National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

The National Art Library was established in 1837 and was part of the School of Design. Since that time it has been moved to different locations in London from its original site at Marlborough House, next to Somerset House, and then in 1850 to its current location. It is a non-lending library so all research needs to be done in house. The reference room materials are open access otherwise the stacks are closed and materials must be requested with the limit of six items per request, unless they’re from special collections in which case the limit is three items. In the periodical room there are 8,000 titles including 2,000 current titles. This collection is related to the museum collection of Arts & Crafts, for example the library holds 99.9% of all Vogue magazines ever published in both English and French. They are bound for security and preservation. The collection also includes trade and exhibition catalogs dating from the 18^th century to the present.

The books are classified and ordered by size. It is a historic collection therefore there isn’t a logical classification system. In order to find items the librarians use a locator map, pressmarks on the books and a findings list. The annual acquisition budget is about $300,000.

My favorite part of the tour was when we were led into a room with items from the collection on display. The librarian, Sally Williams, explained the background information about the items she’d pulled for discussion and our perusal. The collection includes a 1908 illustrated fashion design book by the then famous designer Paul Poiret. The illustrations were made with stencils and then colored in. Next there was an art book that had rabbit pelt pages. The oldest item on display was an illuminated manuscript from Paris dated 1410. There was the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield that had been donated by John Forster in 1876. The library also holds a copy of John Audobon’s 450 prints bound in a book. There was a preserved copy of Ross & Sons Great Exhibition Almanac of 1851. It was so exciting to be able to handle and go through these materials.

Due to the lack of funding very few items in the library’s collection are digitized. However, there are a select few items available on the database Empire online.

Most of the users of this library are university students, post-graduates, people related to auction houses, and curators at the museum. The users have free access to the database including JSTOR. There are also student theses available from the library by date.

Stratford-Upon-Avon

We spent the entire day and evening in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Once we arrived a few friends and I found the public library, a Carnegie library, poked around inside and talked to two librarians. Next we decided to tour the town via a hop on, hop off bus. The first stop was Trinity Church where Shakespeare attended and is buried. Then once back on the bus, we stopped by Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. The garden entrances were locked, so we walked around the perimeter and peered in through the hedges. We departed the bus at the Shakespeare Memorial statue near the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre. Once there we had a dinner at a pub named Swan Pub, but nicknamed the Dirty Duck. After dinner we still had two hours to kill, so we walked around town a bit and found our way over by the River Avon and watched the people, waterfowl, and activity on the river. Finally it was time to enter the Swan Theatre for the performance of Cardenio, the lost play of Shakespeare re-imagined. It was a spectacular performance with the added pleasure of flamenco singing and dancing as a finale.

The London Library

The London Library is located in Saint James Square. It is a private research library with lending services that receives no public funding or grant money. The Deputy Librarian, Jane Oldfield, greeted us at the intake desk. She led us up three flights of stairs to a meeting room. Once there we met the Head of Reader Services, Helen O’Neill. She gave a wonderful presentation on the history of the library, including current renovations. In 1841, Thomas Carlyle, one of the founding members, got fed up with the British Museum’s Library because they didn’t lend out their collection. In response he and a few others set up the private London Library as a lending library. This library predates the Public Library Act. Its collection is predominantly in the Arts and Humanities. However, they do hold the original Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Currently there are an estimated seven thousand members, including corporations. The entire operation is financially dependent on user subscriptions, fundraising, and people leaving money to the library in their wills.

Some examples of former members are Virginia Woolf, who first joined at twenty-two years old, and T.S. Eliot, who was not only a member, but the president of the library from 1952 to 1964.

There are fifty languages, mostly European languages, found in the collection. All of the books are arranged by subject and size, and there is open access browsing. Eight thousand new books are added to the collection each year. There is no ascension policy, and there aren’t any desk jackets. There is an in house conservator so they bind most of their books, however they also send items out for binding. Because there is no ascension there is a greater scope regarding the subject matter revealed in the collection.

One member referred to the London Library as…”the gentleperson’s Google.” John McNally.

The annual budget for acquisitions is about $446,276 (or 282,000 pounds). One third of that is spent on periodicals. Many books are donated, some of which are not kept and are included in the Friends of the Library book sales. Some members leave books to the library when they die. Also, the library has special arrangements with some publishers who give books to the library free of charge.

Sixty percent of the collection is available on the open access online catalog. Most everything in the collection can be checked out unless it is of high monetary value or in a fragile state.

The only part of the collection that has been digitized is the art prints.

There are four reading rooms: the Victorian Reading Room, the Lightwell Reading Room, the 1930s styled reading room where laptops can be used, and the Prevost Reading room.

My overall impression of the library is that it would be a wonderful place to spend many hours reading for research or simply for pleasure.

The Imperial War Museum

In the morning I decided to go to the Imperial War Museum. It’s a short walk from where I’m staying at King’s College Apartments on Stamford Street in Lambeth. After a fifteen-minute walk I arrived at the entrance to the museum. The security guards were checking purses and bags. The one exhibit that caught my attention right off was called The Children’s War. Along with that was the Once Upon a Wartime exhibit. They were really well done with a variety of artifacts, including children’s letters home to parents, teddy bears, suitcases, and child sized gas masks. Throughout the exhibit were touchscreen displays that gave timelines of events and background history. There were so many stories of the children that were evacuated from London to the British countryside, the United States, or if they were orphans shipped off to Australia. From what I can recall there were an estimated seven thousand children killed in London, and about another seven thousand injured due to the Nazi Blitzkrieg.

Another interesting fact to me was that schoolteachers were required to evacuate with their students to the countryside. Classes were held in the morning and the students had the afternoons free to explore their new homes. At this time students were required to stay in school until they reached fifteen years of age. Near the school room display there was a touchscreen display that included a journal of a teacher at an all boys’ school. The teacher made entries about evacuation drills to the bomb shelters, how students were required to carry their gasmasks at all times, and how some students were absent from school because their father and/or older brother(s) were visiting on leave from their military duties.

Included in this area of the museum was a replica of the interior of a typical 1940s British home. It showed a child’s bedroom, a teenager’s bedroom, the parents’ bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. What was most remarkable was the in home bomb shelter assembled in the main living space. It looked like a metal table with wire fencing on the side. Lovely!

Past this display was a replica of the interior of a prefab home. Apparently so many homes were either completely destroyed or uninhabitable that homeless London residents were provided with prefabricated homes. The replica reminded me of today’s modular homes. I was left wondering if any of these homes are still in use today, or if people replaced them when they were able to do so.

The next exhibit I visited was the John Singer Sargent Gallery. In it is his huge painting show the soldiers who have experienced mustard gas poisoning, have their eyes bandaged and are walking with one hand on the shoulder of the soldier in front of them. Within the same exhibit hall, there was another artist by the name of Nash whose painting style I really admired. On the same floor there is an exhibit of Women War Artists. I skimmed this exhibit but noted the beautiful depictions of women factory workers and women working with the war wounded.

New to the Imperial War Museum is the Explore History Centre. It is on the floor up from the ground floor of the museum and has two museum staff stationed at a help desk, and another room with about twenty computers for research. They boast to have a user-friendly catalogue and interactive multimedia displays of the museum’s archives’ treasures. While I was there, a woman researching a person of interest discovered that that person earned medals. She was very excited, but the only glitch was that she’d have to travel to Canada to see them.

If I hadn’t had an appointment to tour the London Library, I would have explored the museum store. Nevertheless, the museum is a fifteen-minute walk from where I’m staying so I’ll have to try to get back there at some point.

Greenwich, England

Our library science group left London to tour Greenwich today. Just to mix things up a bit, we took a boat from the London Eye Pier to the Greenwich Pier. It just so happened that the ticket salesperson sold me a two-way ticket. It was fun taking this sort of water taxi and seeing both banks of the Thames up to and back from Greenwich.

Once in Greenwich we walked through the University of Greenwich campus and made it over to the Stephen Lawrence Gallery. This art gallery was established in the year 2000 under some pretty sad circumstances. Possibly you had read about the racially motivated hate crime several years ago where two black youths were severely beaten by a group of white teenagers. One of the black boys, Stephen, died and his mother, Dori Lawrence, at the time was a student at the university. Later she worked at the university and she and the university community created this gallery in Stephen’s honor. It is open to the community and is a celebration of different cultures, personal expression, and as a memorial to Stephen and his love for art.

The current exhibit is entitled Uncaught Hares: Painting and Sculpture at Greenwich Studios: 1974-1994. The artists during this time period were heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism such as that produced by Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Although it’s not my favorite style of art, I do like the paintings by Marilyn Hallam Short Story from Max, Clyde Hopkins Ron’s Trippy Craft, and Patrick Jones Circle. There is a 1972 film on this art movement in Greenwich’s Docklands at this site www.spacestudios.org.uk/space.

At twelve o’clock noon we broke for lunch and were to reconvene at two in the afternoon. The group left the campus for lunch in the nearby town. Dr. Welsh pointed out where we were to meet at two, so I had lunch at a restaurant called Le Menu. While I ate a Croquet Monsieur, I read through The Greenwich Visitor, a local rag, and learned about The Fan Museum and the well renowned Greenwich Market both unfortunately closed on Mondays. After lunch I stopped by a nautical shop and picked up some useful items for Robert.

At ten minutes to two I was waiting and looking for the group at the predetermined location. I thought that I saw Dr. Welsh in the distance on two separate occasions. At two o’clock I was getting rather concerned about where the group was and if I misunderstood the time or place. By ten after two I went to the National Maritime Museum at the information desk to see if I could locate the group. Simon at the desk made a few phone calls and had no leads, so by two thirty I gave up hope of finding Dr. Welsh and the group. So at this point I backtracked again to the rendez-vous spot, went inside the Information Center and Greenwich Museum for a look around. Then I decided to take advantage of being in Greenwich, and I went the National Maritime Museum exhibits.

