 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 38 August 2025  |
I found myself representing FoDA and Exeter Civic Society at a couple of recent events as I noticed there seemed to be nobody else representing those organisations.
Penguin 90
On 30 July the 90th birthday of Penguin Books was celebrated at Exeter St Davids Station in front of the much publicised book vending machine installed by Exeter City of Literature and GWR in 2023. It was at the station in 1934 that Sir Allen Lane was inspired to found Penguin Books after he couldn’t find a good book to read, following a visit to see Agatha Christie in South Devon.
There are other links to Exeter. Sir Allen Lane (1902-1970) was apprenticed in 1919 to John Lane (1854-1925), a Devonian bibliophile who joined with Charles Elkin Mathews (1851-1921) to found the Bodley Head Press. Charles Elkin Mathews ran a bookshop at 16 Cathedral Yard in Exeter from 1884 to 1887 and began to publish books there before returning to London. Sir Allen Lane's daughter Clare was there with her husband Sir Michael Morpurgo who were involved in choosing titles for the vending machine.
Exeter UNESCO City of Literature’s Executive Director Anna Orchard commenced the celebrations by highlighting the lasting legacy of Sir Allen Lane in Exeter, and heralded the future of stories and storytelling in the region. Clare and Sir Michael Morpurgo honoured Clare’s father Sir Allen Lane, stressing the importance of access to books for children, and cheap editions of good literature for everyone. He also said how important libraries were and how they were going through great difficulties.
The proceedings ended with the cutting of a special cake, shaped like the Penguin Books vending machine, complete with book covers that were featured in the actual machine. I was able to speak to several of the writers there and tell them about the great treasures in the West Country Studies Library, the very existence of which some were not aware of. I also presented copies of a book on Exeter libraries to Anna Cohn Orchard and to Sir Michael Morpurgo who insisted that I sign his copy, so word is being spread.
Heritage gathering at Kent Kingdon's house
This was convened by Todd Gray on 26 July and gathered together representatives including the Devonshire Association, Devon History Society, Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries, Devon Family History Society, Exeter Local History Society, Exeter Civic Society and researchers linked to the University or working independently. Todd gave a brief introduction to Taddyforde but there was no agenda and it was good to meet up to chat with friends and colleagues. Once again the idea of a more formalised confederation of "heritage stakeholders" came up and the lack of an obvious central heritage hub in Exeter was raised.
Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries
DCNQ was represented at the meeting by all three of the Committee: John Draisey (editor and treasurer), Ian Maxted (chair) and Todd Gray. Todd revealed that the Committee had not met for thirty years, although they had kept in contact informally. After 125 years of existence it was time to reconsider its future in this digital age - perhaps it could even merge with the Westcountry Studies bibliographical newsletter which I will not be able to continue indefinitely.
Exeter Civic Society library and archives
On 18 July I took over custody of the Exeter Civic Society's library, which is largely made up of books, pamphlets, illustrations and maps from the collection of Hazel Harvey. I hastily made a set of shelving from scraps of timber, unpacked it and put it in order. It is a good reflection of the interests and concerns of Hazel Harvey and the Civic Society over the past sixty years, and I have so far catalogued about 450 books and pamphlets and printouts can be provided as text files or PDFs. Work is at present in hand to reconcile the illustrations with those appearing in publications by Hazel Harvey and the Civic Society. I am also starting to add items from my own collection.
Exeter UNESCO City of Literature and regional heritage hub?
I am reluctant to disperse the publications as they will then disappear entirely from public access in the heart of Exeter, as very little of the material I have passed to the Devon Heritage Centre has appeared on the public catalogue since about 2018. At present there are more books in Princesshay Little Library than there are Devon books on the lending shelves in Exeter Central Library (150 as against 110 on a count made at the end of July). Looking at the current intake of books into West Country Studies Library from 2020 to 2025 a search of the online catalogue reveals:
| Year | Books | Periodical issues |
| 2020 | 53 | 19 |
| 2021 | 72 | 15 |
| 2022 | 54 | 21 |
| 2023 | 36 | 26 |
| 2024 | 46 | 18 |
| 2025 | 8 | 4 (to July 2025) |
Over this period (2020-2025) there are no publications by the County or District Councils that I can trace on the catalogue, indeed the only council publication is by Holcombe Rogus Parish Council: A Devon community in the time of Covid and beyond (2021). Nor are there any publications by the health, water, police or fire and rescue authorities, and tourist guides are not being picked up from local tourism offices or councils. The West Country Studies Library is a black hole of local information.
