Sir Alan Bowness, director of the Tate Gallery in the 1980s and son-in-law of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, donated to the UL his extensive art history library, containing many exhibition catalogues and private view cards. In recent years several blog posts have been devoted to progress on the Bowness collection, the earliest in 2019. This year I have been working on adding more exhibition catalogues to the library catalogue. I have been struck by how relevant the collection is now as over and over again I have noticed links between it and the 2024 cultural world. Continue reading “Bowness and a touch of synchronicity”
Tag: donations
Beautiful Ukrainian donations : the April 2024 Ukrainian item(s) of the month
A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to receive a donation of five lovely books from the Kharkiv-based publisher Oleksandr Savchook and the organisation Progress-14.
The five donations add to the 12 Savchook titles we had previously bought and which were published between 2014 and 2021. The five new publications, which reflect the core strengths of Mr Savchook’s publishing house in terms of their concentration on the arts, were published in 2022 and 2023 and make very welcome additions to Cambridge’s Ukrainian collection. Continue reading “Beautiful Ukrainian donations : the April 2024 Ukrainian item(s) of the month”
Finnish municipal architecture
At the end of 2023, we received a donation of architecture books from Roger Shrimplin, a Cambridge MA and practising architect. The books we had selected from the list Mr Shrimplin had sent to us were mainly in English, Spanish, and various East European languages, but among them was also this lovely 1985 book in Finnish and Swedish.
A deluxe edition of ‘Twenty love poems and A song of despair’ for Cambridge
The University Library has recently received a special limited edition of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Presented to the University in 1991 by Patricio Aylwin Azócar, former President of Chile, this copy is no. 555 of 250 copies printed from 501 to 750 and features a dedication to the University of Cambridge by the Chilean president.
Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is best known for his poetry, most notably this work, which he wrote in 1924 when he was just nineteen years old. Neruda’s works are widely represented in the Cambridge Libraries collections, both in Spanish and in English translation (click here to view our holdings in iDiscover).
This particular edition of Twenty love poems and ‘A song of despair’ was printed by Ismael Espinosa in 1990 in Santiago de Chile.[i] It is presented in elephant folio, with a satin ribbon, illustrated with eight original glazes by Chilean magical realism painter Hernán Valdovinos. The volume is beautifully bound in peacock-feather decorated cloth, with gold paper-title-label insert on the front panel and marbled endpapers.[ii] The calligraphy is by María Angélica Seguel.
Sonia Morcillo
[i] Ismael Espinosa talks about this edition in Revelaciones de un editor de Neruda, El Mercurio, Sept. 25, 1988, p. E16 (available online at: https://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/628/w3-article-297688.html)
[ii] Description details source: The Edmonton Book Store, Canada.
Donations from the Embassy of Latvia
We recently received a gift of books from the Latvian Embassy in London, some in Latvian, some in English, some in both, and all about Latvia and Latvian culture. Details are provided below, in reverse date order of publication, from 2021 to 2018.
Donations via the Ukrainian Bookshelf Project
The Ukrainian Bookshelf Project “provides for the distribution of Ukrainian literature in the original language and its translations in the world’s leading libraries”*, and the University Library has recently benefited from this fantastic and generous scheme. A large delivery coordinated by the Ukrainian Embassy in London and by the British Library has seen books selected first by the BL but then any duplicates to their holdings offered to academic libraries collecting Ukrainian, and Cambridge’s rapid response has seen us benefit most wonderfully with the donation of nearly 50 modern Ukrainian titles.
Continue reading “Donations via the Ukrainian Bookshelf Project”
Maltese publications in the University Library
Maltese is not actively collected by the University Library, but I was delighted to receive a donation from Dr Mark Agius of three Maltese books. The donation gave me enjoyable cause to take a look into our holdings in the language. As described in the blurb of The languages of Malta (referred to later on), “Maltese is a descendant of Arabic, but due to the history of the island, it has borrowed extensively from Sicilian, Italian and English”.
opening from ‘Damma’
Continue reading “Maltese publications in the University Library”
The Prof. Trevor Dadson donation on early modern literature, history and culture from Spain
The University Library has recently received a donation of several hundred books from the library of the late Professor Trevor Dadson (1947-2020). He was a British Hispanist whose expertise in Golden Age Spanish literature and history gained him worldwide recognition.
Continue reading “The Prof. Trevor Dadson donation on early modern literature, history and culture from Spain”Frederick Justen and ‘Il Gallo di Alfredo il Piccolo’: An intriguing Italian print in Cambridge UL’s 1870-71 collection
Frederick Justen (1832-1906), working at Soho-based Dulau & Co. booksellers, produced different sets of caricatures from the Franco-Prussian and the Commune (1870-71), including some at Cambridge University Library, at the British Library and Heidelberg University Library. A close inspection of one of the prints in the sixth and final volume of Cambridge University Library’s 1870/71 caricatures (KF.3.9-14) shows the challenges raised by the identification of the subjects of the caricatures and suggests that Justen updated the collection as late as October 1878. Digitised in late 2020 and the subject of an online display, some of these prints are currently exhibited in the Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Library. One of the particularly interesting facets of this collection is the existence of similar sets, all produced by Justen. Despite sharing the same red binding, title page and 1872 article from the Atheneum advertising the sets, the various Justen collections are not identical. This diversity provides ample room for investigation, and one entry point is the case of an Italian print in Cambridge’s sixth volume entitled ‘Il Gallo di Alfredo il Piccolo’, which appears to have been printed much later than any other print found in this compilation.
Dame Margaret Anstee Collection: a Newnham alumna in South America
Dame Margaret Joan Anstee (1926-2016) was a remarkable Newnham College graduate who had special ties with Bolivia and who in 1987 was the first ever woman to become Undersecretary-General of the United Nations, the third most senior position at that institution. During her life as a UN official (which we can read about in Never learn to type: a woman at the United Nations), she spent several years working in different parts of the world, including many countries in South America and also Angola (see Orphan of the Cold War: the inside story of the collapse of the Angolan peace process, 1992-93).
It was Bolivia though, where she was the UN representative from 1960 to 1965, that would become a prime focus in her life. In her 1970 work Gate of the sun: a prospect of Bolivia, she recounts her first experiences in a “country to which one cannot remain indifferent”. She not only became special adviser to its government after leaving the UN in 1993 but also chose it as the place to spend part of her retirement (read The house on the sacred lake: and other Bolivian dreams – and nightmares).
Continue reading “Dame Margaret Anstee Collection: a Newnham alumna in South America”
Languages across Borders 