch of the re-issue of his Collected Poems (Carcanet Press), Scupham will give a talk and reading from his work, focussing on the ways in which Cambridge and its locality have featured in his poetry over the course of four decades, from poems based on the surviving letters and diaries of a German-born academic family at the time of the First World War, through scenes of his Harston upbringing in ‘A Wartime Childhood’, to evocations of undergraduate life reading English in the 1950s from the recent poem-sequence ‘Playtime in a Cold City’. This event forms part of the programme of the Friends of Cambridge University Library, and all are welcome: Friends £2.50, others £3.50, students free.
Peter Scupham at Eighty runs in the North Front Corridor at Cambridge University Library until Saturday 22 June, during normal Library opening hours. Members of the University who hold a Library reader’s card are welcome to bring up to two visitors at a time to see the exhibition. Members of the public who do not hold a Library reader’s card may be able to make an appointment with the curator to gain access to the exhibition area. For further information contact John Wells (e-mail: jdw1000@cam.ac.uk, telephone: 01223 333055).
Heather Dean of GLAM(NA) – GLAM’s North American sister organisation – has kindly made available the Literary Archives User Study undertaken at the Beinecke Library in 2010. The survey ‘was motivated by an interest in working more collaboratively with researchers of literary archives’ to gain a better understanding of the challenges facing scholars, and includes practical recommendations for improving the user experience in an educational setting.
Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (NA), ‘Literary Archives User Study’, 2011.
Series of notecards onto which Berry has written his feelings on subjects including his arrival in England, his development as a writer and his work with schools.
Images reproduced with the kind permission of James Berry.
The British Library has acquired the archive of the Caribbean British poet and writer, James Berry OBE. One of the first black writers in Britain to be widely recognised for his work, James Berry came to Britain as part of the first major wave of immigrants from the Caribbean in 1948.
Berry‘s archive includes poetry notebooks spanning the length of his career, along with manuscript and typescript drafts of his poetry and prose (including notes for an unpublished novel), diaries, photographs and audio visual material. Notes and heavily annotated drafts in the archive illustrate Berry’s creative process and the meticulous attention to detail in his writing. This fascinating and varied archive will provide researchers with a real insight into Berry’s life and work.
Much of Berry’s work explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards. James Berry’s passion for and involvement in education, which developed out of a concern for the low priority given to multi-cultural education in British schools, led to numerous visits to schools and a year spent as Writer-in-Residence at Vauxhall Manor School in 1978.
For more information and images of items from the archive please see the press release.
Portrait and facsimile handwriting of Abraham Cowley, from John Thane’s ‘British Autography’ (1839?).
Dawson Turner, the banker, antiquary, and leading light of autograph collectors in the early nineteenth century, claimed that he had ‘never met with the man who was not gratified to see how Newton wrote, or how Milton and Bacon formed their letters’. Since poetry is the most intense and heightened mode of language, fascination with the physicality of an autograph text, and the excitement provided by a sense of proximity to the writer, has often been especially strong in the case of poetical manuscripts.
The emergence of respect for autograph writings, which does not seem to have been common before the eighteenth century, has been attributed to the proliferation of print culture and the uniformity of mass-produced books. Walter Benjamin defined a work of art’s ‘aura’ as ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’, and the American poet Dana Gioia, quoting Benjamin, extended this idea to literary manuscripts in order to explain the special value accorded to autograph texts. Yet Gioia’s essay has appeared in The Hand of the Poet (New York, 1997), a machine-made volume of printed facsimile reproductions of poets’ handwriting, and in actual practice the medium of print has proved to be a means by which some measure of the aura of autographs can be communicated.
Showing Their Hands: Poets’ Autographs in Facsimile, a new exhibition in Cambridge University Library (see foot of post for access information), traces some of the ways in which poets’ handwriting has been disseminated in print. The term ‘autographs’ is used in the sense of any writing in the poets’ own hands, not merely signatures, and the exhibition includes images of poems, letters and legal documents by poets as diverse as Torquato Tasso, George Herbert, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Federico García Lorca. Volumes with facsimile autographs represent a distinctive sub-genre of the illustrated book, and in the same way as the autographs which gave rise to them, these publications have become a field for collectors and students in their own right.
The practice of engraving examples of handwriting pre-dated the concern for specifically autographic material, and reproductions of medieval hands were produced in the first half of the eighteenth century for the benefit of antiquarian scholarship. Some early collections of autograph facsimiles were similarly intended as aids to historians and librarians, by helping them to identify the writers of original documents. Early facsimiles were a branch of the engraver’s art, and there were strong links between their production and the wider print trade; it was not uncommon for facsimiles of signatures or other scraps of autograph writing to be combined with portraits, since each was considered, in Dawson Turner’s words, to be an ‘indispensable accompaniment to biography … and both for the same cause, as clues to the deciphering of character’.
By the early Victorian period autograph collecting had become an established pastime among the middle classes, bringing about a range of publications aimed at a popular audience. The exhibition includes examples of these, including the Historical and Literary Curiosities of 1840, a gallimaufry of pictorial representations frequently combining architectural or topographical imagery with related facsimiles, and The Autographic Mirror (1864–6), a periodical which reproduced documents in the hands of a wide range of contemporary and historical figures—‘Sovereigns, Statesmen, Warriors, Divines, Historians, Lawyers, Literary, Scientific, Artistic, and Theatrical Celebrities’—from Britain and overseas. Early compilations of facsimiles tended to give pride of place to royalty, nobility and political figures, but in the twentieth century volumes were produced devoted to autographs of literary, and specifically poetical, authors.
