Adopt-a-Book

Dear Readers,

Many of you will be aware that we run an Adopt-a-Book scheme at the Library, which gives anyone the opportunity to make a donation covering the price of repair for a chosen book. In return for sponsorship, a permanent bookplate is placed in the volume, recording the name of the sponsor, the date and any specific dedication.

Of course, The Portico Library is a strong proponent of the printed word and of the salvation of our cultures' printed volumes. Books are of great importance, both as historic documents and as objects imbued with memory and meaning. People adopt books for different reasons, but most often it is because a particular book has some special significance in their own life-story and to play a part in the preservation of that text is a way of sustaining a history that is important to them. In keeping with this, we have asked some of the individuals who have adopted books from our collection to tell us something about the books they have selected and what it was that led them to make that choice.

So, our first testimonial is offered to you here. We hope it will be the first of many to bring you some enjoyment, as well as further insight into our collection.

Title: Journal of researches into the natural history of geology of the countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the command of Capt. Fitz Roy, RN

“When my daughter told me that she would be dedicating the rebinding of a Portico book to me for my birthday, I was pleased to have the opportunity to choose the volume that I would like to see repaired. There were several factors that influenced my choice of book. The first thing to come to mind was Manchester’s position at the centre of the Industrial Revolution, making it an important place in world history as a location of working class struggle and in the development of socialism. So originally I thought I would like to see a book by Karl Marx restored. I then found that, as yet, the Portico’s collection of political books is not yet fully catalogued online, so I would need to choose a book from a different sphere.

Last year I was taken by a cousin to visit Down House - Charles Darwin’s family home and the place where he wrote many of his works. In a gallery in the house I saw a copy of this letter from Karl Marx to Darwin:

Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin
Letter from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx
October, 1873

To my mind, Darwin and Marx are the two most important thinkers and writers of the last two centuries. I was delighted with Darwin’s friendly letter to Karl Marx, even though Darwin says he could not fully understand Capital [Das Kapital].  Marx, in his turn, found Darwin’s work “crude, in the English style” but still part of the foundation of “the natural history for our (communist) views.

In the absence of a work by Marx, I chose Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle” in which Darwin documents the observations he made on his amazing voyage around the southern hemisphere (1831-1836), including the visit to the Galapagos Islands.   This work underpinned Darwin’s theory of evolution.

I was very much delighted to have had something to do with the restoration of this wonderful book, held in the Portico library.  I hope that its poor condition, before restoration, was due to heavy-duty hands-on reading, and I hope that before too long it is again worn out with use and with leafing over, and in need of restoration, again.”

This volume was beautifully rebound in grey cloth and brown leather and is ready to be read to the brink of disintegration once again! The Portico Library is very grateful for the sponsorship of this book.

An interview with the artist Stefanie Trow

Stefanie Trow - a South Yorkshire painter living in Manchester - plays with textures and colours. Her paintings convey the fascination she has for human form, and explores both her own and other people’s perception of beauty. It is with tremendous enthusiasm that the Portico Gallery welcome Stefanie’s impressive portraits for a month in February 2015, alongside the works of David Earle and Ian Mood.

When did you start being interested in painting? How did you know you wanted to be an artist?

From about 12. That is when I seriously thought about what I wanted to do. I remember discovering - thanks to my art teacher - Jenny Saville. And I remember thinking: ‘that is what I want to do’. I loved how she conveyed messages and ideas through the use of paint, and this always resonated with me.

I started painting more during my A-Levels. My art teacher made me paint! He would not allow me to use pencils anymore in an attempt to force me to paint. It was a strained relationship but it worked. I clicked with the medium and realised I was quite good at it. Before, I was too scared to paint. From that moment, I started to paint more than I drew. I realised you could do more with paint and colour. Through university I just carried on and never really looked back.

Can you tell us more about your style and what you want to convey through your work?

I have always tended to make portraits and figurative works, from a young age. I guess I have always been interested in people and people’s faces, mixing paints and emulating skin color. With the paintings displayed, I wanted to move away from conventional portraits. I took the images from fashion magazines. I used photographs as a reference, but I didn’t want to rely on them. The purpose was that I wanted to take an image of a women that has been highly photoshopped, and I wanted to take that away from that context, to deconstructed it, and deface it. My aim was to show that you don’t have to photoshop any images to still be beautiful. I think we are surrounded by images that are photoshopped, as if everything had to be perfect. Some of the paintings are a bit unnerving, and not exactly beautiful, I am pushing towards that. I was trying to show flaws within the images, that is why I used bold broken brushstrokes.

Talking about technique, how do you work?  

I use all different sized paint brushes. At the beginning, I sketch out the image, working from the one that I have found. I then build it with the acrylic paints. When these are dry, I use oil paints, because acrylics dry quicker than oils. I obtain this visual effect from several layers of paints. I have to keep waiting for them to dry and so I usually have a number of works on the go: whilst one is drying, it will take a couple of days, I work on another one during that time. As an example, this series took me about two to three months.

 How did you learn to paint?

