The Bodleian Library

Aug. 13, 2019

The Bodleian Library is one of the oldest libraries in Europe (first opened to scholars in 1602) and is the second largest library in Britain. Held in 36 buildings across Oxford, the 15 million piece book collection is still used by students and researchers from around the world. The physical and digital collection of 100s of millions of objects is made of printed works, printed ephemera, medieval manuscripts, photos, games, maps, sheet music, films, audio, and video.

The Open Palace Program made a visit to the Rare Books Department of 'The Bod' talk to their staff about conservation of rare books.

First we toured their conservation labs. The spaces were absolutely gorgeous and the techs there were very kind and explained the projects they're currently working on. It was great to see paper conservation and binding restoration in action. Most of the objects being restored were hundreds of years old.

      
An overview of the lab
     
The photography station. How gorgeous!!!
     
'Let's get a closer look"

Custom tool pouches. Quite the professional touch!

I'm not entirely sure what this was for, if it was a part of the collection or resource preparation for authentic restoration but all I could think was.. "moisturize me".

Then we were lead to a room with a selection of the rare books collection pulled for us! We washed our hands and removed jewelry, watches, and long necklaces to get a closer look at the books. With the permission of the staff we even got to touch some of them. My choices were the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Shakespeare's first printed folio (that took 18 months to print). The information detailed below in the photo captions is taken from the labeling provided next to each book.

Not pictured are two original J.R.R. Tolkien prints from 1927 and 1933. They were both for his four children who received letters from Father Christmas accompanied by lively illustrations. The illustration from 1933 includes goblins and elves, which makes sense as Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the early 1930s. The drawing shows North Polar Bear saving Christmas by battling the goblins who were invading Father Christmas's house and trying to steal the children's presents. I couldn't take pictures due to the family still owning rights to them.

This was the traveling library for King Charles I. It consists of 60 books bound in goatskin. They were printed between 1568 and 1608 in Italian, French, Latin, and Greek (none in English).

The cases aren't original. The Bodleian actually found a stray volume in the collection earlier this year.

      
The First Folio of Shakespeare, 1623
     
The Shakespeare folio contains 36 plays, published by 2 actors/sharers in the King's Men theatre company: John Heminge and Henry Condell. The plays are divided by comedies, tragedies, and histories.
     
The Shakespeare folio is the first folio published in England exclusively devoted to plays. 18 of the plays in the folio had no prior print in existence and owe their survival to this publication.

This is a rare first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, printed in Oxford. It is one of 22 surviving copies.

The illustrator for the Alice in Wonderland book, John Tenniel, did not care for the quality of the printing and the edition was suppressed. Lewis Carroll had already sent out dozens of inscribed copies to friends and had to recall them and sent them to children's homes. This copy was given to the Bodleian by the writer Roger Lancelyn Green.

This copy of 'Institution of a Christen man', 1537, is annotated by Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer.

This is the label for the book to the left that was annotated by Henry VIII

      
The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in Colonial America published in 1640. 1,700 copies were printed but only 11 are known to survive. This one is the only one outside of North America.
     
This was the first book published in the Antarctic, 1908. An explorer thought "that to write, illustrate, print, and bind up to 100 copies of a book would be a good way for the men on his expedition to pass the sunless Antarctic winter".
     
These are annotations made by Mary Shelley for her husband, Percy's play 'The Censi' (1819). It was printed privately by Shelley in a run of only 250 copies.

The Bodleian was definitely a highlight on the trip for me. The staff was so kind to share their collection, resources, and knowledge with us. I enjoyed the discussions we had. Below are some highlights from my notes:

The staff of the library runs on an expanded sense of time. Their institution is hundreds of years old, they use institution stationary that's still from the 19th century,
They don't judge on what content to save for the future, especially when taking things into the collection. Topics of violence, racism, slavery, colonialism, sex, and other 'unethical' things are subjective. The point of the library is to be a memory of society. If society doesn't remember the unethical events of the past, its doomed to repeat them.
The Bodleian has the largest collection of early children's text in the world.
The library's rare books department operates on a balance between 1) Acquiring, 2) Cataloging, and 3) Disseminating. All three must balance, one can't get more attention than the others.
They catalog about 3,000-5,000 books per year. They also stressed that cataloging 10 books at a basic level is better than 1 book at a brilliant level. It opens up availability for people to find them and research them further, rather than stay un-noticed on a shelf.
The environmental data loggers are linked to an automatic monitor that will notify staff if there's a change in the temperature or humidity.