Introducing This Year’s Blog Theme: 52 Weeks of Reading the Collections
‘You work in a library? It must be lovely to get to read books all day.’ Anyone who works in any kind of library has surely encountered this reaction more […]
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Historical How-To’s, Special Holiday Edition: The Great Gingerbread Bake-Off
This week, the Historical How-To’s return for a brief encore. Since the Mince Pie Bake-Off last Christmas was such a success, the staff here at Special Collections decided to celebrate […]
Lighting the Past: The Reserve Collection, Part 2
In the previous instalment, Kieran gave us some highlights from the general Reserve Collection, which Lighting the Past recently finished cataloguing. A collection of this size (over 10,000 items) contains […]
Christmas Carols from the Library Choir
It’s that time of year again, when Christmas will soon be upon us. As such, the Library ‘blog choir’ couldn’t pass on the chance to sing some Christmas music. For […]
Lighting the Past: The Reserve Collection, Part 1
After beginning on the 7th November 2013, the Lighting the Past Team has finally finished the general Reserve Collection, 54 weeks later, on the 21st November 2014. The fifth and […]
New Acquisitions: Hand-coloured 1589 Luther Bible
Earlier this year the rare books team acquired a significant, and rather pretty, addition to its developing Bible Collection. This Bible, a 1589 folio production of Luther’s edition, was […]
Lighting the Past: Historical ABCs
While cataloguing the Reserve Collection, I came across a little gem of a spelling book. It contains four separate publications which have been bound together, each dating from the early […]
New acquisition: Peter Fraser’s collection of Martin Parr photobooks
This past Monday morning was a sad morning. It was the last Monday morning in a series of Monday mornings that I’ve been spending inside the headspace of Martin Parr. […]
Seeing the light in a dark room: Paper as Evidence Workshop hosted by School of History and Special Collections
Material culture can prove beneficial, if not essential, to help us understand historical events, literature, science and art. Throughout the history of mankind, the materiality of day-to-day life has had […]
52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s: Reflections and Visual Index
It all started with a scruffy manuscript recipe book from the 1830s and a few reckless comments about what fun it would be to have a go at trying some […]