The value of manuscript materials for deepening an understanding of poetical composition has long been understood, as has the usefulness of facsimiles in disseminating examples of the process. The exhibition includes the second volume of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1793), with a plate showing a page of the draft of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad. In his accompanying text, D’Israeli provided an early summary of the interest in studying a writer’s working papers: ‘The lover of poetry will not be a little gratified, when he contemplates the variety of epithets, the imperfect idea, the gradual embellishment, and the critical rasures which are discoverable in this Fac Simile. The action of Hector, in lifting his infant in his arms, occasioned Pope much trouble….’
In the last third of the twentieth century there were several attempts to produce facsimile editions of extensive—even comprehensive—collections of individual poets’ surviving manuscripts. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Whitman and Yeats have all had entire series of volumes dedicated to reproductions of their autograph poetry. At the same time, however, the poetical facsimile has been a field for more individualized publications, drawing on the traditions of fine press printing in matters such as layout, paper, edition size, and the typography of the accompanying letterpress; the ink and paper of a facsimile can be greatly superior to those of the original documents. Most facsimiles are issued in bindings bearing no relationship to the original item, but occasionally an attempt is made to recreate the physical characteristics of the source document more closely, and as an example the exhibition features a reproduction of the 1888 article said to have caused the breach between Algernon Charles Swinburne and James McNeill Whistler, published in the form of 13 loose leaves on blue paper.
A wide range of methods of producing facsimiles is demonstrated by the exhibition, from steel engravings and lithography through to colour photography. Advances in digital technology have opened up new avenues for the reproduction of poetical autographs, and facsimiles made available online or by app are represented. The exhibition begins and ends with facsimiles of Shakespeare’s signatures on his will. The first is in the form of an eighteenth-century engraving, the second a twenty-first century full-colour photographic reproduction issued as part of a multi-media publication. In spite of the disparity in imaging technologies, the deterioration in the condition of the original document in the 228-year interval between the production of the facsimiles has meant that the earlier version retains evidential value in relation to Shakespeare’s handwriting.
Showing Their Hands: Poets’ Autographs in Facsimile runs in the North Front Corridor at Cambridge University Library from Monday 17 September to Saturday 1 December, during normal Library opening hours. Library readers who are members of the University are welcome to bring up to two visitors at a time to see exhibitions. Members of the public who do not hold Library readers’ tickets may be able to make an appointment with the curator to gain access to the exhibition area. For further information contact John Wells (e-mail: jdw1000@cam.ac.uk, telephone: 01223 333055).
The Institute of English Studies (University of London), in collaboration with the University of the Andes, Colombia and the University of Lisbon, is hosting an international conference on “Writers and their Libraries” in Senate House, London on 15 and 16 March 2013. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars working on the personal libraries of some of the major figures in world literature, science, art, and philosophy (J.G. Ballard, Joseph Conrad, John Donne, John Keats, Montesquieu, Augustus de Morgan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, Quevedo, William Turner, David Foster Wallace, G.F. Watts, and many more). Exploring reading habits, note-taking practices, marginalia and other traces of reading experience, this two-day conference will contribute to a growing field within the history of the book — the history of reading — by focusing on the methodological and theoretical questions that underpin this form of investigation. In particular, we want to consider the challenges of reclaiming, representing and interpreting the evidence of readers writing in their books and to do so from a comparative perspective. Our motivation is to move beyond “case studies” to a more comprehensive theoretical approach without limitation as to period, language, or nation.
T. Sturge Moore’s annotations in his copy of D.G. Rossetti’s Collected Works (London, 1890)
The subject of this international conference constitutes a rich and lively subject area that combines the interests of book history, literary history, biography, composition history, and other forms of archival research. Writers’ libraries form a rich resource that elucidates the literary life and work in often unexpected ways. All books tell stories about their owners, whether these contain dog-eared pages or scattered pencil marks to extensive reading notes. In the broadest possible manner, a collection of books is a reflection of the owner’s taste and interests. The traces left behind during reading give more specific insight into what captured the attention, and may reveal opinions, thoughts, impressions, convictions, arguments, polemics. Most importantly, the traces reveal what captured the writer’s imagination, giving insight into the transformative process when the reading matter is fed back into the creative process.
Our keynote speakers are Professor H.J. Jackson (University of Toronto), who is the co-editor of S.T. Coleridge’s marginalia (5 volumes in the Bollingen edition) and the author of two important books, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001) and Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (2005), and Professor Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp), who has co-edited Reading Notes, a special issue of Variants: the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (2004), and who is currently at work (with Mark Nixon of the University of Reading) on creating a digital library of Samuel Beckett’s private collection of books preserved in the author’s Paris flat.
The importance of studying writers’ libraries resides in the universality of its subject: reader’s respond to what they read; while their responses may be highly personal, they are nonetheless also subject to broader cultural tendencies. Where reading responses meet the alchemy of literary creation is no doubt the most fascinating point. As in archaeology, the discrete pieces of evidence, the individual findings, must be brought together into a broader historical account that helps us understand better the phenomena we are studying. This is where this conference will make use of and significantly expand on earlier work. Topics for consideration are the history of personal libraries and book collecting; note-taking practices; writing readers and reading writers; the editing of marginalia (digital and in print); preservation practices (private libraries in the rare books room); the reconstruction of personal libraries.
A conference blog has been set up, where you can find regular updates about the conference, as well as guest posts and relevant news items.
Wim Van Mierlo
GLAM members who are interested in diaries and the study of life writing may like to have a look at the website of the Great Diary Project: http://www.thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk/public_html/. Founded by Dr Irving Finkel (who some may know in his other incarnation as Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures at the British Museum), the project aims to collect and preserve ‘unwanted diaries of any date or kind’. This growing collection now has a permanent home at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. You can listen to Dr Finkel talking about the project for a recent BBC radio programme ‘The Man Who Saves Life Stories’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhi9xKGGWX8&feature=plcp.
