Exhibitions

Projects 2008

Each year the Special Collections department at Senate House Library undertakes projects to make specific collections more accessible by cataloguing the items in them online. This display indicates some of the variety of projects undertaken in 2008. These range from a discrete project to promote access to our fifteenth-century printed books (134 items), mainly Latin folios, some of which have been in the library since it was founded in 1871, to the cataloguing of a large and growing collection of mainly twentieth-century political pamphlets and, and of a collection of approximately 2,000 works spanning five centuries pertaining to observations of Russia and donated in 2008.

Ron Heisler Pamphlets

These pamphlets are from the estimated 19,000 pamphlets in the collection donated to Senate House Library by Ron Heisler in 2004. The Ron Heisler Collection is based primarily on labour and radical political movements and political expression in art, drama and literature. The pamphlets displayed are selected from just two randomly chosen boxes, to demonstrate the variety and wide range of the collection. They are from their ephemeral nature uncommon in academic libraries, and are valuable in adding a popular slant to the topics covered.

The Ron Heisler Collection also contains approximately 18,000 books. Cataloguing is ongoing over several years.

A History of East London 1860-1940
Langdon Park School, Poplar, London
London: Langdon Park School, 1976
Heisler P1080

This pamphlet contains short compositions by children of mixed ability aged between 12 and 14 at Langdon Park School, a county secondary school. The anthology is compiled from a year’s work in English lessons around the theme of ‘Stories from Local History’. The children imagine themselves as working class people in various historical situations or circumstances, including the suffragette movement, both world wars, on strikes (such as the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 and the general strike of 1926), in the workhouse, and being force-fed in prison.

A Funny Age: Growing up in North East London Between the Wars
Robert Barltrop
Walthamstow, London: London Borough of Waltham Forest, 1985
Heisler P1073

As summarised in the preface, ‘this is an account of life in the Walthamstow district, with some episodes in the country not far away and in the East End, in the 1920s and 1930s … I have tried to describe the activity of a family in middling circumstances, the neighbourhoods and people I knew and the attitudes surrounding us … Those were times of innovation and new experiences, against a background of depression and social outlooks which were still more Victorian than anything else.’

The Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee : A Short History of Bonnetmaking and Bonnet Wearing
Enid Gauldie
Waterside, Dundee: Waterside, 1993
Heisler P1074

Dundee was the first Scottish town to have its own incorporated trade of bonnetmakers, with a Seal of Cause dated 1496. It produced bonnets for 300 years, as heavy head coverings (up to 18 ounces of coarse wool) intended for practical rather than fashionable wear, the predecessor of the factory-made working man’s cloth cap. This pamphlet covers the nature of the bonnets and how, why and by whom they were made.

Diary of William Taylor, Footman 1837
William Taylor
[London]: St Marylebone Society, 1987
Heisler P1075

William Taylor, a footman in Grafton, in Oxfordshire, wrote on 1 January 1837 that he was beginning his journal ‘to note down some of the chief things that come under my observation each day’ as writing practice. Domestic minutiae include details of his work and meals, and some sentiments which, over 150 years later, retain their force: ‘Up at eight. It’s realy [sic] very little use getting up sooner as the mornings are so dark and I detest working by candlelight and, more than all, I am very fond of my Bed this cold weather’ (9 Jan. 1837).

Old Devon Recipes
Catherine Rothwell
Huddersfield: Netherwood, 1991
Heisler P1077

Perhaps this booklet was included in the collection for the pictures of Devon – street scenes as well as scenery – which replace the pictures of food which one would expect in a recipe book. Recipes range from saltwater eels and salmon tail in cream to Exeter stew and leeky frizzle to Devonshire junket, Teignmouth honey cake and apple scones.

Chilean Trade Unions Fight Back
London: Chile Solidarity Campaign, 1981
Heisler P1185

This brief pamphlet is introduced by Alex Kitson (1921-1997), while he was Deputy General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union. A typescript production, it explains the Chile Solidarity Campaign as having been established: ‘in response to the need for Unity amongst Chilean workers; broad-based and expressing the needs of the working class; a unity through which we can defend our interests together in solidarity”. The pamphlet unites two threads of the Ron Heisler Collection, trade unions, and the developing world.

People’s Power in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau
No. 11 (Jan. – Mar. 1978)
London: Mozambique, Angola and Guine Information Centre, 1978
Heisler P1119

This pamphlet is one of a series intended to raise awareness of political and socio-economic conditions in Africa. It indicates the international interest of the collection.

Talking about Socialism
Tony Benn
Glasgow: Unity, 1996
Heisler P1099

This pamphlet is representative of the overwhelmingly political cast of the Ron Heisler Collection. Tony Benn joined the Labour Party in 1943, became a Member of Parliament in 1950, and remained there until 2001. From the 1970s he was the unofficial leader of the Party’s radical populist left. This pamphlet is based on an interview conducted with Tony Benn in 1995 about socialism and capitalism; Benn wrote numerous pamphlets, as well as the longer works Arguments for Socialism (1979), Fighting Back: Speaking Out for Socialism in the Eighties (1988) and A Future for Socialism (1991) among others.

The M. S. Anderson Collection of Writings on Russia Printed between 1526 and 1917

In 2008 Senate House Library received the donation of the M. S. Anderson Collection of Writings on Russia Printed between 1526 and 1917. Matthew Smith Anderson, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, assembled the books over the forty years between 1964 and 2004. They consist of approximately 2,000 items published about Russia from the early sixteenth century,  when Russia was ignored and almost unknown to the outside world, up until the Russian Revolution, by which time Russia had long taken its place on the world stage. History, travel narratives and fiction are all present. The languages of publication include the Scandinavian and Romance tongues as well as English and German. The collection includes such visually attractive material as sets of hand-coloured prints of The Costumes of the Russian Empire. Its interest is interdisciplinary and extends from literature, history and international relations to various aspects of the burgeoning field of book history.

Cataloguing of the collection to open it up for scholarly research began in 2008 and is expected to be completed in mid-2009. The books below, selected by Professor Olive Anderson, are an initial taster to indicate the variety of material in this rich collection.

A Discourse of the Original, Countrey, Manners, Government and Religion of the Cossacks
Pierre Chevalier
London: Hobart Kemp, 1672
[M.S. Anderson] 1672 - Chevalier

Pictures from the Battle Fields
Eustace Clare Grenville Murray
2nd edn
London: Routledge, 1855
[M.S. Anderson] 1855 - Murray

 

Afghanistan: Its Political and Military History, Geography and Ethnology
S.R. Townshend Mayer and John C. Paget
London: Routledge, 1879
[M.S. Anderson] 1879 - Mayer

Cyprus: Its Value and Importance to England
London: Diprose and Bateman, 1878
[M.S. Anderson] 1878 - Cyprus

Lof- och Tacksäijelse-Skrift öfwer den genom Guds Hielp och Bistånd Lyckeligen Erhåldna Freden
Stockholm: Kongl. Tryckeri, 1721
[M.S. Anderson] 1721 - Lof

Russia’s Gift to the World
J.W. Mackail
London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915
[M.S. Anderson] 1915 - Mackail

Comentari della Moscovia
Siegmund von Herberstein
Venice: G. B. Pedrezzano, 1550
[M.S. Anderson] 1550 - Herberstein

The History of Russia
Giles Fletcher
[London: s.n.], 1643
[M.S. Anderson] 1643 - Fletcher

Queer Stories from Russia
Capeil Chernilo
London: Clarke, [1892]
[M.S. Anderson] 1892 - Chernilo

Atlas: Voyage dans La Russie Méridionale
Jacques Franc¸ois. Gamba
Paris: C.J. Trouvé, 1826
[M.S. Anderson] 1826 – Gamba (fol.)

Incunabula at Senate House Library

Incunabula are the earliest books printed from moveable type. The term comes from the Latin word for swaddling clothes, or swathing-bands, to indicate books printed in the infancy of printing. Incunabula are traditionally thought to begin with Gutenberg; the cut-off point for describing a book as an incunable (or, to use the Latin term, incunabulum) is the end of 1500.

There are probably about 28,000 editions of extant incunabula. The vast majority are in Latin. Many (about 37%) were printed in Italy, with German-speaking Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) following with about 32%. The predominant subject is religion (both theology and devotional texts, especially the Bible and books of hours). Many other subjects, however, are also covered, such as “modern” literature (e.g. Chaucer, Lydgate, Malory), classics, medicine, natural science, music, mathematics, astronomy and law. Some, like Euclid’s Elements, were printings of texts which had circulated in manuscript for over a thousand years; others were new works.

The earliest incunabula resembled manuscripts in appearance: deliberately so, as readers were conservative and wanted what they knew. Although an early title page is found on a papal edict printed by Peter Schoeffer in 1463, title pages did not become common until the 1480s. Early incunabula had no page or leaf numbers. Sometimes they were signed; often not. Although decorative initials first appeared in 1457,  even until the end of the incunabular period printers often left spaces for coloured initials to be supplied by hand, sometimes supplying a small printed letter, called a guide letter, to help them.

Senate House Library has over 130 incunabula. Almost half of these are from named special collections, whereby the greatest number are from the libraries of Augustus De Morgan and Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, which came to the University in 1871 and 1931 respectively. A few are single donations or come from institutional libraries which no longer exist. The Library purchased the remainder between 1941 and the late 1960s. The items featured are specimens of library purchases.

Senate House Library catalogued its incunabula online in 2008.

Trionfi e canzoniere
Francesco Petrarca
Venice: Bartholomaeus de Zanis, 11 July 1497; 30 Aug., 1497
Incunabula 109

The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), father of Italian humanism, His Trionfi - Triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Divinity – are an allegorical.version of the story of the human soul in progress from early passion towards the fulfilment of God. Petrarch began them in 1351 and revised them between 1356 and 1374. Starting in 1470, the Trionfi e canzoniere ran through 36 editions in the incunable period, all of them in Italy.

The Senate house copy of Petrarch’s text surrounded by commentary comprises twelve leaves purchased from Howes in 1962. They are an example of a plain copy without scribal prettification. Guide letters are supplied in place of initial capitals. The Petrarch is one of two examples of medieval poetry among the Senate House incunabula; the other is Richard Pynson’s printing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Die heylighe beuarden tot dat heylighe grafft in iherusalem
Bernhard von Breydenbach
Mainz: Erhard Reuwich, 24 May 1488
Incunabula 89

In 1483-4 Bernhard von Breydenbach went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, accompanied by the artist Erhard Reuwich. Peregrinationes in terram sanctam (Mainz, 1486), here translated as Die heylighe beuarden tot dat heylighe grafft in iherusalem, was the result: a popular combination of pilgrims’ guide, travelogue and geographical textbook. Reuwich himself cut his drawings in wood, views of places visited on the way, and supervised the printing of book. The woodcuts are the earliest printed representations of the places concerned, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The text went through ten editions in the incunable period: two in Latin, two in French, three in German, and one each in Spanish, Czech and this one in Dutch.

This copy has capital letters and some paragraph marks and initial strokes in red. While the precise date and place of acquisition is unknown, the accession number indicates that the Library purchased it towards the end of the 1960s.

Biblia cum Glosis Ordinarijs et Interlinearibus
Venice: Paganino Paganini, 18 Apr. 1495
Incunabula 100

Glosses, common in mediaeval manuscripts, first appeared in print in 1480, and the first edition of the Latin Bible with the commentary of the French Franciscan scholar Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1265-1349) was published in 1481. This gloss was significant for interpreting the literal, as opposed to the mystic, sense of the text. A 1489 edition of the Bible with Nicholas’s commentary was one of the first to include numerous woodcuts. The Bible shown here is the first edition which printed both his commentary (postilla) and also the glossa ordinaria .

The Bible on display is open at the Book of Numbers to show both illustration, and gloss surrounding and between the lines of the text. This copy was purchased in 1958 from G. David, a well-known antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge.

Decades
Flavio Biondo
Venice: Ottaviano Scotto, 16 July 1483
Incunabula 81

Decades, alternatively known as the Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romanorum Imperii covers the history of Europe from the plunder of Rome in 410 to 1440. The text is divided into decades. The papal official Flavio Biondo (1388-1463) died before finishing it, writing only three and the first book of the fourth. Nonetheless, it is Biondo’s greatest work, famous both for its scholarship and for being the first work ever to use the term ‘Middle Age’. It exerted tremendous influence in furthering the chronological notion of a Middle Age between the fall of Rome and Flavio's time.

This is the first of two editions printed during the incunable period. This copy, one of few illuminated incunabula in Senate House Library, has an illuminated shield bearing the arms of the De Medici family. Senate House Library purchased the volume in 1958 in memory of Sir Edwin Deller (1883-1936), who had been Principal of the University of London 1929-1936 and who died in November 1936 as a result of a builder’s truck falling on him when he visited the Senate House tower, then in the course of construction.

The Play Must Go On: Grieve Scene Designs

The Grieve Collection (MS1007) is a collection of 655 original scene designs for performances of Shakespearean and other plays staged at Covent Garden and other major London theatres between 1813 and 1857. The Grieve family of scene painters and set designers consisted of John Henderson Grieve (1770-1845), who came from Perth and who worked for Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Drury Lane, of his two sons, Thomas (1799-1882) and William (1800-1844), and of his grandson, Thomas Walford Grieve (1841-1882).

The London University lecturer and theatrical historian Jacob Isaacs (1896-1973) bought the paintings, with a grant from the University of London Expert Advisory Committee on Theology, Arts and Music, in approximately 1939 and donated it to the University of London in about 1943. In 2008 it was catalogued online on the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS).

Many paintings in the collection are flat. The two displayed are interesting for showing depth. The smaller of the two is of the interior of the ruined Dryburgh Abbey, in Scotland. It was painted for Vision of the Bard, a masque and pageant produced in Covent Garden in 1832 in honour of the recently deceased Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Note Scott’s name prominently on a tomb at the centre front. The larger image is of the inside of a conservatory, with plants in trees and pots. The central glass doors are cut round to indicate that they should open, and the roof and plants are on separate layers to show the depth of the design.

Dryburgh Abbey, from Vision of the Bard
1832
MS1007/473

Conservatory
n.d.
MS1007/599