While at the Maritime Museum, I went through three exhibit areas. The first one was the Explorers exhibit on the ground floor. It had an exhibit showing a map and the goods traded from around the world. Apparently back when peppercorns were rare you could use them as currency to acquire other goods.

Two floors up there was an exhibit of other explorers and the nautical equipment that was used for navigation. Captain Cook and his three voyages was highlighted, especially his third voyage when he was up in Vancouver looking for the Northwest Passage and met his end in Hawaii. There were numerous types of maps ranging from a Polynesian map out of woven material that represented ocean currents and shells that represented islands, a map from an atlas made in Genoa showing the Mediterranean, and maps depicting Africa.

On the floor beneath this exhibit was one dedicated to the slave- trade. There was a comprehensive map depicting the Atlantic Exchange, showing the goods coming from and going to North America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. Also, there were a lot of materials displayed showing what led to the eventual abolition of slavery under the reign of King George III.

Feeling pretty tired at this point, I decided to return to London by boat. So, although I didn’t have the same experience as the group did on their tour, at least the day trip to Greenwich wasn’t a total loss.

Freetime Exploring South London

Beth and I hooked up to explore east of where we are staying at King’s College dorms on Stamford Street. Originally we were trying to locate the Braham’s Museum of Tea and Coffee. There is a lot of construction going on in London right now, so I’m not sure if we missed the building due to all of the scaffolding, but we just couldn’t find it. Instead we found a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, a floating museum. Then we toured the Clink Prison Museum and noted that the prisoners themselves had to pay for their incarceration. Imagine if California had this policy, we wouldn’t have such debt as we currently do. Anyhow, the many devices certainly made for a miserable stay. After seeing the museum we walked by the Borough Market, but it wasn’t open on Sundays. Walking along the bankside of the Thames, we saw the replica of the Globe Theater, had lunch at a Greek restaurant, searched for artifacts on the strand of the Thames, and returned to our dorms to rest. After a while, we met up again, went to Waterloo Station to get a seven-day travel card, rode the tube over to Buckingham Palace to take photos, and walked back through St. James Park. After walking along the Victoria Embankment, we crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridge that offers a panoramic view of Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, the London Aquarium, and the London Eye. It turned out to be a relaxing way to spend a Sunday in the city of London.

Daytrip to Dover Castle & Canterbury

Today, I signed up for the Day Trip to Dover Castle and Canterbury. Once the bus arrived at Dover, you could see the harbor and the ferries leaving to traverse the English Channel to France and other destinations. It was a bit too hazy on the horizon to actually see the French shoreline, but on a clear day I imagine it is visible. After departing the bus at Dover Castle, I first toured the Medieval tunnels. Next, I walked through the museum that highlighted Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and two of their troublesome sons, John and Richard the Lionheart. It’s funny to think that five years ago this month I spent the fourteenth of July, France’s Independence Day, with my family outside of Richard the Lionheart’s castle at Talmont-Saint Hilaire. I remember that the fireworks display was beautiful as it lit up the old castle ruins.

Dover Castle has a layered history like so many places in this corner of the world. Driving up towards the town of Dover, our guide pointed out a prehistoric settlement on top of hill, now grown over with grass, but to a trained eye recognizable. The area of Dover Castle itself was originally where a Roman lighthouse stood. Then the Saxons came built a church and turned the remains of the lighthouse into the bell tower. Next came the Norman Invasion of 1066. After that came Henry II and the castle was built. Fast forward to the twentieth century when the castle was used during WWII for Operation Dynamo to rescue British and French troupes from the German assault at Dunkirk.

The castle is a very impressive structure. As we were walking down the hill to depart I couldn’t help but notice all the trees that were growing up beneath the walls, and it reminded me of the Maya ruins at Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico. I imagine if this area wasn’t still populated that in a few hundred years it would be reclaimed by nature, another lost remnant of the past. Of course this isn’t likely to happen this century.

The next stop was the town of Canterbury, famous for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the murder and sainthood of Thomas Becket. After having a delicious lunch of lamb tagine, I went to the Canterbury Museum. As the name implies it is a museum about Canterbury, first as a Roman settlement, then as a Saxon settlement, throughout the Medieval Ages as a popular pilgrim site, to the present. Most surprising to me was a collection of tiny gold Saxon coins perfectly formed. Actually most all of the Saxon artifacts showed a great deal of craftsmanship. For some reason I’d always thought the Saxons were somewhat primitive with crude skills.

The museum was definitely geared towards children. There were a lot of hands on displays and a timeline showing a very simplified version of how Henry II and Thomas Becket had a falling out. Hardly anyone was in there but a single family, a couple of older ladies, and myself.

Feeling a bit tired I meandered through the streets to the entrance of the Canterbury Cathedral. The fee was more than what I was willing to pay, and I didn’t have a lot of time left, so I decided not to go in. Later, I might regret this decision. Instead I decided to make my way back to where the bus was parked. The ride back was relatively quick and without incident. It sure made up for the miserable trip back from yesterday’s excursion.