Keeper of Special Collections Chris Fletcher writes in the Spectator blog about the commonplace album kept by Lord Byron’s friends, the Parkyns family, Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 7967 …
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2013/05/taking-revenge-on-wicked-lord-byron/
Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 7967, a commonplace book kept by members of the Parkyns family
Bodleian Portraits Online
Over 300 paintings in the Bodleian Libraries can now be viewed online at the BBC website, Your Paintings. The digital images were made by the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity dedicated to making the art owned and held in public collections more accessible.
A Little Girl Reading (unknown artist) [Bodleian Library collections]
The paintings in Bodleian collections are principally portraits. They depict authors of some of the library’s treasured books and manuscripts, as well as the founder Thomas Bodley (1545-1613) himself, donors and librarians and the all-important reader of books.
Others portrayed in Bodleian paintings include:
Explorer and privateer Martin Frobisher (1535?-1594)
in Bodleian collections: Letter of, in papers of the Herrick Family: Summary Catalogue 39669.
Author Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
in Bodleian collections: A draft manuscript of Frankenstein
see the list of Mary Shelley’s Correspondence and papers in the Abinger Collection
Composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
in Bodleian collections: Schilflied manuscript with watercolour by the composer
![William Cecil (1520–1598), Baron Burghley by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger (attributed to) [collections of the Bodleian Library]](http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/files/2013/05/William-Cecil.jpg)
William Cecil (1520–1598), Baron Burghley
by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger (attributed to) [collections of the Bodleian Library]
Most of the paintings housed in the Bodleian Library are currently accessible to visitors only by appointment. Visitors wishing to see an individual painting should apply to:
Bodleian Libraries Exhibitions Section
Email: portraits@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Images from the Your Paintings site can be downloaded for personal research use. See the FAQ ‘What can I do with the images on the Your Paintings site?’ for information about using images from the BBC Your Paintings website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/about/
High-resolution digital images may be ordered from Bodleian Library Imaging Services, (see order form), giving the Accession Number (available in the Additional Information about each painting).
The Cadiz pirates
Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
by Wilhelm Sonmans
(c) Bodleian Libraries; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Dr Anders Ingram (National University of Ireland, Hakluyt Edition Project) used copies of the second edition of Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations (1598-1600) to explore the nature of censorship in Elizabethan England. At issue was the passage describing the Cadiz Expedition of 1596, led by the Earl of Essex and Lord Howard, during which English and Dutch troops sacked the Spanish city.
But the failure to capture the Spanish treasure fleet, and the conduct of the leaders, including the distribution of the booty, led to royal suppression of Essex’s own account of his actions. Two years later, Hakluyt included in his Navigations a “brief description” written by the doctor who travelled on the Ark Royal. The pages containing this episode were later excised from many copies of the work, and a new title page was produced omitting mention of the Cadiz expedition. Examining the physical evidence in three copies of Hakluyt’s Navigations from Bodleian collections, Dr Ingram showed that these represented different variants, and called into question the reason for the removal of these leaves: was this censorship, or action by the publishers in advance of the appearance of Hakluyt’s second volume, printed in 1599, which had found a sponsor in Robert Cecil, one of the examiners of the costs of the expedition during the controversy?
The copies examined contained: (1) The edition intact with the Cadiz episode as originally printed and a title page dated 1598; (2) The Cadiz leaves intact, but with a new title page dated 1599; (3) The leaves containing the description of the Cadiz episode replaced with a later (c. 1720) reprint, in different type and differently set.
The bookplate of Thomas Woodward
Recently acquired:
The death of Abel, an English version by Mary Collyer (d. 1763) of the work by Salomon Gessner (1730-1788). [Vet. A5 f.4209]
This unassuming eighteenth-century book is notable for the binding, half calf with marbled paper apparently made from a lawyer’s bill. The colours do not entirely obscure the handwritten items relating to deeds and trusts.
This “new edition” of The Death of Abel (the first edition of Collyer’s English version was in 1761) was printed in 1779 “for a company of booksellers”. An advertisement at the end of the book shows that a variety of entertaining and improving works – some illustrated with copper plates – could be had cheaply from Thomas Moore, Stationer, at 33 Paternoster Row. The diverse group includes educational books for children, and shows what publishers offered to a larger reading market after the 1774 House of Lords decision against perpetual copyright. The selection represents what William St Clair calls “the old canon”: editions of fiction, conduct literature and poetry — Milton, Pope, and the enormously popular and melancholic “Night Thoughts” by Edward Young — mostly in small octavo or duodecimo editions. To quote Young’s poem:
… “War, famine, pest, volcano, storm, and fire,
Intestine broils, oppression, with her heart
Wrapt up in triple brass, besiege mankind.
God’s image disinherited of day,…”
For any other “intestine broils”, the facing page offers of patent medicines including Scotch Pills and Daffy’s Elixir. Medicines were a common alternative source of income for stationers.
The bookplate of Thomas Woodward on the front paste-down of this item bears a poem, popular for use on bookplates in the nineteenth century, with good advice to all readers:
“If thou art borrowed by a Friend,
Right welcome shall he be,
To read, to study, not to lend,
But to return to me.
Not that imparted knowledge doth
Diminish learning’s store,
But Books, I find, if often lent,
Return to me no more.
_________________
Read slowly – Pause frequently –
Think Seriously – Keep cleanly –
Return Duly.”
Botanical fieldwork in the 1790s
Keeper of Special Collections Chris Fletcher writes in The Spectator blog about the recent acquisition of an album recording botanizing travels around Surrey, Norfolk, Oxfordshire and the Isle of Wight in the 1790s by a still-anonymous compiler. “…[T]he volume may just contain the first reference to freely growing Oxford Ragwort, recently escaped from the confines of the University’s Botanical gardens to find a welcoming home on the bountiful supply of college walls. It clings on still.”
