Library Newsletter Michaelmas 2018

St John’s College Library Newsletter L

MICHAELMAS 2018

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1

Audio-Visual Room refurbishment If you have been up to the AV Room this term, you have probably noticed that it has changed a little. The desk space and old television have been removed and made way for a more open, informal and comfortable space with a flat screen TV, beanbags, and new shelving.

There were two main objectives of the refurbishment – the first being to increase the amount of shelving space available for audio-visual items. The ever-growing collection had filled up the existing DVD towers and wall shelving, leaving little space for further expansion. The style of the shelving also meant that box sets had to be shelved separately, and that the DVDs were prone to skidding about on the deep shelves. The new shelving has been specifically chosen to counteract this – it is a lot narrower in depth so that DVDs can sit flush to the edge of the shelf. It is also more flexible regarding box sets, most of which can now be shelved in the main sequence.

Before

The second objective was to create a more bright and modern space where it is pleasant to watch a DVD, catch up with some reading, or generally work in a less formal environment. The replacement of the old TV was a key part of this, as well as the introduction of comfortable seating and beanbags. Removing the desks has enabled us to expose the full-length windows and use a lot more of the space available in the room. The walls have been painted white to brighten the room, and the glass panels either side of the door are now free from obstruction.

We hope that you enjoy the newly styled AV Room, and find it a pleasant space to view films and browse for audio-visual items. If you have any suggestions for the room, or its contents, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Catherine Ascough Library Assistant

After

Introducing the Cartwright Collection One way in which new books – and other materials – find their way into the Library’s collections is through the immense generosity of our donors. Donations to the College Library not only help to enhance our holdings in a particular subject; they also allow us to maintain close links with alumni of St John’s and benefactors all over the world, including the many Johnian authors who choose to send copies of their latest publications to the Library, all of which are made available to the College community in the Johnian Collection (located in the Chapel Court side of the Basement). Now and again the Library also receives larger bequests of items from the personal collections of exmembers of the College. One of the most substantial of these in recent years has been the collection of bound scores and sheet music consisting of just over 370 items, which was bequeathed to the Library by Johnian Christopher S. Cartwright (BA 1958). An accomplished amateur organist, harpsichordist and recorder player, Cartwright amassed a substantial working library which reflects his interests in the music of the Baroque and Classical periods, including a complete set of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (some 193 volumes), the standard historical-critical edition of the works of J. S. Bach. Other highlights of the collection include an early printed edition of George Frideric Handel’s overtures arranged for harpsichord published around 1760 (the year after the composer’s death), and

a large selection of sheet music for pieces for keyboard and woodwind instruments. Early music composers such as Vivaldi, Telemann, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Jacques-Martin Hotteterre are also well represented. In addition to this, the collection contains a number of editions of works, primarily for the piano, by composers of the nineteenth century and later (including Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and so on).

The bound volumes of scores belonging to the Cartwright Collection can now be found shelved in the Chapel Court side of the Basement (on the left at the bottom of the stairs) and may be accessed and borrowed by all members of the College. The rest of the unbound sheet music is stored in closed access, as are all items published before 1850, although these may be consulted in the Rare Books Reading Room. Much of this material is also available to borrow for a limited period of time (normally up to seven days), although users will need to check with Library staff for permission in order to borrow these items.

To find out more about the items in the Cartwright Collection, you can search on iDiscover using the phrase “Cartwright, Christopher, 1934-2013”. Alternatively, you can check out the list of the collection’s contents now available at the Issue Desk in the Working Library.

David Baker Projects Assistant

Special Collections on display There are two shiny new display cases in the Library entrance hall. One is currently proudly displaying the University Challenge trophy. The other gives us a welcome opportunity to show off a variety of interesting things from the Special Collections. We aim to change the item on show each month. Do stop and take a look if you’re passing.

October’s object of interest was a truly remarkable small book of poetry, published in 1773. To mark Black History Month we displayed a copy of the first literary work ever to be published by

a black slave woman. For a woman to publish a book at that date was not that common. For a black woman, unheard of. For a slave…! Phillis Wheatley’s extraordinary story is told in one of our Special Collections Spotlights, available on the College website (https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/special-collections-spotlight). We haven’t been able to update the Spotlights as often during 2018 while the College website was undergoing major migration to a new platform, but we’re up and running again now and full of ideas for new features. The Special Collections contain a wealth of fascinating material, from the quirky and ephemeral to the beautiful and profound. Check our Spotlights regularly to see the latest update.

Kathryn McKee Special Collections Librarian

Missing Johnians With over 23,000 names on our database, it’s perhaps unsurprising that there are some records with a minimal amount of biographical information in them. Over 16,000 of these records are for living Johnians – Johnians who change jobs, move house, marry and change names, so it goes without saying that they can be hard to keep track of!

