 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 21 May 2021  |
Work on the Devon bibliography
I long delayed updating current publications, a tedious chore when I have much more interesting things to do, but I have just worked through the last four months of the British national bibliography from 13 January to 5 May and some other sources. It certainly makes one aware of how much local material is being missed by BNB.
There are about 85 BNB records that have been identified as having some Devon or wider Westcountry significance although ten of these result from on-line and printed publications having separate entries in BNB. Of the 85, 49 are pre-publication records with limited information on pagination or size. There are 59 records for Devon-based publishers, 50 of them with no significant Devon content. There are 42 from Exeter publishers (14 from the reincarnated David and Charles, eight from the University of Exeter Press and six from Pelagic Publications as well as a sprinkling of other academic imprints) and four from Plymouth - the rush of Pilgrim Father publications has subsided. As to the date of the publications, 59 are for 2021, including the 48 pre-publication records, two for 2020, 2 for 2019, ten for 2018, ten for 2017 (including two Mint Press publications) and two for 2016. Of the 35 items with Devon or Westcountry content, 14 are fiction, 11 historical, three guidebooks, one on the natural environment and two periodicals, one of these on Covid-19. Amazon picked up a few additional titles for 2021 and even one for 2022, but it is difficult to search extensively. But where are the publications by local authorities and other local organisations?
Devon in the 1920s
Julia Neville had the idea of running a slideshow of colourful dust jackets of the 1920s as a sort of screen saver during a coffee break during the launch of the Devon History Society project when it was hoped that it would be a live event. I rashly volunteered but soon found dust jackets rather elusive for Devon titles of that decade. So I decided to look for books whose whole text had been digitised and which were freely available without need for subscription, thus providing a library available at home. Unfortunately the 1920s seems to fall within the 100-year watershed as there is a reluctance to digitise titles which might still have copyright issues. I gather that much recent material that has been digitised by Google Books is kept in a secure location, only accessible to accredited researchers who can analyse the big data but not access the full texts. However there was sufficient to provide a guide to the range of sources potentially available, and at the Zoom launch event on 24 April there was a silent presentation of what I had gathered together. I have since put a fuller version of it on the internet as Devon in the 1920s : on-line resources. It is interesting that some of the items included are for works that have not yet been located in Devon libraries, so it supplements the other listings I have pulled together or updated for the project:
(Printed books)https://devon-bibliography.blogspot.com/2021/04/devon-in-1920s-periodical-articles.html (Periodical articles)
(Non-archival manuscripts and typescripts)
These supplement the listings produced by the Devon Heritage Centre.
A literary walk in and around Exeter
Many of you will know that for the first time in my life I went on a sponsored walk on 20 March to support Hospiscare. This lockdown year we could devise our own walks, and freed from the shackles of hearty rugby fanatics I devised a route with a literary theme, perhaps with the walk that Professor Christopher Elrington undertook to promote the Victoria County History at the back of my mind. I took photographs as I went round to prove that I actually did it, and was staggered to find that I had raised more than £600 for an eleven mile stroll on a fine spring day.
The route covered on 20 March was not exactly as planned and originally superimposed on the 1809 Ordnance Survey map, but I covered about eleven miles in all, three more than the eight laid down by Hospiscare, most of it valiantly accompanied by my cousin. I had to omit the northern section around the University and part of the route along the river, but I completed this with my wife Jill the following Monday, adding another eight miles to the total. There were little bonuses along the way. A surprising proportion of the Saturday walk was along footpaths or cycle routes lined with primroses and daffodils and with spectacular views northwards to the Cathedral and southwards down to the Exe Estuary from Pynes Hill, eastwards towards Coleridge's Ottery St Mary from above Sowton and westwards across the valley to Richard Hooker's Heavitree from Hill Barton. At William Pollard's printing establishment in Sowton we had an interesting conversation with an employee with forty years experience in the printing industry who showed us their memorial garden with the wrought-iron gates transported from their Southernhay premises. And the overcast day and the relatively deserted streets in the city centre, even on a Saturday, made ideal conditions for photography. The Monday also brought its bonuses, notably an encounter with Exeter's Philip Larkin, former Exeter University Librarian and poet Alasdair Paterson, who drew our attention to a novella by the French writer Georges Perec (1936 – 1982). Les revenentes (1972) is a univocalic piece of writing in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. A brilliant English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter text: jewels, secrets, sex (also univocalic) in the collection Three. It is set in a bizarre univocalic Exeter nobody would recognise, so unfortunately cannot figure in this literary tour, but we must ensure that a copy of the original and translation is available in an Exeter library somewhere.
But it did not stop there and the Exeter Literary walk was begun. The number of sites has been greatly increased and I have provided them with captions and, so large has the project grown that I have had to split it up:
It has been fascinating to discover where Exeter's literary figures lived or worked and it has sometimes proved challenging with streets being renumbered over time. I have located the rooms that the novelist George Gissing rented so that he could write in peace, away from his unstable wife. I have also run to earth Bill West, the writer on military intelligence, who lived by the conspiracy theory and assured me that his phone was being tapped and his mail intercepted. Library staff feared his visits, especially after he published The strange rise of semi-literate England, a polemic on the wholesale disposal of books by public and academic libraries. He found nothing to point the finger at in Exeter, but I do wonder what he would have made of what has happened since his death in 1999. It is also interesting to see the parallels in historical bookscapes across the country. The location of the earliest booksellers and printers in St Peter's Churchyard in Exeter mirrors the similar situation in St Paul's Churchyard in London, also a centre for the early book trades, before publishers moved back a block into Paternoster Row, just as they moved across to the High Street in Exeter.
Devon and Cornwall Record Society - the legacy of historians
Todd Gray has just finished masterminding a series of 39 posts on the Facebook page of the Devon and Cornwall Record Society which celebrates the contribution of "deceased historians, archivists,
librarians, curators and archaeologists whose work has had a substantial mark
on how we continue to understand or study Devon and Cornwall". He has now pulled together a document which combines all the the contributions, which has just been circulated to the contributors. It is a substantial and varied compilation and it is to be hoped that obvious gaps could be looked for and filled and the dictionary be published.
William Chapple's rediscovered maps of Exeter
William Chapple was one of the historians covered by Todd Gray's DCRS Facebook series and interest in him has been highlighted by Todd Gray's recent discovery of three previoulsy unknown maps of Exeter. They are contained in a volume with the cover
title: "Nr 5. Manea curiosa et antiqua : draughts, plans &c" which
is held in the Devon Heritage Centre in Exeter Exeter
An article on the maps will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the International Map Collectors' Society.
Important manuscript acquired for the Devon Heritage Centre
The type of source that Chapple would have used for his ill-fated review of Risdon's survey of Devon has recently returned to the county.
The Friends of Devon's archives and the Kent Kingdon Bequest have joined forces to fund the purchase by the Devon Record Office of an 18th century manuscript entitled "An account of the patrons of all the ecclesiastical benefices in the Diocese of Exon, as also the valuations in ye Kings books and reputed value". Probably transcribed by a Devon antiquary around 1745, it is a leather-bound manuscript of about 80 leaves in excellent condition. It contains the manuscript inscription: Thos. Prowse, Dawlish – who gave this book to me A.D. 1747. G. Exon [George Lavington]. The volume has the bookplates of James Harrington, Chancellor of Exeter and John Eustace Grubbe (1816-1889) mayor of Southwold, so the precise provenance is uncertain. Names of the incumbents in 1767 have been added in a later hand and it provides information on every parish in Devon and Cornwall. The main source of information is probably the Exchequer "Valor ecclesiasticus", manuscript E344/19/15, a valuation of 1540, but it will be necessary to examine it more closely to see precisely what it does contain. It would be appropriate if the hand that added the names of the incumbents in 1767 was that of William Chapple.
A digital bookshelf for Exeter
Continuing the 1920s digital initiative I pulled together an initial virtual bookshelf for members of the Exeter Civic Society which gives a further idea of the range of material that is being unearthed and I have started to search more generally into the treasures available through sites such as the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust and Google Books. Exeter is also well represented in Leicester's Historical directories project, partly because I sat on the steering group. Links to the digital versions will be gradually added to the Devon bibliography.
Devon bibliography, the next step
I have been frustrated by the inability to locate a database system to run the entire Devon bibliography. It would have been possible for System Simulation to have provided this, but the merger of Devon and Somerset has resulted in a bibliographically incoherent mess without the possibility of producing reports which can be downloaded by researchers or of displaying meaningful information on the results page. What is required is something more akin to JISC discovery or the USTC but with a simpler interface for adding and amending data as, at a local level it will be necessary to rely on unqualified and volunteer participants across the county. As an interim I have turned the entire bibliography on its head to produce the Devon Communities Bibliography, which lists many of the records at a community level. It is really an expansion of Abbots Bickington to Zeal Monachorum : a handlist of parish histories compiled on the occasion of the centenary of parish councils, produced by the Westcountry Studies Library in 1994. It is at the community level that the gaps will become most evident, as it is local researchers, organisations, libraries, museums and community archives that will be aware of what has been published on their patch. London, Taunton, or even Exeter is too remote to keep a track of what is happening across the more than 400 parishes and towns across one of the UK's largest counties.
