THE EAGLE Articles
Scratchings on the glass Mark Nicholls has served as Librarian of the College since the last century, and is currently a Tutor. Annotation of College Library books is necessarily frowned upon. No reader likes to find a page defaced by underlinings, ‘NB’s, sarcastic comments and untidy marginalia. When identified, a culprit should expect to set to with an eraser, or in severe cases to bear the cost of a new book replacing the one defaced. In a modern collection, the clean page is the order of the day. ARTICLES
Time, however, changes our perspective in these matters. When examining a book that is centuries old the librarian, the scholar and not infrequently the collector welcome the presence of pointing hands, bookplates and signatures. All this is ‘provenance’, to be recorded carefully in any respectable catalogue. A caustic comment in the margin, written by the long dead, is taken as engagement with the text. Our own College Library’s first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species is considered all the more precious because of the sceptical commentary added by its first owner, the Johnian polymath Samuel Butler. Butler was not entirely convinced by the detail in Darwin’s article. He favoured instead the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and said so in these notes, reflecting in his own way the ferment of disputation and debate prompted by publication of Darwin’s great work. As this particular example demonstrates, many such annotations are ‘legitimate’, in that they were added by former owners before the volume in question found its way into the College Library. We should not forget that the vast majority of books acquired by St John’s in its first four centuries came here as gifts or bequests. In those less enlightened days the College spent very little in the purchase of new books, and instead waited for copies to come in at second hand, relying on the generosity of Johnian collectors. Nevertheless, it remains obvious that the survival of a marked text from an earlier age, however that marking came about, is often more exciting and academically stimulating than the preservation of an ‘unmarked’ copy. Similar principles apply to the College buildings. Graffiti of any kind is rightly deplored, and in St John’s it is happily rare. But the wonderful gathering of Tudor signatures and mottoes carved into the fireplace of the Old Treasury over the Great Gate is admired as a link with some famous names from our first century, Roger Ascham, William Fulke and Edward Alvey among them. And this was no unthinking undergraduate prank – all but one of the names are those of Fellows, and the exception is that of a Master of the College, John Taylor.1 The strange
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