By Liz McCarthy
This week marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. After retiring from public life in 1597, Bodley decided to “set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students.” Thanks to his work, the Bodleian Library opened to readers in 1602.
On the anniversary of his death, we thought we’d share five facts about the Bodley and the Bodleian that you may not have known:
- Thomas Bodley was not a fan of “almanackes, plaies, & an infinit number” of other “unworthy matters” — what he called “baggage bookes.” Fortunately, these still made it in to the Library, and included items such as Shakespeare’s First Folio.
- In 1610, Bodley set up the precursor to today’s legal deposit agreements when he arranged for the Stationers’ Company in London to send the Bodleian a copy of every new book printed.
- Bodley’s effort to restore the University library in Oxford saw him send agents all over Europe as well as appeal to the generosity of friends around the nation. He insisted upon acquiring books in non-European languages, including Hebrew and Asian languages. Hundreds of years later, the Libraries’ collections of Hebrew, Islamic, South Asian and Far Eastern studies are some of the best in the world.
- The Bodleian Libraries hold more than just books. Over the years, they have acquired everything from popular ephemera to objects such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s baby rattle. As more and more material is ‘born digital’, the Libraries’ e-resources and e-journals have expanded to include the digital archives of authors and politicians — such as Barbara Castle and Isaiah Berlin — as well as web archives.
- A far cry from the Bodley’s restoration of Duke Humfrey’s Library, our Book Storage Facility in Swindon holds over 153 miles of shelving — that’s shelving space equivalent to over 16 football pitches.
For more information on the life of Thomas Bodley, read the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article. For information on the Bodleian Libraries, see www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
Liz McCarthy is the Communications & Social Media Officer for the Bodleian Libraries, as well as an assistant in the Library’s Conservative Party Archive. When not tweeting or writing about archives, she can be found researching digital humanities & 17th-century bookbindings, working on the Journal of Information Literacy or teaching Irish dance. Follow her on Twitter at @mccarthy_liz.
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Image credit: Thomas Bodley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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The ApothecaryMaile Meloy
Young Adult
Something Cold War-ish must be in my reading water. I seem to be choosing books with a Cold War themes fairly regularly -- David Almond's
The Fire-Eaters, which centers around the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cecil Castelucci's
Rose Sees Red, which is set in the early 80s with the Cold War tension as a back drop to a friendship that develops between an American and a Russian immigrant, and now,
The Apothecary. It's not the side effects of too much dystopian ya for dessert, I promise.
It was for dinner.
Nonetheless, if you find yourself feasting on dystopian but are looking for a little diversity in your dark,
The Apothecary serves it up fresh and fun. The story centers around Janie, a teen whose writer parents are marked as Communists during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s and thus forced to leave LA for London where they get jobs writing for the BBC. At her new school, Janie meets a boy, Benjamin, who wants to be a spy, a Russian boy whose father is, and a chemist-apothecary-physicist triangle trying to contain the effects of a nuclear bomb.
There are so many twists, James Bond-like chase scenes, an unexpected apothecarian surprises, replete with a serum that turns humans into birds and another that can make them invisible, as well as the threat of a nuclear bomb that does go off. It's all there in spades.
The biggest leap of faith I found strained in the novel were the serums. The book is so solidly set in the Cold War, that to expect a character, let alone the reader to buy into the fact that chemical compounds can do what alchemists believed they could do hundreds of years ago is tough. The author acknowledges this by having her character say that it would have been hard to believe her friend could turn into a bird if she hadn't actually seen it happen herself. Still, for me, it disrupted the fictional dream. I believed that chemstry and physics could come together to undo the destruction of a bomb, but to tie that right into the magicalness of herbs was a stretch.
Then again, I spent my teens in the Cold War era. I'm bomb scare scarred. Today's young audience will likely have far less trouble taking that leap. If the reader does, the book continues on in a fast-paced, no-holds-barred, edge-of-your-seat ride to the very end.
One other interesting note. The book is told from the perspective of the main character, Janie, albeit as an adult. I haven't run across too many POVs from this angle of late, and Meloy plays it lightly, allowing the adult only to surface at the very beginning and the end to lend the story an air of continuing mystery. It's well-balanced and a great example of how to use the adult POV to a writer's advantage.
For more great reads and winter distractions, sled on over to
Barrie Summy's website. She's serving them up hot...and with marshmallows!
The Road by Cormac McCarthy left me devastated and depressed, but in a way that was acceptable. It was a horror story of what may come without the creepy crawlies and bogeymen.
I had the pleasure (?) to read this story not knowing a single thing about it. I had read no synopsis, nor had I heard anything specific about it from any friends or colleagues. I had simply heard of it often enough to know it was a worthy read.
And boy, was it! At first it seemed to move at a slow pace, but I was intrigued by the language and style of it. I had never read anything written quite like this before. McCarthy's lack of quotation marks and non-use of names had me reading whenever I got a chance. I couldn't put it down. Literally. I finished a good chunk of it in the first sitting and I was itching to pick it up again and disappointed each night when I couldn't keep myself awake long enough to read more.
The horrors in the book weren't so much horrifying as chilling. The "bad guys" were never explained in any manner besides being bad guys. The good guys did some gruesome things, but never as bad as the bad guys. The good guys did what they had to in order to get by, but the bad guys did terrible things to children and anything that crossed their paths. Or so it would seem from the brief conversations between the man and the son. No explanation was ever given for why the world was the way it was. No explanation of why the good guys who carried the fire were going down south except for the fact they wanted to keep warm. Not even any real explanation as to when this apocalypse came to be.
Lately I seem to have fallen into a rut of reading books that are depressing. I've read books from the minds of serial killers, first time killers, people trying to escape Big Brother, and others that left me feeling down-right depressed. This book trumped all those. It addressed issues I never would have thought of on my own. What would you do if you had a child in a time where there was no food or shelter for anyone? Where the bad guys were constantly after you? Where there was no break from the cold? Where the life you once knew would never be again? Where you had stories you could share from your childhood with your child but he would never understand such happiness and ease? What would anyone do? Would you be a good guy? Or a bad guy?
After a decade of work, Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute published the African American National Biography(AANB). The AANB is the largest repository of black life stories ever assembled with more than 4,000 biographies. To celebrate this monumental achievement we have invited the contributors to this 8 volume set to share some of their knowledge with the OUPBlog. Over the next couple of months we will have the honor of sharing their thoughts, reflections and opinions with you.
Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. In the article below he looks at Annie Lee Moss.
A peculiar effort has been underway to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy as a Red-hunting investigator. Some commentators have declared the censured senator vindicated by the opening of Cold War archives that revealed the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. A key figure in this debate is a witness whose brief appearance before McCarthy helped undo his public reputation: Annie Lee Moss. (more…)
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Earlier today we excerpted from the Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness by Joanne Lynn and Joan Harrold. The next excerpt focuses on something we all will experience someday, the approach of death. While I hope this is something you won’t have to worry about for many years, knowledge may ease your anxiety.
“How will I know when death is getting close?”
Just as doctors usually cannot pinpoint the day when a baby will be born, they cannot predict the exact day or hour when you or your loved one will die. You might need reassurance that it is simply not always possible to know when death is near. Some illnesses make prediction difficult. (more…)
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This week marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. After retiring from public life in 1597, Bodley decided to “set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students.” Thanks to his work, the Bodleian Library opened to readers in 1602.
