It's Always More Complicated

So, at long last, I finally have an email address associated with My New Academic Position (this has been A Saga to do with their system upgrade).

I have also achieved reader's card for library of former workplace (spat out from the bowels of their system with A Very Old Photo of Yrs Truly).

And went and looked at the items I wanted to check, and found that lo, I was right and they did NOT have anything pertinent, as I had in fact hoped they would not. Though I had hoped to look, for another thing, at a couple of closed stack items and discovered that these cannot be ordered on a day's notice INFAMY I am sure I recall the times when there were regular deliveries throughout the day. Not actually critical, but irksome. (Also irksome was that I moaned about this on bluesky and got various responses that had no relevance at all to research libraries, in the UK, in particular this one.)

I then managed to get a digital passport photo at one of the photobooths on Euston station and have applied for a new passport, as mine is well out of date and I seem to keep seeing things that want 'government ID' to verify WHO I AM (over here, making like Hemingway....) so thought this was probably the way to go.

Also this is a trivial thing but in the course of my perambs of the day I walked past the statue of Trim, and his human.

In the niggles department, I did that thing of putting my phone down in place I never usually put it and flapping about trying to find it.

The lockers at the library have really annoying electronic locks.

Printer playing up a bit again. Though I think this really is that one has to let it mutter and sulk for a bit between turning it on and actually trying to print anything.

“Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending: a seasonal account of a real-life quest:

This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching.
It is also a tale about goblins and Christmas decorations; about the perils of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence; and about the real value of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists – what should be called the Noble Professions.
And it is an account that ends with not one but two wonderful events.

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Books that don't actually exist: A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist, from Byron’s destroyed memoirs to Shakespeare’s lost play. Includes real lost books, and books that appear in fiction.

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This is, very who'd a thought it: because I really would not have predicted that this particular religious sect would have found a foothold there, but what do I know? The Bahá’í Faith in Greenland - admittedly the congregation is pretty tiny:

Beyond traditional Inuit shamanism and Christianity (including ‘sects’ like the Jehovah’s Witnesses), the oldest and largest religion in Greenland is the Bahá’í Faith, which was first brought to the island through a literature propagation campaign in 1946. The first Bahá’í to live in Greenland arrived in 1951, and there are now around 150 believers. The Bahá’í Faith is a monotheistic, messianic, quasi-Abrahamic tradition founded in Iran during the late nineteenth century. It has its roots in Bábism, another movement formed earlier in the nineteenth century by a figure known as the Báb, and it takes many of its structural and stylistic cues from Islam, although it has generally been proscribed by Islamic authorities due to its belief in continuing revelation (i.e., prophetic revelation after the Prophet Muhammad) and its opposition to hierarchical religious power structures.

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Slightly less who'd a thought it, because things even from that distance in time turn up In The Archives: new info on the Chevalier d'Eon:

On 27 November 1776 a case came before Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, in which, the Morning Chronicle reported, proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by the ‘loud and hearty laughs’ of all in attendance. The cause of such mirth was the reading aloud of a set of letters written by the Chevalier d’Eon, a French spy and diplomat, and complainant in the case....
The letters were only recently discovered in the King’s Bench collections at the National Archives, enclosed in John Goy’s translations. These letters, and the legal records created as part of these cases, provide us with an invaluable insight into the enigmatic Chevalier d’Eon during this transitional period in his life.

Women in public spaces: Emotion and Space in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Suffrage Movement:

Sir Alexander Beresford Hope MP warned against ‘forcing [women] into the arena of political excitement, where they would be exposed to the animosities, the bickerings, and the resentments which are so unhappily inherent in the tough work of electioneering’.[3] Beresford Hope’s description of ‘the arena of political excitement’ was laden with vivid emotional language, through which he asserted that casting a vote would prove pernicious to feminine emotional virtues.

Moving scientific knowledge from the laboratory to the theatre: Humphry Davy's Lecture practice at the Royal Institution, 1801–1812. He was considerably dissed on for attracting a large number of women to his lectures (including demos of nitrous oxide). Jane Marcet was inspired by them to write her famous Conversations in Chemistry, and it does appear that children attended these lectures along with their mothers.

So people keeping papers that Ought To Be In The Archives in really odd places is not really unknown among members of the archive profession, and there have been been accession lists I have known pertaining to collections in the raw state including entries like 'files found in airing cupboard', 'papers from bathroom windowsill', etc etc. And while in my own career I don't think there were any governmentally sensitive documents, there were instances of medical persons having sensitive clinical records in their home and no particular control exercised. But possibly my colleague at a centre for military history could tell tales...

