Early Boots Adverts
April 4, 2016
“Gorgeous”. “Colourful”. “A real trip down memory lane”. These are just some of the comments from the 7000 people who have visited the Inspiring Beauty exhibition at Weston Gallery in Lakeside this year. As the quotes suggest, it is a gorgeous, glittering exhibition of advertising used by Boots to promote their No7 range of cosmetics, …
The Advantage of Fairy Tales
March 17, 2016
This is a guest post from Samina Rickards, a second year Classical Civilisation student. These past weeks I have been conducting a placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections, as part of the Nottingham Advantage Award’s ‘Experience Heritage’ module. In writing a blog post on my time here I wanted to highlight something I’d found interesting, …
The life and times of a Victorian gentleman in Nottingham
March 7, 2016
This is a guest post by Matt Heald, volunteer and Document Production Assistant at Manuscripts & Special Collections. When I began my time as a volunteer with the department of Manuscripts and Special Collections in November 2013, my first task was catalogue and summarise diaries and letters of William Parsons, solicitor of Nottingham, whose entries …
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 …
A new view: changes to our Manuscripts Online Catalogue
February 17, 2016
After ten years of faithful service, our Manuscripts Online Catalogue has had a facelift. Our new CalmView website, like our old catalogue, allows users to search over 250,000 records describing our rich manuscript and archive collections. However, beyond a cosmetic refresh, the launch of CalmView has allowed us to bring thousands of records relating to …
Five Minutes With…. Ursula Ackrill
February 6, 2016
Happy National Libraries Day! To celebrate libraries and librarians, we’re borrowing the ‘Five Minutes With…’ format from the Library Matters blog and talking to our librarian Ursula, who is responsible for the ‘Special Collections’ part of Manuscripts & Special Collections. German speakers may also be familiar with her as the author of Zeiden, im Januar. What …
Mapping a Career in Conservation
February 1, 2016
This is a guest post by Kelly Grimshaw, former volunteer and University of Nottingham English graduate who approached us with an interest in a career in heritage. In the summer of 2015 I volunteered with the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department for two and a half months. I was involved in three projects: sourcing archival …
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 …
Inspiring Beauty
January 11, 2016
What do Charles Darwin and the number 7 have in common? It might sound like the set-up to a bad joke, but it the answer – cosmetics – is the subject of our next Weston Gallery exhibition, Inspiring Beauty. No7 ~ 80 years of making up the modern woman. Opening on Friday 15th January, the new exhibition was …
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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