While curators are scrambling to get shows back into exhibition spaces, a new project encouraging readers to get to know some of the book treasures in England’s libraries in East Anglia has launched online.
Discover Historic Books was put together during UK lockdown this year by the team behind the
Galleries and museums in the UK are taking their first tentative steps towards reopening as lockdown restrictions start to relax. Among them is the Charles Dickens Museum in London which is reopening its doors on July 25. Its new exhibition, Technicolour Dickens: The Living Image
The Pratchett Project is a collaborative team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin, Senate House Library (University of London), and Liverpool University which since 2018 has been studying the life and work of writer Sir Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), author most famously of the Discworld series of humorous fantasy
Among the exhibitions that agile curators have successfully adapted for online consumption is the excellent The Art of Advertising, at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. It covers more than two centuries of advertising, from black and white letterpress trade cards for coffins and packing cases, to colorful 1930s
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 (as well as his brush with death five years previously in a train crash). Sadly, lockdown has meant the cancelation of many commemorative events, though the Dickens Museum has just released the first of a new collection of colorized photographs ahead of a planned major new
The first major exhibition to explore the hidden collections of rare books in the north west of England features the work of William Morris, Kate Greenaway, and the prolific Harry Rountree, who provided illustrations for many magazines and novels including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G. Wodehouse.
There are many novels about bookshops, rather fewer about collectors of rare books, and almost none about book design. This final category has now been bulked out a little with Death of a Typographer by Nick Gadd (published by Arden), a playful crime thriller about the world of typography.
Set largely in Melbourne,
The Dear Mr. Poole exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in London has been one of the casualties of the coronavirus lockdown, but happily a sizable section of it has now been put online for readers to visit virtually.
Philip Poole (1909-1999) was known as the ‘pen-man of London’ running his shop His Nibs at 182 Drury
Although the real world has paused in its celebration of fine books and collections, it is still very much possible to find delights online. Here are five suggestions:
Determine how you like your rare books (rare, medium rare?):
A marvelous tweet from Durham Cathedral Library inspired by the ‘How
One of the leading twentieth-century British book collectors, Major John Abbey (1894-1969), is celebrated in an exhibition at Horsham Museum, West Sussex, England, which looks at his collecting life. (And yes, it is still currently open to visitors.)
Dyslexic and a poor writer, Abbey was interested in the book as physical object, its