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I was going over this, well, one knows Business Is Done in these places, and in particular given the centuries of women being Noted Travellers and Explorers I think the Travellers' Club is particularly Poor Show, but really, pretty much over here with Groucho Marx, what ho?

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Yet again, writer with a book to promote claims No-One Has Ever Done This Before: there are surely still living novelists of the 60s/70s who were noted in their day for their unglamourous depictions of motherhood???

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And on people and professions with narratives that get erased or overlooked: A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it:

SUPARS is meaningful as both a design far ahead of its time and as a counterexample to established techno-utopian histories of the internet and the world wide web. The people credited as visionaries in this history almost always imagined a world where technology would improve human communication, intelligence and effectiveness absolutely.

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When I read this, in a piece which I find a bit dubious about writers wrecking their health through their writing practices, I thought, 'how could they tell?' on this about Ayn Rand:

[S]he turned to Benzedrine, which allowed her to write at an unprecedented clip, and she finally turned in the completed manuscript, one day before the deadline. But there were costs to her newfound productivity. Rand’s reliance on the drug led to “mood swings, irritability, emotional outbursts, and paranoia[.]”

A Black Irish-American rejoinder to Gone With The Wind: Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow: well, maybe the politics around race are better than I remember, given that I read his works when I was in my teens, but my recollection in hindsight - and having read some of his later works in my slightly more mature years - is that he was pretty dubious in the area of sexual politics.

(Though in further ways this week has been A Week, there was the failure of Teams to connect to a lecture I rather wanted to virtually attend on Tuesday: but I think this was not a failure at this end but a more general problem as someone else on Twitter copped to having the same issue and IT problems were reported.)

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Thinking beyond the 'strong woman'/'girlboss' stereotype: Jennie Jerome [not Churchill's ma], a twentieth century Victorian in the Library:

Women’s history and much of male history, too, celebrates those who break molds, lead avant-garde lives, and generally do things differently from the majority, while under pressure from society or duress from personal circumstances. Often, the women who gain attention (and readership) are wild and witty, throw parties, run away with men, or fall in love with other women, write novels or move to the deserts of the Southwest. But, what about women like Jennie Jerome?

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A rather similar critique here, in the context of ART: The Problem with the ‘Look, I Found Her!’ Trend in Art History:

It is true that some artists who are women had smaller, less conventional oeuvres compared to their male peers. Rather than acting as if this is not the case, or only looking at those who made work that competed with mainstream or avant-garde men, would it not be more worthwhile and more interesting to raise those old feminist questions about the canon itself? About what work we, the people who look at and care about art, consider impressive or important, and why, and whether those value systems still serve us?

Also interrogating canon formation: though this is more 'how some exceptional women found ways round the impediments that threatened to close down their creative ambitions, and to remind readers of the formidable extent of those barriers': Our being your equals: Eight women writers who challenge the male canon (Review of Anna Beer, EVE BITES BACK: an alternative history of English literature. Not forgotten figures, but some interesting juxtapositions and considerations of genre there.

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There are, I think, problems with this project even if one does sympathise with the desire to preserve this record: The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever. Points out that DIGITISATION IS NOT A PRESERVATION MEDIUM unless you have longterm upgrade contingency plans in play, and that you would be doing better, in the first place, to be getting the zines into SAFE PHYSICAL STORAGE UNDER APPROPRIATE CONDITIONS.

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And this, just because it's about what you can find - well, that at least complicates the initial story that the medieval records present about who/what a woman was and what she was doing there: The Steelyard, Hansard Merchants, and a “Misliving” Singlewoman in Late Medieval London.

Actually it was yesterday, rather than today, that I spotted this work recently made available through the good offices of Project Gutenberg:

William Carpenter, One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is Not a Globe (1885) -

- and I can't see that he entirely manages to give a plausible explanation for eclipses, but then he does think that the sun is a lot smaller than those there astronomers declare, and goes round the earth...

We do feel that Alfred Russel Wallace would have been better employed than debating with members of the Zetetic Society.

One is - a little - intrigued at what was published in Flat Earth journals (o, say, do, that it was Flat Earth hymns such as feature in Kipling's The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat...)

