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Blog post
Clouds: How Luke Howard linked Weather Lore and Natural Philosophy
William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) ‘lonely as a cloud’ poem was conceived in April 1802 on a spring day walk in the Lake District. A few months later, in December 1802, a pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard (1772-1864) delivered a paper in London, on the dynamics of cloud formations. The two...Déri, Andrea
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Blog post
Oil, storms and knowing part 2: Pliny, Franklin and the IPCC Special Report on Oceans
This post is the second of a pair to mark the period of the 25th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is contributed by Andrea Deri, Cataloguer. In addition to seafarers, fishers in the Mediterranean Sea applied oil as Pliny the Elder and Plutarch...Déri, Andrea
science, maps, Americas, modern history, curiosity, travel, and environmental science
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Blog post
Oil, storms and knowing part 1: Seafarers Calm Waves with Oil
This post is to mark the period of the 25th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is contributed by Andrea Deri, Cataloguer. A storm at sea is one of the most feared experiences, as it often presages shipwreck. Mariners would do anything to survive...Déri, Andrea
South East Asia, science, maps, Medieval history, East Asia, South Asia, Middle East, curiosity, travel, and environmental science
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Blog post
A Bioluminescent Christmas
Christmas is associated with sparkling lights that lift the eyes up to the stars in motionless awe. On Christmas 1875, a curious traveller wrote about a less-known yet equally magical light that drew his eyes below the horizon, a light that flared up with the breaking waves: sea sparkle. The...Déri, Andrea
science, Hungary, history, and South Asia
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Blog post
Languages of Reckoning: The Gagauz Number System
The more languages you speak, the more perspectives you have on the world. Bulgarian, Czech and Hungarian proverbs capture this observation: ‘Човекът е толкова пъти човек, колкото езика знае’ (Bulgarian: a person is as many times a person as many languages knows), ‘Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem’ (Czech: as...Déri, Andrea
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Blog post
Hume’s Stray Feathers
Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), British administrator and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, recorded an extraordinary story of resilience, the ability of people to cope with disruptions. Hume was a respected ornithologist. In January 1875 he boarded an old gunboat fitted for the Indian Marine Survey to...Déri, Andrea
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Blog post
Open and Engaged: Open Access Week at the British Library
One of the key arguments in favour of open access to research is that the public should have the right to read the results of publicly funded research. While much effort is put into creating policies, workflows and business models to enable openness, are we succeeding in engaging the public...Flanagan, Dimity
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Blog post
The Lives of Typewriters and Large Data-sets: The Will Self Archive
Chris Beckett, Manuscripts Cataloguer at the British Library is currently working on the Will Self archive. The archive, which was acquired by the Library in 2016, consists of 24 large boxes of papers along with artwork, audio-visual material and the author’s computer hard drive. The first tranche is now discoverable...Beckett, Chris
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Blog post
No Longer in the Garage: The Archive of Galloping Dog Press, Poetry Information and Not Poetry
The small press publisher Peter Hodgkiss begins his memoir essay ‘It’s All in the Garage’ contemplating ‘a tatty cardboard box’ with ‘GDP’ written in fading red felt-tip pen on the side: ‘It has moved from landing to attic to garage 1 to garage 2 in two houses in Newcastle to...Beckett, Chris
literature, poetry, Contemporary Britain, manuscripts, and new collection items
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Blog post
The writing of J. G. Ballard’s Crash: a look under the bonnet
Shock greeted the publication of J. G. Ballard’s Crash in 1973. Cult status quickly followed. Today, the novel is widely considered to be a modern classic, a novel that speaks both of its time – the darkening close of a decade of colourful liberation – and speaks dystopically to us...Beckett, Chris
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Blog post
‘Post-it’ notes in the Will Self archive
'My books begin life in notebooks, then they move on to Post-it notes, the Post-its go up on the walls of the room […] short story ideas, tropes, metaphors, gags, characters, etc. When I'm working on a book, the Post-its come down off the wall and go into scrapbooks.’ (‘Writers'...Beckett, Chris
literature, Contemporary Britain, manuscripts, and new collection items
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Blog post
First report from the Will Self archive: family matters
Will Self’s review (for the New Statesman) of Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002) begins with the suggestion that his grandfather would have enjoyed the book. Before telling us why (Cockney visionaries both, with a tendency to compendiousness), we are treated to a pen-portrait of grandfather...Beckett, Chris
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Blog post
Archive of Joan Bakewell joins the British Library’s Contemporary Archives Collections
Joan Bakewell’s autobiography, The Centre of the Bed (2003), begins in a white room – a room as white as ‘a fresh sheet of paper’ – at the top of the house in which she has lived for many years. Boxes and packets of papers long-forgotten have been retrieved from...Beckett, Chris
literature, television, Contemporary Britain, manuscripts, and archival research
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Blog post
J. G. Ballard: Streets in the Sky and the Secret Logic of the High-Rise
Hardly a day goes by without a news report about London’s social housing crisis. There are currently more than 260 high-rise buildings (of 20 floors or more) either under construction or in the pipeline that are set to dramatically change the London skyline. Yet the high prices of the apartments...Beckett, Chris
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Learning object
The Opening of Crash in Slow Motion
Chris Beckett provides a close reading of the manuscript draft of Crash by J G Ballard, focussing on the novel's opening pages. In ‘Memories of Greeneland’ (1978), J G Ballard wrote that he had been ‘enormously influenced by [Graham] Greene's style, by his method of setting out the psychological ground...Beckett, Chris
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Learning object
Topography and the historic shelving schemes at the British Library
Throughout the last 400 years librarians and curators have taken different approaches to classify topographical collections. Adrian Edwards, Head of Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library, explores the historic shelving schemes and traces the development of their organisation.Edwards, Adrian S.
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Learning object
Early Shakespeare sources: a guide for academic researchers. Part 2: the British Library's early Shakespeare collections
Adrian S Edwards outlines the history of collecting early Shakespeare editions, and examines in detail the collections of David Garrick, George III, Thomas Grenville and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, which make up three-quarters of the British Library’s early Shakespeare holdings.Edwards, Adrian S.