Library Newsletter
The lost art of minute writing
Clubs and societies are such an essential part of student life that a College Archive without records of student societies would feel quite lifeless Minutes, in particular, give a flavour of the people and the time – especially when they’re written, in a sense, for the fun of it (as well as with an eye to posterity).
A lovely example, which is so of its time it couldn’t be mistaken for any other decade, is found in the records kept by St John’s cricketers who, it turns out, were busy on two fronts One, naturally enough, was playing cricket. The other was participating in ‘The Crickets’, a play- and book-reading society and dining club, whose members were also in the Cricket Club The Crickets held weekly meetings in the Michaelmas and Lent Terms, and apparently strove to make their minutes as light-hearted as their reading material P.E.M. Mellor, in 1925, could well have been channelling P G Wodehouse: “Reading
stopped at 10.45 and after a few minutes oneor two of the members retired to bed The remainder, as on a previous occasion, played musical instruments. But even the the worst things must come to an end, and this nightmare terminated at 11.15, after which (as has already been stated) all was peace ”
The minutes of student societies rarely find their way to the Archives now, which is a pity Perhaps, to encourage the practice, there is an opportunity for the Archives to run a competition for the ‘best’ society minutes written over the course of a year (prize to be decided)?
Philip Mellor was a member of the Football as well as the Cricket Club and the Cricketers, and clearly made the most of his time at St John’s It was sobering, on looking him up in the Register of Twentieth-Century Johnians, to find that he was killed in action in 1943.
Lynsey Darby, Archivist
Nautical know-how on display
As is tradition for the Library Gradate Trainee, June came around with the opportunity for me to present an exhibition
The rare books collection is 50,000 books strong, not counting
manuscripts, institutional archives and various artefacts. This was both a blessing and a curse, as with so much material it was incredibly difficult to settle on a topic. In the end I chose to follow my current literary interests – at the time I was reading
Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, so I decidedto focus on a history of seafarers. I soon rounded this down to the tools and instruments that have been used by sailors across the ages, from maps and astronomy to compasses and sextants The focus of the exhibition is innovation – how human curiosity meant we loved exploring to the point of invention (and still do – just think of astronauts!).
My personal favourite item on show is John Seller’s 1682 Atlas maritimus, or, A sea-atlas describing the sea-coasts in most of the known parts of the world; a beautiful hand-coloured book printed for the use of sailors. The level of detail in the picture might make you think that this book is a giant tome, the sort that can only be read rested on a table; however, it is actually no bigger than your hand Although Seller had printed larger atlases in the past, he realised that these weren’t
Alex Lawless, Library Assistant
particularly useful for seafarers in practice. This one was intentionally small enough to fit in a pocket, so it could be taken aboard working ships.
The plate pictured here will actually not be on display – there were so many lovely spreads to choose from – but it does deserve a spotlight as it is truly stunning. This is an advert for “all sorts of instruments belonging to the art of navigation”, printed right at the start of the book. These days algorithmic targeted
advertising might crop up beside your browser page, but in the 17 century they clearly had to think a little harder about who might be reading what in order to push sales. th
If you’d like to see the Atlas, as well as the rest of the exhibition, for yourself, you can do so in the Library Exhibition Area from MondayFriday, 9am-5pm (excluding public holidays) from 23 June
Milly Dahmoune, Graduate Trainee
‘In Xanadu did KublAI Khan…’
Writing about artificial intelligence in The New Yorker last year, Ted Chiang observed that ‘art is something that results from making a lot of choices’ and that text generators fundamentally don’t make choices (much as they don’t have desires or intentions) Instead, a generator might ‘take an average of the choices that other writers have made, [which] is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible’; or ‘ engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer’.
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The papers of Douglas Adams (1971), more precisely those pertaining to his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, contain a lovely bit of mimicry: Adams’s expanded version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ The story behind ‘Kubla Khan’ is that Coleridge was accounting for a vision in a dream; after being visited mid-flow by ‘ a person from Porlock’, he was unable to remember the rest. The poem finishes rather brilliantly for an allegedly unfinished work, but Adams takes Coleridge at his word and sets Dirk Gently in a reality in which the visitor didn’t interrupt In order to make this completed version of ‘Kubla Khan’ quotable, Adams had to write the rest of it; a printout of the whole poem, credited to ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge-ish, 1797–1987’, survives in the Old Library’s collections
Excitingly, the Library also includes an example of Coleridge ‘doing’ Coleridge, or rather attempting not to. Our 1816 printing of three poems – ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ – contains some notes and corrections to ‘Christabel’ in Coleridge’s hand. Among the striking additions is this, appended to a passage spoken by the
character Geraldine: ‘This paragraph I purpose to re-write, with the exception of two or perhaps three Lines As it stands, it might be placed in any one ’ s mouth, appropriately therefore in no one ’ s, and in Geraldine’s it falls flat.’
Adams trying to figure out what, in a novel of ghosts and extraterrestrials and electric monks, a hypothetical Coleridge might have written: that’s interesting. Coleridge trying to write something that only he could write – so that precisely one character might convincingly speak it – is interesting too. An AI poem or novel or academic essay, a bit of
sophisticated predictive text, is not uninteresting; but, by definition, it isn’t interested The works of Adams and Coleridge alike are represented in Library Genesis, the database of pirated books used for AI-training by Meta; an AI thus trained would have some raw material for writing alternative lines for ‘Christabel’, or an Adamsian parody of ‘Kubla Khan’. But it would mean nothing by this, and would take no care over, derive no pleasure from, the choices it wouldn’t actually make. Troubling, a world in which we’re happy to mock our creativity; ‘sour’, as Coleridge-ish puts it, ‘the milk of Paradise.’
Adam Crothers, Special Collections Assistant
Searching Library collections on iDiscover
Many of you would have experience in using iDiscover to search for Library books We have now created a few collections includingNew Books, Language Learning Material, Health and Wellbeing Collection, Academic Skills Collection, Audio-Visual Material, Maps, Graphic Novels, Diversification Collection, Kenneth Maxwell Collection and Guy Lee Collection. All of these are searchable by collection names: for example, if you key in ‘St John’s New Books’ in the search box on iDiscover, you can view all the available items forming this collection Items can be sorted by date and author for easy browsing Each title has a link to take you to the item’s location and classmark.
If you search a title which is part of the collection, a collection path will enable you to view other titles from the collection For
example, if you search for a book The new Arctic on iDiscover, you will see a collection path to ‘St John’s College New Books’, click on it and you can see a selection of new books
Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian
