Something Else for the Weekend

Just a quick reminder of the free public events programme at UCL this weekend. Look for the building opposite Waterstones on Torrington Place and pop in through the black gates and the glass door to see some exhibitions (including our display of concrete poetry from Special Collections) and take part in activities from computer simulations and film screenings through to live tattooing.

Full programme here.

The Benefits of Reading, According to Ms Dutton and Mr de la Mare

Here’s Ellen Dutton‘s latest Stop Motion animation, on the benefits of reading. I thought it would be nice to set this alongside some of the thoughts Walter de la Mare shared in his anthologies for young people. Here’s an extract from Come Hither, a book of poems and prose extracts he published for young people in 1923, which was republished again as recently as 1990:

That is one of the pleasures of reading – you may make any picture out of the words you can and will; and a poem may have as many different meanings as there are different minds. (p. xxv-xxvi).

And these are from the introduction he and Thomas Quayle gave to their Readings of 1927:

That is really what it comes to: there is not really time enough in our short lives, with so much to be done, to waste much of it or our minds on what will not prove of lasting joy and use and service to them. (p. xx).

One simply cannot pay too much attention to what we see around us and in particular to living and beautiful things. And more especially when we are young. If possible, then, when you read about anything in a book, see it as clearly as you can in your own mind; then do your best to find that thing in the world around; then compare it with what the writer has said about it. Make your own discoveries. Explore! (p. xx)

A good book, indeed, is the next best thing in this life to a true friend. It gives all it has to give solely for the asking – and wants nothing in return but just a thankful blessing on the man who wrote it. (p. xxi).

The methods of information literacy for young people may have changed, but the sentiments are very much the same. As de la Mare and Quayle put it, “To be able to read is to be able to explore – as far as we will and can – the World of Books.” (p. xvii). Capital ‘W’, capital ‘B’.

Day of DH: A Day in the Sterling Library

N.B. This is a reposting of part of my Day of DH blog.

So this is where I spent the bulk of the day. I’m working on a paper for the Researching the Reading Experience conference. I’ve been working through de la Mare’s essay collection Pleasures and Speculations (Faber, 1940) and examining copies of books remaining in his Working Library for evidence of reading. I’m starting to get a sense of his virtual library – books that we can infer he owned or had access to but which are not extant in the books designated his working collection.

Pleasures and Speculations is a useful case study, as it contains essays he reworked, all about books he loved, and far from finding copies of each work he mentions, coverage is patchy and either early (books dating from before the turn of the century) or late (books published 2-3 years before 1940 – i.e. the time period in which he would have been reworking the earlier versions of the essays).

One of the main purposes of my overall work on the de la Mare library is to test the limits to which we can push different bibliographic methods. In this paper I’m testing inferences around the virtual library to the max. Which is lots of fun … and something of which I hope de la Mare, who was a prolific book reviewer, would have approved.

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Image: the Sterling Library, home to Senate House Library’s Historic Collections Reading Room and its Palaeography and Book Studies Collections.