Papers from March meeting

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Zoe Wilcox

Sarah Elsegood’s presentation on the University of East Anglia’s literary archives can be downloaded from the Minutes and Papers page

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Cataloguing Guidance Now Available!

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Zoe Wilcox

At long last GLAM’s cataloguing guidelines are now available on the site in draft form. It has been a massive undertaking and I would like to thank all the members of the Cataloguing Working Party (Christine Faunch, Fran Baker, Helen Melody, Jacqui Grainger) and everyone else who contributed. Please do have a look and remember to give us your feedback by 1st July – either by leaving a comment on the site or by emailing cwp@glam-archives.org.uk.

Zoë Wilcox, Cataloguing Working Party Chair

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Manuscripts Still Matter

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Zoe Wilcox

Fragment from the Andrew Motion Archive, courtesy of the British Library
The second conference of the UK Literary Heritage Working Group will be held at the British Library on Monday 30th April 2012. 

The UK Literary Heritage Working Group, which is chaired by Lord Howarth of Newport, was established in 2005 and campaigns for the implementation of tax incentives to benefit living writers wishing to deposit their papers with UK institutions. It also works to raise awareness of the value of literary archives in terms of their research, educational and creative uses and the cultural benefits to be derived from such collections remaining within the UK. 

Manuscripts Matter, the Working Group’s first conference was held at the British Library in 2006. The international conference focused on collecting modern literary archives and included discussion of the concerns about the “loss” of British archives abroad, and the perspectives of institutions, dealers and creators of archives. Manuscripts Still Matter will consider the situation for archival institutions, archive creators, and a broad range of users given the changing financial and political climate since 2006. 

The day will begin with discussion of the situation for literary archives since 2005 and later sessions will consider the archives sector as a whole. The programme includes a session on the use of archives by the Creative Industries, which will include the British Library’s Artist in Residence,Christopher Green, and discussion of funding of the heritage sector with the Chief Executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund, Carole Souter, and others. An in conversation session with poets and writers, Wendy Cope, Ruth Fainlight, Ferdinand Mount and former Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, will consider the feelings of writers and poets on using archives, and seeing their own papers archived. Finally the programme will include a series of short presentations on different literary archive collections designed to demonstrate the vibrancy of theUKarchives and manuscripts sector that the Working Group wishes to champion. 

Conference fees (including buffet lunch and refreshments): £20. Please direct any enquiries to Helen Melody (helen.melody@bl.uk). To make bookings, please go to the British Library website at – http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event129607.html.

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Robert Edric Archive at UEA helps researchers uncover the creative writing process

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Zoe Wilcox

Robert Edric's manuscript for Cradle Song. Courtesy of University of East Anglia Archives and Special Collections

By Sarah Elsegood,
Arts and Humanities Faculty Librarian and Curator of Archives and Special Collections 

The University of East Anglia has been gifted an important collection of literary manuscripts from prolific Yorkshire author Robert Edric (pseudonym for Gary Edric Armitage) who was born in Sheffield in 1956 and now lives in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The collection of 53 boxes contains early drafts of fragments and completed short stories, including proofs of five early unpublished novels. Edric writes initially in pencil and only transfers his work to computer at the final stage, so the evidence of his creative process is preserved in hard copy for future researchers. That the majority of the manuscripts are in pencil gives us additional conservation issues to consider. The archive covers the period from 1982-2005, and there is an agreement that the papers relating to later works will be passed to UEA at a future time.

A full listing of the archive, completed by Archives Assistant Bridget Gillies, can be found at www.uea.ac.uk/is/archives/edric

About Robert Edric

Edric’s first published novel A Winter Garden won the James Tait Black Award in 1985. His novels Peacetime and Gathering the Water were long listed for the Booker Prize in 2006 and 2008. A departure from literary fiction between 2003 and 2005 led to the publication of a trilogy of detective novels set in Hull, known as the ‘Song Trilogy’. In 2011 Edric was one of eight novelists selected for the Fiction Uncovered promotion for his 2011 novel The London Satyr, winning praise from UEA Creative Writing Professor Giles Foden, who was chair of the panel of judges.

