The phoenix in early modern print woodcuts
June 4, 2024
This blog post was written by our Special Collections Librarian in the course of her work on an upcoming exhibition at the Old Rectory Museum, Loughborough, where facsimiles of books from the Loughborough Parish Library collection will be displayed. The early Christian writer St Isidore of Seville described the phoenix in his Etymologies: ‘The phoenix …
Discovering Iceland with the Benedikz Collection
April 9, 2024
The University of Nottingham may seem like an unlikely home for a treasure trove of Icelandic literature, but, nonetheless, in 1998 we welcomed the Benedikz collection: an assemblage of Old Icelandic sagas, poetry and travel books which greatly enhanced our pre-existing holdings of Norse, Icelandic and Viking literature. So, how did this remarkable acquisition come …
The Ballad of the Cherry Tree
December 11, 2023
This is a guest post by Trish Kerrison, who volunteered at Manuscripts and Special Collections between April and September 2023, cataloguing medicinal herbs and their uses in remedies from material held in our collections. In Mrs Willoughby’s Housekeeping Book of 1737 (MS 87/4), to which Mother Bird is a frequent contributor, there is a receipt …
Holinshed’s Chronicles: Shakespeare’s textbook
October 17, 2022
In the 1540s, bookseller and printer called Reyner Wolfe had a grand ambition to write a ‘universal cosmography of the world’, an enormous work that would cover the history of every nation complete with up-to-date illustrations and maps, and, to make it more accessible, written in English. It was quickly apparent that this was well …
Mansfield and the Waste of Water
April 20, 2022
In 1899, the Nottinghamshire town of Mansfield was causing a certain amount of confusion and alarm. The population was just under 16,000 according to the 1891 census, was predicted to be about 18,500 to 20,000 by 1901. The problem facing engineers George & F.W. Hodson was that they were all using a suspiciously large quantity …
Are you smarter than a 19th century 10 year old?
July 30, 2021
“My first is to ramble, my next to retreat; my whole oft enrages in summer’s fierce heat”. Any suggestions? This word puzzle sounds like a cryptic crossword clue but it’s actually a fun puzzle for children. The answer is at the bottom of the post, but if you didn’t solve that one, try this: “Without …
Birds of America: Flights of Fancy
May 5, 2021
There are only 120 copies of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ known to survive, the vast majority in university or other public libraries. Different editions occupy multiple places in top 10 lists of the most expensive books ever sold. The 4th Duke of Portland, whose archive we hold, owned a complete copy of the first edition, …
World Book Day 2021
March 4, 2021
Happy World Book Day! None of the staff here fancied dressing up (we can’t all wear a dressing gown and pretend to be Arthur Dent) so instead we’ve picked out a few of our favourite books from our collections. Abigail (Document Production Assistant) chose what we refer to as the Poisons Scrapbooks: a set of …
Simple Medicine
February 9, 2021
Post by Library Assistant Safiya Williams. There is a great pleasure, and sometimes amusement, in reading through old texts that cover topics of the human body and cures for its many ailments. Books on herbalism and herbal remedies give us an idea of those who came before us – without the support of modern medicine, …
Microscopy
September 11, 2020
Post by Ursula Ackrill, Special Collections Librarian. “It seemed to me,” said Swammer, coming close to Peregrine, “it seemed to me, my dear Mr. Tyss, as if a flea were on your collar.” Peregrine Tyss, the protagonist of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s humorous fantasy novel ‘Master Flea’ (1822), does keep the company of a friendly …
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