

TheGhostLibrary
The Ghost Library
To those who live on in the margins,
To Sheila Bolton, 1945, and Diane Vickery, 1950, Their names now elegies, in atrophied ink, for these time-eroded ghosts, To Della, happy 8th anniversary, Her name, wedded now only to the page it was written on, To Jane Anne Bennet, Norway, This remnant of her life, far flung but unforgotten, To Agnes, or Myers, 1896, and to Alan Sillitoe, 100 years on, To the names scrawled in quill ink and chicken scratch, To the names blurred from memory, and those waiting to be found again,
I think of these little snapshots of lives, And mourn the ghosts in their clothbound caskets, bandaging broken spines with dust jackets, lingering on through their own epitaphs, Frozen fragments of living in this margin mausoleum, I think of Elizabeth Dodds, windswept and still three months from Montreal, I think of Dorothea Griffith, winner of the first-place prize with a drawing as forgotten as her face, I think of the boy from Barrow Grammar school, his award for general improvement outlasting his name, For these lines share the stories of their eternally resting scribes, Marginalia in memoriam, with the handwriting of each, an accent, Each flit of the pen, a reconstruction of identity, In place of articulation, every embellishment instead speaks
For the faceless phantoms who lived and breathed and laughed and cried and died, Who won the first-place prize for drawing, Who took the S.S Duchess of York to Montreal, Who wanted an escape from the present-day hectic rush, Who live on in the margins.
Henry Lambert
AReflectionontheSillitoeCollection
When I first explored the Sillitoe Collection, two things immediately caught the interest of my creativity following our initial overview. The first of these was the sheer range of texts that Sillitoe kept, which seemed entirely at odds with the person I had assumed him to be. In my day one reflections, I wrote that “I had him envisioned as the paragon of the urban working class - a man with industrial grime under his nails. In a sense, he was but he was so much more too.” The volumes on his shelves ranged from spotting guides for birds and flowers to oceanographic expedition logs, to Austen biographies, to a total of six copies of a poetry collection titled ‘Eyes From A Dream’. Like he famously said, “whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not.”
The second, and more influential, point of interest for me was the annotations and marginalia which seemed to reveal themselves in greater detail as our exploration of the collection deepened. At first, my searching turned up many instances of Sillitoe’s own signature (often accompanied by a date) which alone caught my attention but I swiftly learned that this was only scratching the surface of the lost art form of book annotations. Many books had inscriptions from people who had owned them long before Sillitoe had, everyday people, known only by their names and whatever snippets of information accompanied them. As more and more of these names turned up, I found myself fascinated by the tiny light they shed on lives that would otherwise have blurred from history. This then became the focal point of my residence, for seemingly no end of “little snapshots of lives” as I would go on to refer to them as were hidden amongst the pages of unsuspecting volumes, with the range of books within the collection allowing for an even greater variety of marginalia authors. Among these, were the inscriptions of one Mrs MacKenzie, gifting the book to Elizabeth Dodds for a steamship voyage across the Atlantic during the summer of 1929; a hand drawn piece of sheet music, followed by the dedication “With such feeling as the above may evoke - Peter”; the seemingly illegible vandalisms of child throughout the pages of a book about planes; and the phrase “6 gourmet, little delicious bits” which we took much delight in trying to understand.
In all, much of my time spent with the collection became concerned with discovering and cataloguing these old notes, and ultimately, my piece became an insight into this “library within a library”, shining a light on the otherwise forgotten names, the fragments of lives recorded in the pages of the collection, and the unknowns that time has worn away.