This is a disgraceful situation for a City that is a UNESCO City of Literature and claims to be a heritage hub for the region. Nor is Devon County Council and its policies over austerity since 2012 solely to blame. Exeter City Council does not support a tourist information office in the heart of Exeter to provide publicity to visitors and residents alike. Not many people arrive in Exeter by canal nowadays, and I have several times had to direct visitors in the centre of Exeter down to the Quay. One Australian couple who decided on a four-day break in Exeter only chanced on the tiny tourist office in the Custom House on the last day of their visit. Will the plans for unitary authorities change the landscape? Probably not, as it will only bring the two causes of the present situation together. Stakeholders in the City and County would have to unite to bring about a centre in Exeter’s heart to give the community back its rich store of memories which it can share with residents of all ages from the young schoolchild to those suffering from dementia at the end of their lives, as well as visitors from around the world who come for business, research or as tourists
The war with Russia
The poster is splendidly printed, with a range of display types, by Norton, Printer, (Gutta Percha Dépôt,) St. Sidwell's, and the same text was also printed in the Exeter weekly newspapers of the day. The newspapers later carried lengthy accounts of the meeting in the Guildhall, which was attended by between 300 and 400 persons. Each newspaper sent a shorthand reporter who took down the words of speakers and noted the reactions of the audience. Speakers mention the work of Miss Nightingale, and there is also mention of Odesa, which is now, like Exeter, a UNESCO City of Literature, where the Odesa Literary Museum and many other cultural sites have been damaged in Russia's "special military operation". The text of the Western Times report has been transcribed.
Heritage Open Days 2025
The theme of HODs this year is architecture and I am putting together a guided walk for Exeter Civic Society entitled "The architecture of information: a guided walk through two millennia of the written word". It will take in fifty sites where there are (or more often were) libraries, printers, publishers, booksellers, newspapers, archives or other institutions or individuals concerned with the dissemination of text, printed or manuscript. All the sites are within the walls and an attempt will be made to introduce them in rough chronological order. There will be two walks on 16 September if there is enough take-up.
Lewtrenchard and the Baring-Gould Library
Independent hotel group Original Collection "is excited to announce that Lewtrenchard Manor, a historic Grade II*-listed manor house hotel near Okehampton, Devon, has reopened its doors to guests, (25 July 2025). [...] Original Collection has been granted a new long-term lease from Lewtrenchard Manor’s landlord The Baring-Gould Corporation." While it states that " the hotel’s impressive antique collection has been reinstated", there is no mention of the library. "The hotel restaurant will also reopen under a new name, Origin" and I understand that part of it will be located in the library. During the £3m refurbishment the books had been packed away in some eighty boxes and I have spent more than a week unpacking them and sorting them onto the shelves. There is still work to be done and I hope to be able to do most of it during August and early September.
Other sections of the Baring-Gould library and archives are in the Special Collections section of Exeter University Library and the Devon Heritage Centre. I have compiled a merged spreadsheet of the holdings which is on the Devon Bibliography website.
The British Book Trade Index: past, present and future.
This three-day stint in Birmingham began with a workshop on 22 July at Birmingham School of Art which is important for all those mounting databases on the internet. The Bodleian had recently taken the BBTI down, following the cyberattack on the British Library in October 2023, from which it has still not fully recovered and the fragility of networks was a recurring theme.
Maureen Bell's presentation "From shoeboxes to the internet: BBTI from then till now" looked back to the 1960s when the University of Newcastle upon Tyne was a hotbed of book history research. Led by Professor Peter Isaac, the History of the Book Trade in the North Project produced eighty publications between 1965 and 2002. Peter Wallis and Frank Robinson ran the Project for Historical Biobibliography (PHIBB), a major component of which was the Books Subscription List Project, an important publication of which was Book subscription lists: a revised guide (1975). This was a pioneering exercise in digital number-crunching including a massive database of subscribers to 800 books printed by subscription from about 1680 to 1760, more than 300,000 records. In the 1970s the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue was taking shape in the British Library with Robin Alston at the helm. Peter Isaac retired as Professor of Engineering at Newcastle in 1981 and set about gathering collaborators and resources for a British book trade index. This was set up in 1985, based at Newcastle, using dBase3+ software. Records were keyboarded from pre-printed data collection cards but data could also be provided by submitting ASCII comma-delimited files on floppy discs. I submitted several thousand entries for the database as ASCII files, not only for Devon, but for all of the British Isles. An annual series of seminars was begun which grew into the Print Networks conferences and many of the contributions were published in a series of volumes. A newsletter, Quadrat, was also set up in 1996 and ran to 28 issues. The BBTI continued at Newcastle until the death of Peter Isaac in 2002 when it moved to Birmingham University with Dr Maureen Bell assisted by John Hinks, where it remained until 2014. In that year it moved to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in the care of Giles Bergel. In 2024 it was taken down from the Bodleian website to safeguard the data following the cyberattack on the British Library in October 2023, but copies of the data archive containing about 135,000 records, were passed to the Universities of Saskatchewan in Canada and Victoria in Australia where they can be accessed on the web.