If mail is returned to the College following an event or publication mailing, and we have no other means of making contact, that Johnian gets marked as ‘missing’, and even though this largely sounds like an alumni relations exercise, it regularly falls to the Biographical Office to research and attempt contact with these missing Johnians. Often, this is on a completely ad hoc basis – noticing that we have no address while performing other work on a record, or being asked for contact details by a contemporary – but there are other times when we try to tackle them as part of a bigger project. One example from a few years ago was attempting to locate all former holders of the Harper-Wood Studentship, many of whom weren’t granted membership of the College in the first instance. In practice, this was a relatively easy approach as the vast majority of recipients had gone on to become noteworthy in some aspect of the written or creative arts.

Another way we have focused our efforts is to attempt to locate those missing Johnians who are due to be invited to one of the upcoming reunion events held in June and September each year.

This effort assists other College departments, with the Assistant to the Fellows’ Steward being responsible for producing and sending the invitations, and the Development Office being responsible for the maintenance of contact details.

The actual process of looking for missing Johnians can vary from something as quick as typing a name into Google and immediately meeting with success, or trying to configure searches including potentially key information from our records – previous schools, subjects studied, place and date of birth, even names of parents. While obviously not every such enquiry meets with success, a good number of those approached by us respond favourably, often remembering their time in College fondly, and enquiring after former Tutors or people they shared staircases with. It is a great feeling of accomplishment to not only find these people and bring them back in touch with their College, but further, to be able to bring them back in touch with each other.

The time spent living away from home in a College such as this has an intensity that many carry through their lives; this is why so many Johnians remain closely engaged with the College, and continue to attend events and keep us informed about important changes in their lives.

Paul Everest Biographical Assistant

 Accessing ejournals or ebooks  Searching online databases  Referencing  Using other libraries

Library staff can help with all these topics and many more

 Non-print legal deposit  Copyright  Plagiarism Book a session at the Issue Desk or email Catherine (ca468@cam.ac.uk)

Find these books on the new acquisitions display

Hunter Davies, The Glory Game A College Library should offer classics of every kind. Readers in search of something truly fine, beyond just academically instructive, might keep an eye on our General Interest collection, shelved at the southern end of the Mezzanine Gallery. This is full of delights, and surprises, among them a copy of perhaps the best book about football ever written. First published in 1972, the versatile author and journalist Hunter Davies’s beautifully crafted, but also waspish and unvarnished, study of a year in the life of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club tells a tale of occasional triumph, frequent setbacks, friendships and enmities, nurtured and broken dreams (and legs), of homesickness, of growing up, and of real people above all, brought together in the hothouse of a successful London club, in the first division of the old English Football League.

You do not have to be interested in football to enjoy Davies’s work.

At the time of publication, critics recognised the skilful ways in which he described the team dynamic, the hopes and fears of disparate individuals, the nature of a sportsman’s and a manager’s trade. Today the book captures a lost age, a very different ‘glory game’. Here is the era of Brian Clough and Don Revie, of thoroughly violent play fully sanctioned by referees and governing bodies, of that great factional work by David Peace, The Damned United. Manchester United are spiralling towards relegation and seven different clubs win the league title in as many years. Money talks, but not yet decisively. Footballers in the early 1970s are just shaking off the shackles of the maximum wage, but are still representatives, and themselves members of largely working-class communities. Changing rooms are grim, the backstreets around neglected stadiums redolent of a Britain still struggling to recover from the Second World War.

In a fascinating novelty at the time, Davies offered a survey of the footballers’ lifestyles: where they lived, what they read, their political affiliations, their favourite meals, their aspirations. And in subsequent editions – we hold that of 2001 – he asks catch-up questions of progressively older men. The changes over time are interesting, but not so interesting as the original responses, where footballers lived in semi-detached suburbia, within the towns and cities they represented, earned decent but hardly excessive wages, were approximately faithful to their ‘WAGs’, drove Zodiacs and Cortinas, and – most of them – joined the aspirational mainstream of the 1970s: the society picked off in Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party and the wonderful Bob and (Librarian) Thelma from Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

For me this study in a vanished age is a history of my childhood.

The likes of Cyril Knowles, Alan Gilzean and Ralph Coates were heroes, and now they are gone. Football, like cricket, like your College, trades on the nostalgia born of years: ‘O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!’ But in Davies’s hands the nostalgia is never saccharine. Modern football is far from wonderful, but thank goodness a lot has changed. If you want to understand the hold that football had before mass TV coverage, before the days of the light ball, the manicured, artificially heated pitch, before the penalisation of most forms of contact, and before any ‘technology’ whatsoever, The Glory Game is for you.

Mark Nicholls Librarian

For comments on this Issue, or contributions to future Issues, please contact Janet Chow. Email: jc614@cam.ac.uk; Tel: (3)38662