30 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 27,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
23 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in Resource discovery
For the first time its history, the Library has published a fully illustrated guide to some of the most important items in our collections.
Front cover of Riches of the Rylands.
Riches of the Rylands, published by Manchester Universiy Press, explores and celebrates the Library’s outstanding Special Collections of rare books, manuscripts, archives, maps and visual materials.
The book features over 150 key items, each one chosen for its intrinsic interest and significance, and to reflect the broad spectrum of the collections. The book is arranged thematically, with thirteen chapters containing short essays on individual items by over sixty contributors – curators and experts in particular fields. Every item is beautifully illustrated in full colour. An extended introduction charts the history and context of the collections, and explores how they ‘speak’ to one another and to many different audiences.
Sample opening from Riches of the Rylands.
Riches of the Rylands will appeal to lovers of books and libraries, and anyone interested in literature, art, history, the history of ideas, and collecting, as well as more specialist academic audiences.
The book is available from Manchester University Press and online suppliers for £30, and is currently on sale at The John Rylands Library at the special introductory price of £25.
23 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in Printed books, Visual materials
Holly has been a popular Christmas decoration for centuries with its shiny green leaves and red berries. It is also associated with symbolism of Jesus’ birth and death, as expressed in the Carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy.’
22 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Visual materials
Tags
This ivory panel depicts the Adoration of the Magi in the upper portion and the Nativity of Jesus in the lower portion. The piece dates from the sixth century and was probably made in Egypt or Syria.
19 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Events, Public programmes
Fran Baker writes:
This year’s Rylands Poetry Reading was delivered by a poet who is probably better known to many of us in another of his roles. Rowan Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury until his retirement in 2012, and he is now Master of Magdalene College Cambridge. Although he has been a published poet for many years, it was only this year that he joined the list of Manchester-based Carcanet Press.
Rowan Williams delivering the Twelfth Rylands Poetry Reading.
His reading opened on a seasonal note with the poem ‘Advent Calendar’. However, Williams dislikes being labelled as ‘a religious poet’, preferring to be ‘a poet for whom religious things matter intensely’ – and that was evident in the wide-ranging subject matter of the poems he went on to read and discuss. These included work from his new Carcanet collection, The Other Mountain, a number of his earlier works, and some of his translations of work by Welsh writers.
It was one of our best attended readings to date, and the Q&A session at the end was particularly lively, prompting discussion about poetry and translation; the influence of the Welsh language on Williams’s work; musical settings of his poetry; poetry and religion; and his admiration for the work of David Jones and Vernon Watkins.
Williams was a compelling speaker, and probably felt more at home in the church-like surroundings of the Historic Reading Room than many of our visiting poets.
Rowan Williams and Michael Schmidt, Editorial and Managing Director of Carcanet Press. Image copyright © Fergus Wilde.
19 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in University Archive
Tags
Boothill Foot Tappers, Christmas Ball, Colbert Hamilton and the Hellrazors, Jazawaki, jazz band, Oompah band, panto, raffle, snowman, Special 20, The Bootleg Beatles, The Builders
This advertisement from student newspaper the Mancunion gives a glimpse of what the University of Manchester’s Christmas Ball promised in thirty years ago. Music, Panto, Raffle and more at £2 a ticket!
15 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Manuscripts
Tags
angel, Chichester, English missal, Jesus, John Rylands Library, Latin MS 24, Manchester, Mary, Nativity, prayer, Salisbury Cathedral
This image is from a mid-thirteenth century English missal (a prayer book) created in memory of Henry of Chichester in the scriptorium of Salisbury Cathedral. It shows Mary suckling the newborn Jesus, lying in a bed that would surely have been out of place in a stable!
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Visual materials
This extraordinary image of the Nativity is an engraving by William Bell Scott after William Blake’s painting (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Bell Scott was fascinated by Blake’s design, which he described as depicting ‘an entirely miraculous and supernatural event.’
11 Thursday Dec 2014
Posted in Archives, Digitisation, Resource discovery
Tags
Academic engagement, Acquisitions, CHICC, Digitisation, Exclusive Brethren, John Nelson Darby, Panacea Society, Plymouth Brethren, Scrapbooks
A scrapbook containing personal memorabilia relating to the life and travels of the Christian evangelist John Nelson Darby (1800-82) has been digitised and placed online by the Library’s Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care. Digitisation was carried out to aid the preservation of this important collection of documents. The pages of the scrapbook are acidic and have deteriorated considerably over time; regular handling was contributing to its poor condition.
Front cover of John Nelson Darby’s scrapbook, ref. JND/1/1.
Darby was a noted Biblical scholar, one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren, and later the leader of the ‘Exclusive Brethren’. He developed a distinctive reading of the Bible which focussed on the ‘end times’, the ‘ruin’ of the church, the prophetic importance of Israel, and the ‘rapture’ of the ‘saints’ or true believers at the point of Christ’s return.
The scrapbook contains letters, certificates, newspaper cuttings, tickets and other ephemera relating to the life of Darby, and is part of the extensive Papers of John Nelson Darby held by the Library. Darby’s papers also include his expansively annotated Greek New Testament, which is also viewable as digitised images thanks to kind donations made by Darby’s alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and the Panacea Society.
The entire scrapbook can be viewed as a turning-the-pages Bookreader Object within Luna at https://enriqueta.man.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/2p95h9.
10 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Printed books, Visual materials
Tags
Arthur Rackham, Book Illustration, christmas, Fairy Tales, Printed books, Santa Claus, Visual Collections
This volume by Arthur Rackham was recently retrieved for an archaeology seminar, but the images were just too seasonal to by-pass for the blog. Rackham has illustrated scenes from the fairy tale world. They convey a sense of joy and wonder, but not in a sanitized twee sense, many of these images are laced with the macabre and sinister. They consist of goblins, giants, elves, fairies and other grotesque and fantastic creatures, many of these stories are now familiar to us as Christmas Pantos.
Jack and The Bean Stalk.
Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures (R141905) is held in the Alison Uttley Collection and is the 331st copy from a run of 1030. Rackham is widely regarded as one of the leading illustrators from the Golden Age of British book illustration, which encompassed 1900 until the start of the First World War. Ian Rogerson discusses Rackham’s fairy tale illustrations in the newly published Riches of the Rylands.
Merry Christmas!
Santa Claus