"Working with BBTI data: a hands-on introduction" by Giles Bergel and Alex Hitchman of the Bodleian set out to provide a gentle (but “cool”) introduction to the basics of data analysis using the legacy BBTI dataset hosted by the Bodleian. It introduced the OpenRefine software, used for cleaning up messy data, matching records, enrichment of data and methods of visualisation. I, and some others were rapidly lost, and I could not see any great advance on what I could achieve from sorting and (carefully) blanket changing data on a spreadsheet, something that I had been doing for some time since I abandoned d-Base and Access for Excel and Libre Office Calc. We were however introduced to “techno-death” of data, made inaccessible through changes in platforms, processors, diagnostic and validation tools, shifts in ownership, “upgrades” of equipment, cyberattacks or simply discarding of data or software through ignorance. Nor were internet archives such as the Wayback Machine a complete answer. The archiving of websites does not normally cover the content of the databases to which they give access and most of the links become invalid in a very short time. I was relieved therefore to learn that I had all along been archiving my data as tab delimited text files. “Keep it simple” is the key. Two presentations from the University of Victoria in Australia and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada discussed issues raised by the use copies of the archived database. Both Universities were presenting the BBTI data archive and using it linked to initiatives such as the Grub Street Project, presenting the literary landscape of 18th century London. It was important that such websites used static datasets, archived at intervals of perhaps two to three years, and that no earlier archived versions should be discarded. Neither institution had made significant amendments to the data and this led into the final discussion on the future of the BBTI.
It was agreed that a working group should be set up to chart the way ahead for the next forty years, perhaps convened by the Centre for Printing History and Culture in Birmingham, or the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This should include discussion of the format of entries, stressing that it was an index and not a prosopography, or biographical dictionary. I suggested that the format should tie in with the thesaurus of internationally agreed authority files being drawn up by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and showed two books which employed this format: Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et gens du livre en Basse-Normandie 1701-1789 by Alain Girard and myself (2020) and Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires (vers 1470 – vers 1830 by Jean-Dominique Mellot and others, published by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Discussion would also cover the archiving of versions of the BBTI, the maintenance and extension of the database and the training of participants.
The next two days moved out to the campus of Birmingham University where the Centre for Printing History and Culture had organised the Print Networks 40th conference on 23-24 July 2025 with the theme “Provincial to regional”. A fascinating series of presentations, with echoes which were of relevance to book history studies in Devon. I will be detailing this in a separate web page.
A visit to Weimar
I indicated in the last issue that I had started work on an international comparison of the world of the book in Exeter and Devon, Caen and Lower Normandy, and Weimar and Thuringia during the 18th century. My visit to Weimar in June picked up on a long relationship with that culturally important town. There, in 1964, I got to know Dr Hubert Amft when I attended a university holiday study course for German language and culture. Weimar was then in the German Democratic Republic but we retained contact for sixty years by letter, telephone, e-mail and personal visits. Hubert was very widely read and well regarded in Weimar as a literary and local historian. He died 25 June 2024 and, going through his correspondence after his death, I came across two articles, one on Weimar and the other on the Wartburg Castle, which he had sent me in 1977 and 1982. These he hoped to have translated and published anonymously in the West and I was partly successful in this, the Weimar article appearing in History today, but they had never been published in German.
I produced a limited printing of twenty copies, of which I took ten for local institutions. A full publication in Exeter is not practical, but it could serve for inclusion in a collection of his articles on which he was working when he died. I presented copies to the Goethe- und Schillerarchiv, the Anna Amalia Library (where Goethe was librarian), the Stadtmuseum (in the house of Bertuch, a leading publisher) and Pavillon-Presse, a printing museum and publisher. I received in return publications to assist me in my project, which means I will be devoting much less time to Devon and its bibliography in the future. Over to you … .