Working on the Edric Archive…

Robert Edric's manuscript for Cradle Song. Courtesy of University of East Anglia Archives and Special Collections

The archive arrived already sorted into boxes arranged chronologically, together with an outline listing by the author. He notes how the various drafts of “pieces” and “finished and half-finished tales … blew around like leaves and seeds for a few years as other, more substantial stories and novels took shape.” Edric’s listing includes everything, whether “evaporated, destroyed and existing”. 

With each new archive, my colleague and I together try to build up a picture of the writer. It is a gradual process of familiarization. On receipt we notice the chaotic or organized nature of the collection, and whether it brings with it any flora or fauna! Further clues are revealed through the appraisal, sorting and listing process, and from any correspondence. Parallel with this we gain an awareness from reading some of the published and unpublished work and reviews. Receiving the archive of a working author is even more interesting as the story of the life’s work isn’t yet over. I had some very entertaining conversations with the author by telephone and, in lieu of e-mail which he doesn’t use, Robert Edric sent us some delightful postcards, which are now in the archive.

We are very grateful and hope that further authors will come forward to augment our literary collections in this 40th anniversary year of the MA in Creative Writing at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

Visits by appointment to archives@uea.ac.uk

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The Special Collections Handbook

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Zoe Wilcox

The Special Collections Handbook by GLAM member Alison Cullingford

This new title by GLAM member Alison Cullingford has recently been published by Facet. Intended as a no-nonsense guide for special collections librarians, the handbook contains chapters on legal issues, preservation, cataloguing, marketing and social media, fundraising and advocacy, acquisition and collection development strategy, user services and staff training. For more information see
the Facet Publishing website.

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A household name

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Zoe Wilcox

Cataloguing the George R. Sims Collection by Matthew Schofield

Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester

In October I was working on a two-week project to catalogue the George R. Sims Collection at the John Rylands University of Manchester Special Collections and it’s now on the online catalogue.

George Robert Sims (1847-1922) was a household name in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was a prolific writer of popular dramatic works and credited with being the first person to have four plays running simultaneously in the West End. He was also a prolific author of novels and poetry and produced several volumes of memoirs. Interestingly, however, Sims was also a journalist, social campaigner and philanthropist and wrote at length over a great many years regarding the plight of the poor and was involved with several charities and is remembered for his poem ‘It’s Christmas Day in the Workhouse’.

This collection is interesting because it contains a significant number of typescript volumes of his plays, which were not published and also actor’s and musician’s parts for the plays with annotations, which together demonstrate the content of ephemeral popular drama of the 1880s/1890s and also give something of the sense of how they were performed. Also of interest are manuscripts of several of Sims’s published novels and what appears to be an unpublished manuscript for a book on vagrancy in the 1890s, the only manuscript representation of Sims’s campaigning journalism within the collection.

This collection also reveals the extent of Sims’s celebrity status as playwright, author, journalist and bon vivant. There are 4 volumes of scrapbooks, one of which is solely dedicated to published cartoon images of Sims and others containing letters, published articles and printed ephemera relating to the critical reception of his plays and also his social engagements, hobbies and home life. There is interesting posthumous material dating from the 1920s relating to the attempts of Sims’s widow to sell the rights to his works to silent film producers.

The image of Sims above is testament to his celebrity status at the time. It is an envelope (one of a number found within the collection) which rather than having Sims’s name and address, only has a hand-drawn likeness of Sims. The two birds represent the location of his home, being opposite “The Ducks Villa”. What also comes across in the collection is Sims’s eccentricity, with several articles, printed postcards and photographic images of his dogs, who appear to have accompanied him to performances of his works and in particular a printed invitation to the ‘christening’ of his dog, Barney Barnato, named after a prominent Jewish diamond magnate.

Matthew Schofield

John Rylands University Library

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Macmillan Archive looks back on 150 years of The Golden Treasury

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Zoe Wilcox

Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury was originally published in 1861 and has been the standard anthology of poetry for over 100 years. The Golden Treasury series helped to popularise Wordsworth and other romantic poets and is a set text for students of English Literature across the world. The volume has been in print ever since the first edition and a facsimile version with a new foreword by Carol Ann Duffy is being published today to celebrate this anniversary.

