Stories across the shelf
Narratives
A collection is usually read along its deliberate threads: by category, by maker, by theme. These narratives read it differently — each one connects objects that were acquired separately, for separate reasons, into a single story.
The Lead · Narrative I
Picturing Place: Four Centuries of Looking
From an engraved guess at Taprobana to albumen prints of Bremen to pen-and-ink England: three technologies for taking a place home.
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Narrative · II
The England Trilogy, Complete
Sydney R. Jones's three-volume pen-and-ink survey of England, complete: South (1948), West (1950), East (1954).
3 objects · 1948–1954 Narrative · III
The Broster Shelf: Jacobites Between the Wars
Three interwar Heinemann hardbacks of D. K. Broster: novels of honourable defeat, read by the generation that survived the trenches.
3 objects · 1927–1930 Narrative · IV
Russia in Translation
Four volumes, three translators: how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky crossed into English, from wartime reprint to mail-order classics.
4 objects · 1943–1968 Narrative · V
The Analogue Toolkit
Calculate, write, forecast, see: four machines of the pre-electronic everyday, each one now an app on a phone.
4 objects · 1930–1954 Narrative · VI
Other People's Hands
Inscriptions, prize labels, plaques and stamps: seven objects whose previous owners left their names behind.
7 objects · 1878–1947 Narrative · VII
Two Christmases
Two books given at Christmas, 1918 and 1927. Gift inscriptions as time stamps on what a decade hoped for.
2 objects · 1908–1927 Narrative · VIII
The Camera and the Album
Bremen 1891 and England 1954: from buying photographs made by professionals to taking your own.
2 objects · 1891–1954 Narrative · IX
Pocket Gilt: Books Made to Be Carried
A Georgian prayer book and an Edwardian pocket Byron, eighty years apart, solving the same problem: beauty that fits in a pocket.
2 objects · 1830–1906 Narrative · X
Literature for the Parlour
How the masterpiece came down off the luxury shelf and into ordinary front rooms: Shakespeare by the third of a million, a pocket Byron, mail-order Dostoevsky, and one poet nobody bought.
6 objects · 1878–1968 Narrative · XI
The Year 1927
One year surfaces three times across the shelf: a school prize in July, a Christmas inscription, and a slide rule's production run.
3 objects · 1918–1930 Narrative · XII
Books in Wartime
A 1918 gift inscription, a Swiss typewriter built 1939–1945, and War and Peace reprinted in 1943: war as it appears in margins, dates, and paper.
3 objects · 1908–1943