My parents also painted, so I learnt the basics from my dad. We would talk about stuff at school, and then I would go home and talk to my dad about it, asking ‘how do you do this, and that?’ So both from school and from my parents. But my technique is something I have developed. I have never had someone tell me: ‘this what you need to do to have this effect’.

Who are your main references?

I would say Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Jenny Saville to name a few.

 How does this work compare to your previous work? Is this series a rupture or a continuation?  

 The last ten years I have worked on a lot of commissioned portraits. I have never really been able to do my own work, my own style. This is a clear step in the direction I want to go and produce my own work.

 Any plans?

I am working on new works. I am pushing forward my style of painting. As an example, there are two pieces in the exhibition that are quite photo-realistic: Attraction and Deflection. They are quite realistic, whereas I think my next work will carry along with a more expressive approach. There will still be a realistic and figurative element, but I want to push the expressive style and concepts surrounding the female form.

Interviewed by Mathilde Armantier

North West Poets at the Portico - matching books to poems

Emma and I have recently had a meeting with Lindsey Holland of North West Poets to explore the possibilities for collaboration between NWP and the Portico. We looked at holding a regular series of poetry events in the Portico, to include workshops and readings, but also using the library as an inspirational venue where leading north west poets could meet and work on a theme, such as geology or botany. I’m excited at the prospect of being able to use the book collection to support events of this kind.

There’s more thinking to be done on both sides, but we have provisionally agreed to hold a launch event in January or February for Andrew Forster’s third collection, Homecoming [Smith Doorstop 2014]. Forster, who is Literature Officer at the Wordsworth Trust, recently read from Homecoming during the Manchester Literature Festival, now being hosted at venues around the city. 

Most of the poems in the book relate to the north west, and many are about Wordsworth, so this will give us an opportunity to showcase some of our rich collection of material related to Wordsworth – I’ll be rooting for The Letters of Charles Lamb, and Benjamin Robert Haydon: correspondence and table-talk, with a memoir by his son, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon. Haydon senior painted what is possibly the most well-known portrait of Wordsworth, now on loan to the Wordsworth Trust from the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s also Thomas de Quincey, who famously ran away from school in Manchester, eventually washing up as the tenant of Dove Cottage after Wordsworth had left it. The Portico has a copy of de Quincey’s Sketches Critical and Biographical. Forster’s Homecoming includes a poem entitled De Quincey’s letter to Johnny Wordsworth 1809. 

Here’s an extract from it:

    He’s taken such care to make it legible:

    the faded copper ink neatly blocked,

    a contrast to his Confessions, where words

    are splashed on paper and blurred by winestains.

It’ll be interesting to see what Forster makes of the Portico’s early editions.

Sheila Wild
Chair of Book Committee, The Portico Library

Cook’s Second Voyage and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Portico has a copy of Captain James Cook’s Voyage towards the South Pole and round the world: 1772, 1773, 1774, 1775, illustrated by the expedition’s artist, William Hodges.  Cook’s two ships, The Resolution and The Adventure, sailed from Plymouth on the 13^th July 1772, the same year that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born. The expedition was charged with searching for the Southern Continent and testing a version of the John Harrison chronometer for longitude determinations. The expedition sailed further south than any mariner had ever done, and it must have been inspiration to many young men of Coleridge’s generation.

One of the book’s illustrations is entitled The Ice Islands, seen the 9^th January 1773, and on seeing this, my first thought was that it must have been the inspiration for the crucial incident in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the Mariner shoots an albatross, albeit with a crossbow:

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald

 . . . with my crossbow

I shot the ALBATROSS.

The Princeton Library also has a copy of the book, and you can see the engraving on the Princeton website: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/cook2/ice-islands.jpg

Richard Holmes’s biography, Coleridge, Early Visions, confirms that Cook’s Voyage was one of the sources for the Mariner and also that throughout his life Coleridge ‘was obsessed with travel books’. However, I think Cook’s voyaging was more than just one source among many, for in his 1956 paper Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Cook’s Second Voyage [Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 19, No. ½ (Jan.-Jun., 19560], Bernard Smith notes that William Wales, the astronomer and meteorologist on the Resolution, taught mathematics at Christ’s Hospital when Coleridge was there.

In a long and fascinating paper, Smith deduces from a copy of the manuscript Journal Wales kept during his time on the Resolution that the course of the Ancient Mariner’s voyage was determined to a large extent by Coleridge’s recollections of accounts of Cook’s second voyage, either as they were told to him by Wales, or read in books at the school, and that the precision and clarity of Coleridge’s atmospheric imagery derives much from the precision and clarity of Wales’s astronomical and meteorological observations.  Smith concludes:

“But perhaps the most remarkable feature of all is the preservation in the poem of the broad pattern of the Resolution’s voyage, so that, to some extent, the order of sequence of events in the poem follows the order of sequence of the relevant events of the voyage. The fair passage of the N.E. Trades, the squally passage of the S.E.Trdaes, the mast-high ice, the glint of the ice, the noise of the ice splitting, follow the same order in the poem as in Wales’s Journal; and later in both the poem and the journal accounts of the heat, the calm, and the sea-snakes agree in their sequence.”