A full account of the history of The Golden Treasury, featuring images from the Macmillan Archive, has been compiled by Macmillan archivist Alysoun Sanders and can be read on the Palgrave Macmillan website. The archival sources document Palgrave’s original resolve to infect the whole nation with a love of poetry, Tennyson’s involvement in the initial selection process and the subsequent addition of new poets as the volume’s popularity and influence grew.

The Macmillan Archive itself is divided between the British Library and the University of Reading. Amongst the British Library holdings are the original manuscript of The Golden Treasury and correspondence between Palgrave and Alexander Macmillan. Generally speaking, correspondence relating to Macmillan’s most prominent authors is to be found at the BL, but Reading nevertheless retains letters from Hilaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats amongst other well-known writers.

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Heritage Lottery Fund simplifies process for urgent acquisitions

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Zoe Wilcox

HLF yesterday announced changes to its funding criteria for heritage acquisitions, designed to make it easier for applicants to access funds for urgent purchases. This decision was the result of a suggestion by The National Archives in response to HLF’s strategy consultation and is welcomed by GLAM, which advocated for the change.

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LitHouses conference: Old Places, Narrative Spaces: Combining Conservation and Creativity

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Zoe Wilcox

The annual LitHouses conference, in association with the Freud Museum, will be held on 28 November 2011 at the Anna Freud Centre, Hampstead, London. For registration information see the LitHouses website.

Schedule

09:30 Early Tour of the Freud Museum  10:00 The Anna Freud Centre – registration and coffee

10:30 Guest Speaker: Fiona Talbot, Head of Museums, Libraries and Archives, Heritage Lottery Fund

11:00 The LitHouses Group update from members – combining conservation and creativity

12:30 Lunch – sandwiches & conversation

14:00 Case Study 1 – “The aura of place – topography in early Dickens films”. Michael Eaton, Dickens dramatist, co-curator Dickens & Film 2012.

14:30 Case Study 2 – “Creativity in a museum environment”. Michael Arditti, former writer-in-residence at the Freud Museum.

15:00 Case Study 3 – “Conceptual artists-in-residence at Shandy Hall”. Patrick Wildgust, Shandy Hall (Laurence Sterne).

15:30 Case Study 4 – “Flat Time House – turning your house into a book”. Antony Hudek, University College London.

16:00 General Discussion

16:30 Tea

17:00 Late Tour of the Freud Museum

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Last chance to see Mervyn Peake exhibition at the British Library

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Zoe Wilcox

Drawing of Flay from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast notebooks, courtesy of the Mervyn Peake Estate

Extended until the 2nd October, there is still time to visit The Worlds of Mervyn Peake, a free exhibition in the British Library Folio Gallery.

The exhibition showcases the Peake Archive which was acquired by the Library last year with generous support from the Art Fund, the Friends of the British Library, the Friends of the National Libraries and individual donors. Highlights include Peake’s notebooks, which are full of working drawings of his characters, sketched to help him imagine the kinds of things these peculiar people might say. Also on view are his original drawings for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, rivalling Tenniel’s illustrations in their eccentricity and fearsomeness as well as the virtuosity of Peake’s cross-hatching technique.

The exhibition presents a thorough picture of Peake the polymath: as novelist, poet (of both serious and nonsense verse), painter, illustrator and playwright. His work is seen through the prism of the worlds he inhabited, both imaginary and real – from his birth in China, to Sark, London and his trip to Germany as a war correspondent in 1945 – these places all made a lasting impression on the settings and subject matter of his creative output.

Peake’s papers and drawings sit alongside correspondence from the archive. There is Graham Greene’s letter about Titus Groan which takes Peake to task for ‘spoiling a first-class book by laziness’. C S Lewis’ letter on Gormenghast praises Peake for making him ‘experience what he never experiened before… a new Universal’. And then there’s a note from Dylan Thomas, the Peakes’ friend and neighbour who often turned up on their doorstep somewhat the worse for wear; this note asks Mervyn for the loan of a coat and trousers (apparently just two of the garments which Thomas borrowed from Peake over the years; none were ever returned).

A deeply sympathetic man, a keen observer and a practical joker, this exhibition offers the chance to trace all these facets of Peake’s character in the writings and drawings he left behind.

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