 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 32 August 2023  |
Westcountry Studies Library relaunched
Well, it will always be the Westcountry Studies Library for me, although it has now become the West Country Studies Library. It was celebrated by a special event hosted at the Devon Heritage Centre by the South West Heritage Trust on Friday 30 June 2023. Unfortunately the bus service from the centre of Exeter out to the Devon Heritage Centre let me down, so I arrived late and missed much of "the story so far" presented by Janet Tall, the Head of Archives, Learning and Development, which was largely concerned with the dramatic improvements made in storage and conservation of the rich collections, which cover the whole of the Westcountry from Land's End to Bristol and the Channel Islands. The "next steps" were then outlined by Kate Parr, the Local Studies Librarian, based in Taunton - there are currently no local studies library staff based in Exeter. This includes a collections review which hopefully will make the rich resources more accessible to the world at large. It was then possible to view treasures from the collection which were on display, tour the stacks to see how the collections were housed, and glimpse the conservation and digitisation resources. It was interesting to compare the improved facilities at The Box with what is now available in Exeter, although I have yet to see the rehoused local studies collections which remain in Plymouth Library.
To help promote the collections I have added to the Devon Communities Bibliography a series of web pages for communities in the adjoining counties based on the rich holdings of the Westcountry Studies Library, with some holdings for Plymouth and Barnstaple and the DEI. They are taken from archived library web pages produced in 2002 but unfortunately coverage of Bristol and the Channel Islands was not included at the time.
Cornwall communities:
Advent-Fowey, Germoe-Lynher, Mabe-Otterham, Padstow-Ruan Minor, Saint Agnes-Sancreed, Scilly Isles-Zennor
Dorset communities:
Abbotsbury-Lytchett Minster, Mapperton-Yetminster
Somerset communities:
Aisholt-Exford, Exmoor, Farleigh Hungerford-Sutton Mallet, Taunton-Yeovilton
An important archive lost: the fate of the Westcountry Studies Library's stock card files
The following description of what seems to have been recently lost was originally written in August 2019 when I was starting to compile a listing of books acquired for the Westcountry Studies Library by the Kent Kingdon Bequest. I then found the stock cards inaccessibly stored in boxes, so that aspect of the project had to be abandoned. It may seem an obscure and arcane topic in this digital age of AI, but these stock cards, perhaps 200,000 in all, were built up largely by three generations of librarians over more than a century (Harry Tapley-Soper 1902-1946, Geoffrey Paley 1946-1977 and Ian Maxted 1977-2005) and are the only archive of the library collections to have survived the blitz in 1942. I understand that they may have been discarded, but every effort should be made to locate them.
- They contain much information that has not yet been included in the digital record. Early computer systems had limited storage capacity and completing the long-neglected cataloguing of the books was prioritised. The bibliographer Robin Alston in the British Library realised the value of the information held in early, frequently manuscript, listings when initiating projects such as the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue.
- They have been used by researchers and cataloguers interested in the provenance of individual copies, books with annotations or inserts, sketches of vanished buildings or information about lantern slides.
- They had been used in court cases when the handwriting on the stock cards matched that on stolen books. The lack of documentation in the British Museum is currently posing problems in the recently publicised theft of antiquities where the importance of full documentation of the collections has been repeatedly stressed. Conversely, records for withdrawn books could provide reassurance for booksellers unsure whether items offered might be stolen goods.
- They shed light on how the collections were built up, an important theme in RAMM's award-winning displays. The Museum maintains meticulous and detailed records of its collections, built up over the same period as Exeter City Library and the Westcountry Studies Library.
How an adequate stock assessment can be undertaken without access to the stock cards is difficult to understand, so I hope they can be retrieved. One would have thought that the archival significance of these card files would have been clear among archivists if not to librarians. Now read on to learn what seems to have been lost:
Westcountry Studies Library's card indexes
The card files transferred from Exeter Central Library to the Devon Heritage Centre contain much information on the history and development of the collections which has not been incorporated in the digital record.