Neither Smith nor Holmes mention an illustrated edition of the Voyage, but, knowing that a poem needs not only sources, but also a trigger, I wonder if sight of Hodge’s illustration, perhaps in Tom Poole’s library at Stowey, triggered the writing of The Rime?

Sheila Wild, Chair, Book Committee

August meeting of the Book Committee

At yesterday evening’s Book Committee we received updates on the progress on the cataloguing project, the Portico Brotherton Poetry Prize, and the future exhibitions programme. We also revisited the Committee’s remit, and have sent our agreed version through to the next meeting of the Main Committee for approval. It’s the first time in several years that the Committee’s remit has been formalised in this way, and I am pleased to see this on its way.

Over 17,000 books have now been catalogued, which, with the imminent departure of Kirsten to do a PhD on the future of independent libraries (well done Kirsten!) gives us a revised end date of March/April next year.  Our question about how many books in total (answer: about 25,000) prompted the revelation that the Portico holds a set of Government State reports – not the small, paper bound edition, but the large, leather bound version. We thought these might make an interesting subject for a future exhibition, one that we could get local politicians and parliamentarians involved in, thus getting some active support for the Portico.

As a poet, I have a particular interest in the poetry prize. We received an update on our relationship with the folks over at Leeds who are collaborating with us on the prize, and had a look at the number and geographical spread of the entries so far received. The closing date is not until the 31^st August, and as someone who always puts her own competition entries in at the last moment, I was able to say with confidence that we will have a flurry of entries in the final week.

Two interesting items came up under ‘any other business’. Gaskell House would like to borrow two of Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, Mrs Gaskell’s favourite travel guides. We invited Gaskell House to make a formal request, but in principle this sounds like a good idea, subject to our being able to recall the volumes should a reputable scholar wish to use them for research purposes.

And lastly, Emma produced some stunning fridge magnets, manufactured (if that’s the correct word for something produced in-house) on the premises and shortly to go on sale in the Portico. The images shown came from Specimens of the Sculpture and Painting now remaining in England from the earliest period to the reign of Henry VIII within our collection. They are colourful medieval paintings and I shall certainly be buying one or two – even though my fridge is hidden away behind a wooden door.

These could become a cult object, so make sure you get there first!

Sheila Wild, Chair, Book Committee

Geography rediscovered at The Portico

Over the past two years, the cataloguing project has uncovered many forgotten treasures on the Library’s shelves, but a particularly exciting discovery was made last week: an entire section of geography books, which had never been added to the card index, and as a result had remained inaccessible to researchers for the past thirty years.

Although the Geography section was listed in the Library’s alpha-numerical classification system under the letter ‘Z’, when the card index was created around thirty years ago, this section was somehow overlooked. As a result, none of the books could be searched for, and they had been left to languish in the stacks ever since.

Despite being a comparatively small section within the Library’s collection, it includes some particularly notable texts that would be of great fascination to those with an interest in the subject, and invaluable to researchers looking into the history and development of geography as a scientific discipline.

A fine example is a 3 volume set written by the eminent Scottish antiquarian and cartographer, John Pinkerton, and published in 1807. Entitled Modern geography: a description of the empires, kingdoms, states, and colonies; with the oceans, seas, and isles; in all parts of the world: including the most recent discoveries, and political alterations, the text opens with a detailed reflection on geography as a discipline of study, and proceeds to provide a comprehensive geographical description of the world. Pinkerton is often credited as having been a particularly influential figure in the development of cartography, exchanging the elaborate cartouches and fantastical beasts used during the 18th century in preference for greater accuracy of detail, and this is clearly displayed in the array of maps found throughout these volumes.

Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos: sketch of a physical description of the universe, is another fascinating text discovered within this section.  Hugely popular when it was first released in 1845, Humboldt’s work attempted to apply the ancient Greek view of the orderliness of the cosmos (the universe) to the Earth, suggesting that universal laws could also be applied to the apparent chaos of the terrestrial world. Although many of the ideas contained in the work became somewhat outdated with the advancement of the natural sciences, it made a significant contribution to scientific progress in its conception of the unity of science, nature, and mankind. 

A particularly visually arresting volume is a first edition of Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s New Zealand: its physical geography, geology, and natural history, with special reference to the results of government expeditions in the provinces of Auckland and Nelson. In 1859 Hochstetter was employed by the government of New Zealand to undertake a rapid geological survey of the country, the publication of this beautifully illustrated volume in 1867 provided a more accessible account of Hochstetter’s findings that would be more palatable to the general public.

Conservation appeal update

Following on from our recent conservation appeal, we are pleased to announce that all 10 volumes of John Latham’s A general history of birds have now been rebound.

Once again we would like to thank those who generously sponsored the volumes and made the work possible, and to Cyril Formby, our conservator, for doing such a fantastic job. The books are now on display in the gallery, and according to the numerous visitors who have enquired about purchasing them, it would appear that they have made a particularly stunning addition to the Library’s shelves!