Library Newsletter Lent 2023

John’s

Five centuries of Buttery renovations

The opening of the new Buttery, Bar and Café in January this year is a nice example, so far as archives’ work is concerned, of looking both backwards and forwards. There was a certain amount of interest internally in the history of the College Buttery, and it was lovely to be able to share with colleagues in the Communications Office a letter which was sent to Nicholas Metcalfe, Master of St John’s 1518-1537, which partly concerned the building of the original Buttery. Metcalfe was away from Cambridge and John Smith, Fellow of the College, was overseeing estates business. On the subject of the Buttery, and justifiably proud of his efforts at fundraising, he wrote: “the botry ys couryd ouer and the windows glasyd and ii buttry hettchys ys mayd and the new tabyll paynted but al these shall stand the Colege in nothyng for I wyl pay for yt of such money as dyd I opteyne for the Colege” (“the buttery is covered over and the windows glazed and two buttery hatches is [sic] made and the new table painted, but all these shall stand the College for nothing for I will pay for it of such money as did I obtain for the College”).

For an account of 20th-century Buttery developments, Alec Crook’s book Penrose to Cripps: A Century of Building the College of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge is invaluable. Committee minutes, though closed for this period to general researchers, give a more detailed picture of ‘behind-the-scenes’ discussions. A report prepared by the Steward for the Kitchen Planning Committee in 1968 elaborates on the two main reasons for the building of a new Scholars’ Buttery and other kitchen buildings (the dilapidated state of current buildings and the need

LENT 2023

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 2

for an informal dining space), with some familiar themes: an informal and self-service dining option would offer students better value for money and more choice amidst worsening economic conditions and rising food prices; it would also ease pressure on kitchen staff during a labour shortage and would enable increased conference business.

Diversifying the Library shelves

This term the Library has launched a new project aim ed at diversify ing our teaching collections as part of the wider university decolonisation movement. Decolonisation has become increasingly important across the Higher Education sector, as universities and institutions have been called upon by students, among others, to recognise and address the colonial legacies that underpin modern scholarship. In particular, there have been huge calls for universities to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ – a move essentially not about abandoning the white male voices from the global North that dominate current scholarship, but about dismantling the hierarchies that posit these voices as intellectually superior. It is about re-centring currently marginalised and misrepresented voices, especially those from the global South, and challenging universities to acknowledge, question and transform the current biases and inequalities which are prevalent in modern scholarship.

As the providers of many of the teaching and learning materials for university courses, libraries have a crucial role to play in this process: a key challenge is the recognised need to diversify collections and teaching materials available to students. Inspired by a similar project undertaken by Worcester College, Oxford, this is exactly what our ‘Diversifying the Library Shelves’ project aims to do. We are asking our students, Fellows, and academic teaching staff to recommend books for their subjects by scholars and authors of colour who are often missing from reading lists, but who they think should be included. We are also welcoming recommendations for more general books on decolonisation in

Looking forwards, the archives will receive material about the planning and building of all elements of the new Community Hub, when they are no longer required for current business purposes. The display boards which hung in the old Buttery Dining Room about the building of its successor have already found a home in the archives!

different subjects. Since opening the recommendation form we have had some fantastic suggestions across a wide variety of subjects, including History, Spanish, Portuguese, and Economics, and we cannot wait to see what else is recommended to us. The form will remain open indefinitely, so if you are a current student, Fellow, or member of teaching staff, please get your thinking caps on and let us know which books you want to be included in our teaching collections!

The recommendation form can be accessed by scanning the QR code on posters in the Library, or the link can be sent to you by emailing Katie at kh695@cam.ac.uk.

Behind the scenes: modern book binding

The Working Library acquires many new books throughout the year. If the books are paperback, they need additional protection to prolong their life span. Behind the scenes, helping us to preserve Library books, is our bookbinder, Phil Bolton. In this article, we look at how Phil started his career as a bookbinder, and the binding methods he uses.

After first working in a garage in 1978, Phil left to train as a bookbinder joining his father, George, the manager of J.P.Gray & Sons, bookbinders in No.10 Green Street. Thereafter, he served an apprenticeship for three years. When J.P. Gray & Sons went into administration in the 1980s, George and Phil came to St John’s College.