The Westcountry Studies Library opened in 1975 without a public catalogue. While stock cards were produced in manuscript to continue and replace the public catalogues lost in the blitz in 1942, they were never typed up with added entries and cross-references to form a public catalogue. The stock cards were rearranged in alphabetical author order and this served as a finding aid of sorts. This situation appalled W. G. Hoskins when he attended the opening of the Westcountry Studies Library, and he rarely used WSL, preferring the Devon and Exeter Institution or he had occasionally used the County Collection at Barley House. A local studies cataloguing programme was only commenced through a Manpower Services Commission scheme in 1977 with the master cards produced being typed to generate author, place, subject and name sequences for the public catalogue, using the following card files:
1. Stock cards of Exeter City Library, some dating back to the late 19th century. Provenance is often given and dates of accessioning can often be ascertained from the accession numbers, sometimes significant for dating undated items. They are in manuscript, often on pre-printed cards.
2. Stock cards of Devon County Library. These are mostly typed on yellow cards and cataloguing is much briefer. Duplicate volumes were passed to Barnstaple in the 1980s to augment the local collection there but whether the stock cards followed them I cannot recall.
As cataloguing progressed the following sequences resulted:
3. Master cards. These give full cataloguing details with the location of the main working copy of the item. On the verso are tracings for author, place, subject and name entries in the typed public catalogues and details of individual copies with accession numbers, locations and sometimes provenance information. Arrangement was by location of the working copy of each item. Often the only record of provenance is on the white master card, as stock cards produced after 1976 were very brief author, title and date records. The cards in the public catalogue have been discarded, as have the periodic printouts from the d-Base databases to 2005 following the introduction of the on-line catalogue.
4. Stock cards. These became a merged sequence which aims to mirror the arrangement of the actual collections. It consists of Exeter City Library and Devon County Library stock cards and pink cards for new WSL accessions, where necessary assigning new accession numbers based on an inverted date – during a stock check in the mid 1980s additional months were devised, hence for example 841401/01 which often referred to much earlier publications. Arrangement was within the sequences in which individual copies were found, forming a parallel sequence to the books on the shelves.
5. Withdrawn copies. The policy in the 1970s was that no item should ever be discarded from the local studies collections and, following a major theft, security triggers were placed in most books and pamphlets with the accession number and location noted on the trigger. Over time local items were withdrawn from branches and passed to WSL, and extensive duplication arose. At first records were kept of duplicates transferred, sold or discarded but this was soon discontinued.
6. Items not acquired. This included items ordered but never received or items listed but not acquired. Following computerisation such items were not normally deleted from the catalogue as they were normally of some local significance, for example recording changed or unchanged reprints or editions it was decided not to acquire, and they completed the bibliographical record.
7. Books believed lost in the Blitz. This sequence was occasionally consulted to confirm whether these had since been found but physical items bearing the same stock record numbers were rarely located, so these were probably actual losses. Fortunately the bulk of the local collection and the precious stock cards had been evacuated and so survived.
In addition there are sequences for specific types of resources. These include:
8. P&D. Records for prints, drawings and photographs. The sequence was started in 1924 on receipt of the Heber Mardon collection and by 1942 had reached almost P&D50,000. They do not include all Somers Cocks items. Provenance is normally given. The P&D sequence was revived with 50,001 once cataloguing moved from books to illustrations.
9. LS. Lantern slides. Produced mainly in the 1930s, these also include many non-local subjects. Details of photographer and date were normally given, information that does not always appear on the lantern slide itself.
10. Illustrations and negatives stock records. These were largely devised during a Manpower Services Commission project in the late 1970s to identify, print and conserve the extensive local glass negative collections. Record numbers were based on the size of the plate and assigned a running number.
Other sequences were used for specific projects, for example SC (Somers Cocks) numbers for Devon topographical prints and sequences for the Express and Echo photographic collection.
It may be possible to reconstitute the stock records in part by noting stock numbers and other information for individual copies on the System Simulation database during the stock assessment and this might be supplemented by information from the Exeter City Archives records, for example committee minutes and reports and lists such as ECA/1/11/4/9 (Lists of books and documents evacuated from the City Library 1941-1944). This cannot however replace the loss of the original cards.
Gatekeepers to Heaven and a new doorway to Exeter's celestial treasure house
It was a moving experience for me to see the six manuscripts from the Bodleian Library in their temporary home in RAMM for the exhibition Gatekeepers to Heaven: Religion, knowledge and power in medieval Exeter which ran until 3 September 2023. Among the medieval exhibits from RAMM's collections there is a modern desk with two screens where it is possible to thumb (or rather click) through a couple of the digitised Bodleian manuscripts, perhaps a precursor to a reconstructed medieval reading desk which could be installed in the visitor centre in the cloisters now being rebuilt .
Another gateway to the medieval Cathedral Library is the forthcoming publication of transcriptions of the medieval catalogues of the library's collections. The text for this has been compiled by Dr James Willoughby of the University of Oxford for the forthcoming volume in the series Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, a joint project of the British Academy and British Library with the involvement of the University of Oxford. The project started in 1990 and sixteen volumes have been published to date. The Exeter section will form part of the two-volume Libraries of the secular cathedrals of England and Wales, edited by N. L. Ramsay & James Willoughby.
Negotiations are in hand between British Library Publishing, Friends of Devon's Archives and the Kent Kingdon Bequest for a local publication of the Exeter section, which runs to 190 pages plus an appendix of four pages on "The furnishing of the new library at Exeter, 1411–13" and a series of indexes. Apart from Leofric's donation list of 1068/72 and the inventories of 1327 and 1506, 18 other lists, extending to 1550 are transcribed, together with a well-researched account of their origins which amounts to an extremely detailed survey of the growth of the Cathedral Library over half a millennium. Dr Willoughby has also been able to examine every one of the surviving Exeter manuscripts to match them with the medieval listings. The cost of the two volumes would be beyond the reach of most libraries in Devon and the compiler and British Library Publications are anxious for local publication of extracts at a reasonable cost to be made available where possible.
Literary map of Exeter and Devon
This attractive item was launched at the book market organised by Exeter City of Literature in St Peter's Churchyard on Sunday 16 July with nine independent bookshops and publishers and plenty of bookish activities. Much information for the Exeter map was provided through Exeter Civic Society's blue plaques project. The map has a list of 37 independent bookshops across the county and 30 literary figures (arranged by first name). There are of course omissions, for example R F Delderfield and John Galsworthy, but there are some that are new to the Devon bibliography, for example the poet Alice Oswald at Dartington, much of whose work has been inspired by the Dart valley. Her writings are now included in the listings and, as a spin-off from the recent erection of a blue plaque to novelist M. P. Willcocks the listing of her publications is also being improved.
Devon bibliography
With my movements restricted at present, I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the grey literature that is appearing, and my work with the British national bibliography does not even pick up all relevant mainstream publications. A recent visit to Waterstones revealed:
- The terror raids of 1942 : the Baedeker Blitz / Jan Gore. Havertown : Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2020. ISBN 9781526745132, which includes Exeter April-May 1942, Bath 25-27 April 1942, Norwich, April-June 1942, York 29 April 1942, Canterbury, June 1942.
- The hated cage : an American tragedy in Britain's most terrifying prison / Nicholas Guyatt. London : Oneworld, 2022. ISBN 9781786079893, which deals with Dartmoor Prison's American prisoners of war in 1812-1815.
Neither of these had been picked up by BNB, and neither had BNB made me aware that Bossiney Books had moved from Otley back to the Westcountry in 2021, not to St Teath in Cornwall where it started but to Exeter. The tourist centre at the Custom House had a large collection of their local guides, recently delivered. Bossiney have filled the slot made vacant in Exeter since the demise of Chips Barber and his Obelisk Press booklets.
I have been improving the listing of Exeter directories, which I have been using extensively in my study of the shops in Magdalen Road. Only in 1874 did street listings begin, and I have been examining Besley's directory of Exeter and suburbs to see exactly which communities are included with separate listings. The following is not complete as far as date coverage is concerned:
1882-1955 Alphington. 1850-1939 County directories have a separate listing.
1931-1936 Burnt House Lane
1882-1939 Countess Wear. 1910-1931 Kelly's Devon has a separate listing.
1982-1939 Exwick
1882-1908 Heavitree. 1910 Kelly's Devon separate listing at end of Exeter section
1882-1955 Ide. 1850-1939 County directories have a separate listing.
1934-1936 St Loyes
1882-1908 St Thomas
1850-1939 Topsham. County directories have a separate listing (never included by Besley).
1881-1936 Whipton. 1910 Kelly's Devon separate listing at end of Exeter section
1881-1936 Wonford. 1910 Kelly's Devon separate listing at end of Exeter section
This information will be included in the Devon bibliography.
Going back still further in time, I have been able to add a whole series of records for items that have not survived: book auction catalogues between 1688 and 1725. We know that such catalogues were printed because a researcher has been gleaning details from newspaper advertisements and other sources. He also sheds much light on the importance of auction sales, frequently held in coffee houses, in the vibrant literary and cultural life of Exeter in that period.
A thesaurus and gazetteer, which was already being developed while I was in Westcountry Studies is now being applied to records so that subject and place listings can also be provided. While embryo place listings are available in the Devon communities bibliography, the subject listings never got very far and the thesaurus has developed since then, so the following must be considered as trial runs:
Themes generated through the draft local studies thesaurus
Geological features (theme 26)
Wildlife (plants, animals) (theme 28)
Agriculture, (theme 77)
Fisheries, (theme 7738)
Mining (theme 776)
Housing (theme 2328)
Leisure (theme 368)
Sport (theme 3686)
Arts (theme 38)
Health services (theme 56)
Language, symbols (theme 4)
Information, media (theme 44)
And finally, AI revisited
Google Bard promoted itself yet again, so this time I asked:
What books about Devon have been published in 2023, giving author, title ISBN and publisher?
The response:
Here are some books about Devon that have been published in 2023, giving author, title, ISBN, and publisher:
Devon: A Literary Journey by William Cook (ISBN 9781789549928, publisher: Amberley Publishing) is a collection of essays on Devon's literary heritage, from Thomas Hardy to Agatha Christie.
[Image opens in a new window: www.theoldie.co.uk]
Devon: The Landscape and Its People by Peter Coates (ISBN 9781472988962, publisher: Yale University Press) is a comprehensive overview of Devon's landscape and its history, from the Ice Age to the present day.
[Image opens in a new window: www.nationaltrust.org.uk]
Devon's Coast: A History by Peter Moore (ISBN 9781843408954, publisher: Amberley Publishing) tells the story of Devon's coastline, from its geological formation to its role in smuggling and tourism.
[Image opens in a new window: en.wikipedia.org]
Devon's Churches: A Guide by Christopher Wilson (ISBN 9781913002239, publisher: Tempus Publishing) is a guide to over 500 of Devon's churches, from the earliest Saxon buildings to the latest modern designs.
[Image opens in a new window: bluecrowmedia.com]
Devon's Wildflowers by Richard Thomas (ISBN 9781409165692, publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing) is a guide to the wildflowers of Devon, including their identification, ecology, and conservation.
[Image opens in a new window: www.faber.co.uk]
I hope this helps!
Well, no improvement really. The entries are accompanied by pictures which have no relevance to the titles and link to completely irrelevant web pages and, despite the description of their coverage, the books themselves do not seem to exist. So I asked:
Write me a sonnet on the problems of creating a bibliography of Devon.
Google Bard responded with:
