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Case 2: Survival in Special Collections

This case displays printed and published material from the Special Collections. These books and pamphlets have either survived in the face of adversity, represent a previous edition now lost, or demonstrate the preferences and impact of a former owner.

View the objects held in Case 2 

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Threats to Survival: Environmental Conditions 

The Lancelyn Green collection of 17th and 18th century pamphlets was kept in the family library at Poulton Hall on the Wirral from their initial purchase by Thomas Green, vicar of Woodchurch (died 1746), up to their donation to the University by Roger Lancelyn Green (1918-1987), a member of Council of the University. The pamphlets include unique survivals of local printing and are witnesses to the accidents which may lead to the survival – or loss - of occasional material not regarded in its own time as valuable or prestigious.

The survival of these pamphlets seems all the more remarkable given the description of their storage in the Library at Poulton Hall, “stacked in a huge wooden box, jumbled mercilessly together, and almost hidden under a heap of dust that had been collecting there for nearly a century.” It is unsurprising that they suffered various kinds of damage – from rodents, insects, water, and soot - before being transferred to a secure and environmentally-controlled store at the University.

In their favour was the relatively benign neglect of “a single, individual collection, made almost entirely by one man who died over two hundred years ago, and still occupying the shelves of his own library, built and furnished during his own lifetime, and in no slightest detail altered since he last used it.”

For more information on the Lancelyn Green Pamphlet Collection see our blog. 

Think: How do you curate and store your own book collection at home? Is it organised by author, colour, or not at all? Share your #shelfies with us at @LivUniSCA

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Threats to Survival: War

One shelf in this case shows Augustus De Morgan, Differential and Integral Calculus (1842), and Charles Hutton, Mathematical Tables (1811).

The bookplates in these volumes tell the story of other copies of the same work which did not survive ‘enemy action’ – the Merseyside blitz of 1940-41. The donor Duncan Cumming Fraser (died 1952) was rescued from the ruins of his house when Birkenhead was bombed in March 1941, but lost almost all his books and papers. As Actuary of the Liverpool Royal Insurance Company, Fraser was experienced in assessing loss, and he also served as Honorary Actuary of the Titanic, Lusitania and Empress of Ireland relief funds.

The British mathematician De Morgan’s work was aimed at the ‘common man’. The copies in the Grace Library of the Department of Applied Mathematics have been interleaved with blank pages for the student’s notes.

Hutton’s tables of logarithmic and trigonometric functions were the standard edition of an essential tool for calculations before computers.

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Threats to Survival: Censorship 

This young adult novel (“for age 10 and over”) is both  common and scarce. The 1971 edition is the fifteenth: it was a set schoolbook in West Germany for decades, and has sold 5 million copies. The 1931 first edition is very rare: banned by the Nazis, many copies perished in the flames of the book burnings of May 10, 1933.

The 1935 translation is part of the library of the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS), which was administered at the University from 1907-1976. Amongst the photographs in the GLS archive are many taken by Hanns Weltzel in 1930s Germany, including portraits of Unku herself, who was murdered in Auschwitz. See the information document [PDF] about Eddie and Unku on the Althaus/Weltzel photograph collection guide.

Want to know more? Watch the video What Happened to Unku? on YouTube below, and see the travelling exhibition “…don’t forget the photos, it’s very important…” – The National Socialist Persecution of Central German Sinti and Roma. 

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Continue the Case 2 story at Selection in Special Collections...