Much of the community bibliography is still in embryo but I have bitten off the largest chunk with the
Exeter bibliography. This is so large that it runs to a number of pages:
Still to be added for Exeter are::
Newspapers 1704 to datePeriodical titles 1760 to dateTopographical prints 1660-1870Photographs (a selection of publishers with numbered negative sequences) 1860-1960
Exeter city of literature
The project has recently appointed Anna Cohn Orchard as the inaugural Director. She comes from a background rich in literature, having lived in Pennsylvania, Sydney and New York and worked on literature based projects in each place. The website has also developed rapidly, and there is now a link to the Exeter Working Papers website in the Literary Devon section. I will need to develop this so that it homes in better on the relevant sections, as the EWP website is international in coverage. Two millennia of Devon's written heritage
There will be an illustrated zoom presentation on this topic to the Friends of Exeter Museum and Art Gallery on 21 July. Taking as its starting point two alphabets written in Exeter two millennia apart, it will track literacy in Exeter across the centuries, revealing the changing forms in which the written word reached people in Exeter from coins through graffiti, monumental inscriptions, scrolls, codices, illuminated manuscripts, printed books, broadside ballads, newspapers, periodicals, chapbooks and maps, and then into the digital world of the internet and social media. It hopes to show that there is a continuity running through all these developments. The internet has not killed the book, just as the printed book did not kill the manuscript.
And finally
It is dispiriting to record that in 2021 we "celebrate" ten years of austerity in Devon and its impact on specialist departments in the public library service. The whole process of dismantling these services was recorded in a series of eight blog postings between March and September 2011 in Devona: speaking up for Devon's libraries, an eloquent and impassioned polemic on their role, their collections and their activities and also the ignorance that surrounded the deliberations. Much has happened since then and praise must be given to what Libraries Unlimited and the South West Heritage Trust has achieved with dramatically cut financial input from Devon County Council as the statutory library authority. The local studies service in particular has suffered a 95% or more cut in funding with no dedicated library personnel, apart from one day a week from a SWHT staff member in Taunton. This too has been severely affected by the Covid-19 lockdowns but considerable progress has been made in acquiring books to fill the gaps caused by the pitiable resources fund grudgingly handed over by Devon County Council, thanks to a £2,500 grant from the Kent Kingdon Bequest - a local charity set up in Victorian times. Perhaps the biggest gap - and one which could have blighted the award of UNESCO city of literature to Exeter had it been highlighted - is the lack of a publicly accessible local studies library in the heart of Exeter. Plymouth, Barnstaple, and even places like Exmouth, Tiverton, Bideford or Newton Abbot have a better centrally available reference collection of local studies books than Exeter. The latest issue of the Visit Exeter guide, undated but probably issued in 2021, lists in its section on "heritage, culture & family fun" the Devon and Exeter Institution, Exeter Library, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, even the Devon Family History Society, but not the Devon Heritage Centre. The Westcountry Studies Library, built up by professional library staff over more than a century, holds the county's largest collection of Devon literature - Boniface, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Ford, Thomas D'Urfey, John Gay, Peter Pindar, Anna Eliza Bray, Sabine Baring-Gould, Charles Kingsley, George Gissing, Eden Phillpotts, John Galsworthy, E. M. Delafield, Agatha Christie, Henry Williamson, Michael Morpurgo and many more, but it is hidden away behind a car park on an industrial estate next to the motorway. Such collections, which are of national importance, do not build themselves and require professional input to maintain and promote them. Nor can they simply be handed over to record offices with no specialist staff. Libraries deal with inspiration as well as information, with the present and the future as well as the past. Both librarians and archivists work with the written record, but the range and the way it is structured, acquired and accessed is fundamentally different. Yet perhaps help is at hand in this post-Covid world. We recently heard that "Devon County Council is delighted to support Exeter's City of Literature programme, [and] is keen to see literature and creativity as part of a Devon's Renaissance". However this statement no longer seems to appear on the website, so there is presumably no actual money where the mouth is. The renaissance of a largely virtual Westcountry Studies Library with some physical presence and professional staffing in the heart of Exeter must surely have a higher priority than my mad idea of recreating the medieval Exeter Cathedral Library. Maybe some space for a literary heritage centre for Devon and Exeter could be found in a corner of one of the empty High Street stores or possibly even the Royal Clarence Hotel once it is rebuilt. It just needs a catchy name. The Box, I think, has already been adopted somewhere or other. What about The Treasure Chest? Much more enticing, although it could be confused with the Treasure House, Beverley's excellent heritage centre. Perhaps we will have to settle for the Book Fool's Paradise.
