 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 27 November 2022  |
Devon bibliography
The recent publication of several important documents has roused me from my lethargy. They include:
Exeter City Council. Exeter plan : this is our city, this is our future : outline draft plan, September 2022.
Devon Climate Emergency. Devon carbon plan. (The interim version, accessed and listed in September, is now no longer available). A series of PDF files not individually listed in the bibliography.
McKay, Sean. North Devon Priority Focus Area : Case Study. An alarming study prepared for the Environment Agency on water pollution from North Devon farms.
None of these of course have (yet) appeared in the British national bibliography, nor (on my last checking) in catalogues of public libraries in Devon, although Topsham Library mentions the Exeter plan in its Facebook page.
Meantime BNB continues to list around 200,000 titles a year - 4,000 a week - and I cannot hope to do a thorough search. There are many titles by Devon publishers, few of them with Devon content, but I include them as they provide a record of an important regional industry. On 2 November my heart leapt when I saw an unusually dense cluster under Dewey 942.35 (West Country, Devon and Exeter history), but it proved to be thirty reissues of Amberley Press titles first published between 2010 and 2014 and two Devon and Cornwall Record Society publications of 1992 and 1969. And they pick up few publications by local history organisations, perhaps because they do not bother to deposit copies with the British Library, but then my History of the book in Exeter and Devon, placed in all copyright libraries in September 2021 has still to be listed. They claim to be up to date by providing pre-publication records, but unhelpfully describe them simply as "1 volume". Even Amazon manages to give numbers of pages in pre-publication records, but that source is much more difficult to search and the record format much less helpful.
The Box and Plymouth
On 16 November the AGM of Friends of Devon's Archives was held in The Box, a first opportunity for many of those attending to see inside the appropriately named structure and, in particular to see behind the scenes of the archives. Such a contrast to the old building in Clare Place, the condition of which had not pleased the Master of the Rolls. The present archival store, fully air conditioned and temperature controlled, was described by one inspector as the tidiest archive store he had ever seen.
Astounding Inventions - Heritage open days, September 2022.
To tie in with the theme of Heritage Open Days 2022 a web page, Ten astounding literary inventions in Exeter, was prepared to link heritage collections across Exeter with ten literary
inventions. Unfortunately personal circumstances meant that it was completed
too late for inclusion in
ReConEx podcasts in Exeter
The Leverhulme funded project Writing religious conflict and community in Exeter 1500-1750 (mercifully ReConEx for short) at the University of Exeter has launched a series of podcasts, the first four being listed below.
ReConEx podcast 1 – In conversation with Mark Stoyle
In this first podcast, we speak to Professor Mark Stoyle, who is Professor of History at the University of Southampton. Mark has broad interests in early modern British history, especially in the Civil Wars of the 1640s and Tudor rebellions of the sixteenth century. Among his broader interests, Mark has published some particularly important work on the history of Exeter and more widely on the history of Devon and Cornwall. His new book A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 is just out from Yale University Press.
Podcast 2: Paul Auchteronlie on Exeter and the Islamic world
In the second of our ReConEx podcast conversations Niall Allsopp and David Parry speak to Paul Auchterlonie, one of our ReConEx project advisors. Paul read Arabic at Oxford and spent 40 years as a university librarian specialising in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, most recently as librarian in charge of Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter. He is also the author or editor of numerous books and articles in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and on encounters between Britain and the Islamic world. One recent publication of particular relevance to the ReConEx project is Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-Century Algiers and Mecca (Arabian Publishing, 2012), a study of the first known Englishman to visit Mecca that incorporates a critical edition of Pitts’s work A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans.
Podcast 3: Anna-Lujz Gilbert on 17th and 18th Century Devon libraries
In this episode of the ReConEx podcast we speak to Dr Anna-Lujz Gilbert (@anna_lujz) about her research into four Devon libraries founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what they can tell us about books, readers, and communal and religious identities in early modern Devon. Anna is a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London in the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (or CELL). She is currently working on the project Shaping Scholarship tracing early donations to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Anna undertook her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Exeter and has also worked in the heritage sector for the National Trust and Devon Archives. Today we will be discussing Anna’s research for her 2021 Exeter PhD thesis, which was entitled ‘Public Books in Provincial Towns: Parish and Town Libraries in Early Modern Devon’.
ReConEx podcast 4 – Ian Maxted on book history and the book trade in Exeter
In this episode we speak to our project advisor Ian Maxted on the history of the book and the book trade in Exeter and the southwest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ian is a leading scholar in the field and his numerous publications include The Story of the Book in Exeter and Devon (2021). Our wide-ranging discussion includes the relationship of the print trade in Exeter to that in London and in other provincial centres, events such as the king’s printers coming to Exeter in the Civil War period, and publication genres including histories, sermons, and ballads. Ian has kindly put together an extensive set of tables and data to accompany our discussion – these are available on Ian’s website at this link.
The following tables are provided:
1.
2.
3. Publication of sermons in
4.
Number
of printing houses in
5.
6. Size of
7. Westcountry broadside ballads 1547 to 1750, with some later
8. Manuscript and print. The circulation of texts 1550-1750.
9 The King's printers, their travels to
The following tables have also been prepared but are being held over for the second podcast, due for release early in 2023.
10. Publications from the press of J. B. when William of Orange was in
11. Imprints of
12.
13.
Publication
of
14.
Books
with
15. The printed maps of
16. Devon engravings to 1750
Print and manuscript
Preparing for the podcast, one of the points raised for
discussion was the continuation of the manuscript tradition long after the
arrival on the scene of printing (table 8). That point is certainly relevant for
West Country Studies Library - a transformation back to the Westcountry Studies Library?
It was good to read in the FODA autumn newsletter that a transformation is under way following the acquisition of new space within Greatmoor House, mobile shelving and map storage to ensure that the collection is stored in more environmentally stable conditions and is more easily accessible to staff. It is to be hoped that this will also mean the re-emergence, not only of the Library's original name (the librarian was in 1982 referred to in the E&E as "the Devon Rural History Librarian", something more appropriate today for the custodian of the Devon Rural Archive) but also of the stock cards, the basic archive of the collection. The many thousands of cards were in several sequences, which may no longer be evident to staff today, there being no staff in post from the time of move out of the city centre, and they contain important information on the growth of the collections and the provenance of many of the items which is not recorded in the digital catalogue. The cards have been removed from the filing drawers and placed in boxes. It is important that the correct sequences are re-established. They do not just cover books but also prints and drawings, ephemera and lantern slides, many of which had not been properly listed since cataloguing started in 1977. There were also files of items believed lost in the war and items of local interest which it had proved impossible to acquire or which had been transferred.
And finally ...
If you have 17 minutes 24 seconds to waste, there is a Toddcast made for the Devon and Cornwall Record Society where I speak to Todd Gray about my recent Story of the book in Exeter and Devon.
