Fragments of a Saint
October 20, 2016
Tucked away in a bundle of 17th century natural history illustrations was a single page of comparatively plain-looking handwritten text that was obviously out of place. It began abruptly in the middle of a sentence and the edges were slightly more battered- not surprising, considering it was about 200 years older than the rest of the pages. …
It’s All Fun and Games
September 26, 2016
Did you play Snakes and Ladders, hopscotch and draughts as a child? The chances are you did, as did your grandparents, and possibly generations beyond that. These games are simple and fun, and for those reasons have become classic childhood staples. Many more games which have not survived the passage of time, for equally valid reasons. …
Pirates!
September 19, 2016
Ahoy there readers! No, this is not a post about digital piracy or illegal file sharing, but the sea-faring pirates of old, to mark that most frivolous of parody holidays, International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Originally started in America as an in-joke between friends, it has become an annual charity fundraising day, where participants …
Beyond the Reading Room: Document Production
August 26, 2016
It’s 10 years this month that Manuscripts & Special Collections moved to King’s Meadow Campus! Many people have visited the Reading Room over the years, but this is only a small part of the department. As part of the celebrations, we’re giving you a look at what goes on Beyond the Reading Room, continuing with… …
Mr William Saville’s Crime
August 7, 2016
William Saville (1815-1844) is not a resident that Nottingham, or any other city, would boast about. The child of a violent drunkard who grew up to become a murderer would have been little more than a footnote in Nottingham’s history had it not been for the terrible events at his execution. The whole story is …
Dead Man Found in Coffin
July 25, 2016
What are Horseshoehead, Purples, Tissick, and Rising of the Lights? If you guessed along the lines of an equestrian accident, a colour, a small village in the Home Counties, and perhaps an indie band on the verge of greatness, then you’d be very wrong. These are just a few of the bizarre-sounding medical conditions that …
Picturing Shakespeare
April 22, 2016
Tomorrow, the 23rd April, is the quartercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). We, and the Library more generally, have been celebrating Shakespeare throughout April. If you visited the Reading Room this month, you will have seen some of the wonderful books in our Cambridge Shakespeare Collection on display. It owes its existence to Henry Thomas Hall (1823-1894), a resident of Cambridge and …
Dark, Satanic Mills
February 26, 2016
In late January and throughout February 1828, readers of the radical newspaper The Lion were amongst the first to read excerpts from an astonishing memoir that would help change Victorian Britain’s textile industry, and possibly inspire one of the great works of English literature. A Memoir of Robert Blincoe was published in its entirety four years after …
The Fall and Rise of Little Fanny
January 20, 2016
One of the best aspects of working with Manuscripts & Special Collections is that, every so often, we will stumble across something extraordinarily beautiful, profound or moving – and sometimes, we find something like ‘The History of Little Fanny: exemplified in a series of figures‘ (Briggs Collection Pamphlet PZ6.H4). Somehow missed off the list of great children’s …
A back-of-the-envelope history of Christmas cards
December 11, 2015
If you were asked to guess what the very first Christmas card depicted, what would your answer be? Most people (according to an unofficial poll of my colleagues) thought either a Nativity scene or possibly one of a snowy landscape. Sensible ideas, but both wrong. The first Christmas card was commissioned in 1843 by Sir …
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