But I was fascinated by this, in that Wikipedia article on Flat Earth Societies:

In 1969, Shenton persuaded Ellis Hillman, a Polytechnic of East London lecturer, to become president of the Flat Earth Society; but there is little evidence of any activity on his part until after Shenton's death, when he added most of Shenton's library to the archives of the Science Fiction Foundation he helped to establish.

I set out determined to change the world of public libraries.

And a) I'm wondering to what extent is this rather severe vision of libraries and librarianship still the case? are libraries still full of severe tweedy ladies in hornrims going sssshhh (outside some people's erotic fantasies)? are they not more welcoming and user-friendly?

And b) Is there actually a never to be crossed gulf between excellence & standards on the one hand, and user-friendliness and accessibility on the other?

Because I think you're going to be a whole lot more useful to your user-base if you do have those underlying qualities. (E.g. so they can find the book they're looking for via a classification system rather than by dumb luck.)

I'm also thinking, yes, it's all very well 'providing books that people actually want to read' - and I'm not among those who think that you should only have what are deemed to be 'worthwhile' books in a library - but what about the books that people don't actually realise yet that they want to read, because they're not all over bookshop windows and displays?

I can't help thinking that this all comes down to the pressure on resources and the ways that library services are being slashed to the bone, and that in a truly civilised society libraries would be in a position to have standards that enabled them to provide services that would be for the very varied constituencies that use or might use libraries.

(Including, I can't help thinking, those who go there for a quiet study space...)

Dept of Schadenfreude:
[A] dose of costumed Brit-flick sniggering.
Can you imagine a prequel to Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography with a screenplay by Richard Gordon, author of Doctor in the House? No, nor can I.

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Dept of, As I Have Far Too Oft Had Occasion to Remark:
How not to write about libraries – some guidelines for reporters:

5. There are some amazing things hidden in special collections

…and your chances of getting to see them diminish if you continually represent library archives as dusty, musty, smelly, unkempt, or populated entirely with hobbits and wizard-beings, strange and unknowable creatures unschooled in human customs.

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Dept of, More Money Than Sense:
The £250,000 home kitchen that nobody needs
Though I do think it would be a useful and instructive exercise to go through this list and pick out those things that yes, one has and/or still does use, the ones that languish forgotten in a drawer, and the ones that are why would I give such a thing houseroom?

I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainers, bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers and fondue sets languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards.

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Dept of, I think I was saving these in case I ran short when doing the 100 things thing, now perhaps I can close these tabs:
Susan Sontag on Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom
Britain's first black community in Elizabethan London

A few items specifically archivally/manuscript related:

Blood thicked with cold: A proposed law may lead to the destruction of Hungarian secret police documents preserved by the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security:

[T]he Hungarian government is preparing to enact a new law which may lead to the blatant, politically-motivated sanitization of the country’s communist past. Allegedly out of a concern for privacy rights, citizens who were spied upon or observed by the previous regime’s state security officers may now not only ask to view their files at the Archives of Hungarian State Security in Budapest, but may also remove these preserved archival documents from the reading room, take them home and have them destroyed.

According to Bence Rétvári, a secretary of state in Hungary’s Ministry of Justice, ”A constitutional system cannot preserve documents collected through anti-constitutional means, as these are the immoral documents of an immoral regime.” The government decree makes it permissible to remove and destroy irreplaceable archival documents. Were Rétvári’s warped logic also used by authorities in other countries, we could no longer produce histories of the world’s most dictatorial and genocidal regimes.

It is very difficult to see the destruction of Hungarian archives as anything other than a crude political move on the part of politicians who are concerned about potentially unpleasant and embarrassing documents on their relationship with the former regime that may one day be found by historians. Such documents may even suggest that some of the most fervent anti-communist politicians today were of a rather different opinion only two decades ago.

On another paw, however, sometimes you should ask before giving a repository your archives: a piece in the snippety bits at the beginning of today's Guardian Review section, not online, about the bequest by Richard Lancelyn Green of his amazing Conan Doyle collection to the Portsmouth Central Library indicates that although this story has a happy ending, there were serious concerns about the resources to house, catalogue and make it all available.

And on the whole, we are entirely in concurrence with yesterday's 'In Praise of' leader: In praise of … manuscripts for the nation, though I am all for the mention of the significance of resources available for processing. And, hey, an intelligent remark in the Comments!

John Le Carre is doing fine, the manuscripts we need saving are sitting in many of these little soceity's [sic] collections, they demonstrate our local and national history in a multitude of ways and deserve far more respect than some tedious spy novels.

Records of Victorian women murderers and thieves placed online. We feel that possibly this was a practicable project because there were far fewer of them than male criminals - plus possibly more likely to have been paroled.

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The Saturday interview: Susie Orbach. Yet again, I think we see journos bemused by Orbach's refusal to feed them sound-bitey titbits and suggestion that There Are No Simple Answers.

Suzanne Moore would like pro-feminist men to speak up a bit more.

The Ms Senior America pageant was created in 1972 to challenge a culture that worshipped youth and dreaded wrinkles. The pageant would embrace the experience, wisdom, dynamism and beauty of the older woman – even if a few had been surgically assisted to escape the ravages of time.
Hmmmm.... errrr.... no, I'm not sure what I think about this, apart, possibly, from 'deuced un-British, what?' - I can't honestly envisage many of the women of my generation with PhDs and serious careers (including some who were involved in the 1970 Miss World protest) being interested in this sort of thing. Plus, if it is all about talents and graces and personal style acquired through lived experience and maturity, what is with those froofy dresses?

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And spotted on a listserv posting, that Rouge Dragon Pursuivant is on email - username, yes, rougedragon [at] The College of Arms - yes, it has a website, how very different from the days when I was working there and as I recall, typewriters were about the highest tech around.

Today is World Book Day. Or at least, it is in the UK - bizarrely, we don't celebrate this Unesco day on April 23 like the rest of the world. [Maybe because we have our own April 23 things to celebrate, like St George and one W Shagsberd?] Naomi Alderman says hug a librarian go to the library today. However, I'm v dubious about her claim that 'buying paperbacks has got cheaper and easier' since I suspect that the price of paperbacks, compared to packet of cigarettes/x no of Mars Bars, has gone up since the glory days of Penguin when they were specifically priced the same as a packet of 10 (and prob the same as about 2 Mars Bars). Also, that 'libraries are not sexy' - the sexy librarian trope had to come from somewhere, surely?

How to write a misery memoir. Am, appositely, in the process of reading Stephen Potter's Supermanship, which has section on 'Memoirmanship', in which one's traumatic experiences at prep school are deemed essential (problem here with Gattling-Fen, who was strongly suspected of being the perpetrator, rather than victim, of boyhood bullying).

And in anticipation of International Women's Day, In Norway... they're enforcing a law that 40% of directors must be female.

In 2003, the NHO, the Norwegian equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry, decided to step up the pace of voluntary change. It headhunted 32-year-old Benja Stig Fagerland and gave her a two-year deadline to achieve a minor miracle.

Fagerland is an economist with two degrees and an MBA. She had no interest in "women's issues" then, she says, but she had set up a network of 10 girlfriends, called Raw Material, to discuss the pros and cons of the quota. They were all in their late 20s and early 30s, in middle management, and ambitious. Raw Material attracted the attention of the media and NHO.

"We were young and fearless. We thought we could go where we pleased in terms of our careers. I didn't believe in the quota system," Fagerland says. "I was competitive. Every job I'd had, I'd been the youngest and the only woman. I thought it was an issue of competence and nothing to do with being female. I set out to discover the arguments for and against. And that's when I changed my mind.

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Marit Hoel is the founder of the Oslo-based Centre for Corporate Diversity, which helps companies to find experienced female non-executive directors. In Norway, as a sociologist in the 1980s, she was the first person to begin counting women - or the lack of them - on boards. In response to the growing criticism that women of ability and experience were in short supply, she called a press conference. She spoke no words. Instead, she showed the photographs of 100 senior women with a brief resume of their cvs. "It was my Beckett moment," she says. "The pictures said it all. Experienced women are out there in quantity. The problem, as elsewhere, is that they are literally not seen. Men have their own network."

Men have networked for years but don't recognise it as networking. When we do it, they become alarmed. I don't know why," she adds mischievously

Peter Stanford on RC women and their quest for ordination: dear Mr S, why the condescending cliche 'pressure for women to be given something more to do in church than flower-arranging', when the rest of your article makes it quite clear that they are already doing much, much, more than that but without the rewards and recognition that men in equivalent postions would get?

This is sweet little tale about public libraries by Eva Ibbotson, but it sounds far too much like one of her novels to ring true (even if it is).

Stephen Fry on the importance of history:

There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life.