Business, politics and technology at the dawn of radio broadcasting: the Byrne-Bussey Marconi Lecture, Marconi Day, 2013
Gabriele Balbi (USI) delivered the 2013 Byrne-Bussey Marconi Lecture on Marconi Day, 20 April, on the subject of why the Marconi Company was apparently slow to appreciate the broadcasting option of wireless. From the first development of wireless communication, the technology had advantages over the wired telegraph. Yet wireless point-to-point communications were subject to some seeming deficiencies: a lack of privacy and the potential for disruption, as anyone with a wireless set might pick up and listen to messages, or even disrupt them, as occurred at a 1903 demonstration of wireless at the Royal Institution in London.
Some individuals in the Marconi Company recognized that this apparent failure in fact heralded a new era of mass communication: the birth of broadcasting. But the company’s business model, and political relationships with the Post Office which regulated wireless and new technologies like the point-to-point wireless telephone that the Company wanted to exploit, meant that it was the 1920s before the Marconi Company fully engaged with the broadcasting option.
Oxford and District Amateur Radio Society members making the connection on Marconi Day 2013.
Ernesto Gomez (Bodleian Library) writes:
Marconi Day 2013 was celebrated by the Oxford and District Amateur Radio Society with a special Radio Club Station set up in the Museum of History of Science to communicate with radio amateurs around the world. The Oxford radio amateurs used the call sign GB4HMS. Amazingly one of the earliest contacts of the day was with Newfoundland, the historical place well remembered for being the first to receive a transatlantic message in 1901.”This year around 63 clubs from different latitudes managed to commemorate the Marconi achievements in the field of radio transmissions.
Visiting fellows in 2013 at the Bodleian Libraries
In 2013 the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book welcomes the following visiting researchers:
Byrne-Bussey Marconi Fellows, 2013
Jaume Navarro (Universidad del País Vasco) A conceptual and cultural history of the demise of the ether
Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College) Workplace Experiments and Work Study in the British Electrical Industry, c.1900-1950
Humfrey Wanley Fellows, 2013
Kasper Van Ommen (University of Leiden Library) Scaliger and Oxford: Early Modern Oriental collections
Jonathan Wainwright (University of York, Faculty of Music) A catalogue of the Music School collection of the Bodleian Library
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Bodleian Fellow, 2013
Rachel Schneider (University of Texas at Austin) Contesting Fragments: Print, Politics, and Graphic Design in Eighteenth-Century England
The Dunscombe-Colt Research Fellow 2013 (The Georgian Group and BSECS)
Peter Lindfield (Post-Doctoral Tutor at the School of Art History, University of St Andrews and Visiting Lecturer, Kunsthochschule, University of Kassel) Gothic Histories and Buildings of the Long Eighteenth Century
The Renaissance Society of America Bodleian Visiting Fellow, 2013
Katherine Larson (University of Toronto) Embodying Song in Early Modern England
More about Visiting Fellowships at the CSB: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/fellowships
Dr Gabriele Balbi (University of Lugano and Byrne-Bussey Marconi Fellow, 2012) will speak about the Marconi Company’s understanding of two ideas of communication (point-to-point and one-to-many) that were at the basis of two different media: the telegraph and radio broadcasting.
Saturday, 20 April 2013, 1 pm
Convocation House, Bodleian Library
Contact: bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
McKenzie Lecture 2013: Xu Bing speaking at the English Faculty, Oxford
The 2013 D.F. McKenzie Lecture was given by Xu Bing, an artist whose work incorporates and explores words and script. To a capacity crowd of 170 in the English Faculty lecture theatre, the artist described his fascination with the forms of graphic communication, and explained how his works, beginning with the room installation “Book from the Sky,” have explored the boundaries of script, icons and language. He showed and discussed examples of this in his work, including English words portrayed as Chinese characters, in “Square Word Calligraphy”, and a novel in icons, “Book from the Ground: From Point-to-Point”.
An exhibition of Xu Bing’s work, Landscape Landscript, appears at the Ashmolean Museum from 28 February to 19 May 2013, curated by Shelagh Vainker.
Xu Bing was introduced by Peter McDonald (English Faculty) who drew a comparison between the artist’s examination of meaning in form, and D.F. McKenzie’s famous puzzle to his students in the 1980s, asking them to deduce a book’s origin from its physical form alone. As McDonald pointed out, “In their different ways, the professor of bibliography with his blank book and the young artist with his nonsense characters were asking the same question: what constitutes a sign? Does the term apply only to the black marks inscribed on paper? What about the paper itself or the size and format of the book? And if the latter are signs, then what sense are we to make of the philosophical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, what we apprehend through our senses and what we read with our so-called mind’s eye?”
Each year the McKenzie Trust, in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book, presents the D.F. McKenzie Lecture, on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts.
McKenzie Lecture and other events in Oxford next week
Monday, 25 February: Oxford Bibliographical Society Lecture
Paddy Bullard (University of Kent) “Bare words not being sufficient…”: Tacit Knowledge and Early-Modern Books
All welcome. Taylor Institution at 5.15 pm
****
Wednesday, 27 February: Magdalen Library Talk
Dr Tom Freeman (University of Essex) ‘The Making of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’
Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, 5:30 pm
****
28 February, 5-6 pm: Annual D.F. McKenzie Lecture
Xu Bing, ‘The sort of artist I am’
“Central to all Xu Bing’s art is the theme of language: its uses and changes; misunderstandings; and dialogues within and between cultures. As a Chinese artist, Xu Bing has focused particularly on the pictorial quality of the Chinese language which, he maintains, lies at the core of Chinese culture.”
Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty, St Cross Building