Lynsey Darby, Archivist

Katie Hannawin, Library Assistant

George worked as a bookbinder in the Library, while Phil helped with cleaning books in the Old Library. George subsequently passed his bookbinding skills on to his son. For more than three decades since then, Phil has been serving our College Library. Aside from his wor k at St John’s, Phil also binds books in Caius and Girton College libraries.

In preserving and repairing paperback books, two main types of binding – ‘lyfguard’ and ‘drop-board’ – are used. Lyfguard uses one piece of transparent and permanent stick-on protector to cover the whole book. It is the less time-consuming and more cost-effective method. Library books which are regularly superseded by new editions, for example, medical and law books, are usually lyfguarded. Drop-board is a more complicated process. It involves the following steps: 1) removing the original book cover (front and back) and spine; 2) inserting pieces of blank paper on both the front and back of the book; 3) putting a mull (open weave cotton cloth) on the spine to strengthen it; 4) cutting two pieces of gray board to the size of the book and then gluing a book cloth on to both pieces; 5) sticking the blank paper to the inside of the hard

a joyous jumble of

board to hold the book securely; and 6) finally, sticking the original book cover page on the front and back of the hard board so that one can still see the title and details of the book. Library books that continue to be relevant and used over a long period of time, such as many History and English books, will be drop-boarded to prolong their shelf life. Apart from preserving new books, Phil also repairs existing Library books by, for example, re-backing broken book spines and using heat set tissue to mend torn pages.

In terms of tools and materials used in bookbinding and book repair today, Phil thinks they have not changed much over time, except for the glue: ‘The glue I used in the old days was animal glue made from skin and bone. It smells and it looks like a jelly pot. You had to put the pot in a bowl of boiling water, otherwise it [the glue] would go solid. Also, the glue we use today is softer, you could thin it with water, whereas the old glue was brittle, it stuck to your fingers.’ Other tools Phil uses are cloth with different textures, a paring knife, scissors, and a press (to clamp the book while working on it). Outside work, Phil uses his creativity to design and make sketch books and wedding albums for friends.

Images: Phil and his book press (left); paperback books given hard covers (right)

Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian

A Special Collections Assistant walks into a Library Newsletter article, and is surprised to see a bartender there. The bartender greets him thus:

‘I say, I say, I say! Why did the charismatic and intelligent person cross the road on the first day of April this year?’

‘Gosh,’ says the Special Collections Assistant, taking a moment to remember that the date in question hasn’t occurred

yet. He tries to get into the spirit. ‘Why…perhaps to visit the April Fool’s Day exhibition in the Old Library of St John’s?’

‘What’s the difference,’ asks the bartender, ‘between an Old Library and a New Library?’

‘There isn’t a New Library. That’s not the name for it, anyway. The Old Library’s where we have medieval manuscripts containing charming images of fools, and printed books

Being

japes, jests and jibes to advertise and promote an exhibition of amusing and edifying curios at the College of St John

concerning, for example, magic tricks, or fake Wordsworth poems, or factually baseless guides to Taiwan, or pamphlets about life being discovered on the Moon, or accounts of women giving birth to rabbits, or…’

‘Sounds like a lot, mister!’

‘Doctor, actually.’

‘Doctor, doctor!’

‘Yes.’

‘I keep thinking I’m an exhibition case!’

‘Oh? How does that make you feel?’

‘Full of interesting items!’

Cite Them Right online access

Online access to Cite Them Right is available to all current Cambridge University staff and students. There you can find the guidelines for different referencing styles (e.g. APA, Harvard and Chicago) for books, journals, reports, pamphlets, websites, social media and many other sources. For each referencing style, it gives you the citation order of all the elements you need to include in your reference(s). There are examples showing you how to insert citations into your text and document the full reference details. If you are still unsure, there is a tutorial section which you can explore. The website also provides useful information on plagiarism.

Access via https://www.citethemrightonline.com/

The bartender pauses for a laugh, which the Special Collections Assistant nervously offers.

‘Ha, yes. That’s right. We do an event for the Cambridge Festival every spring, and as one of the possible dates this year was April Fool’s Day I thought it might be amusing to attempt a very topical event. Goodness knows how this will translate to the online version that will appear the following week, but I’ve still time to figure it out. And while obviously I’d like the exhibition to be entertaining, I hope there’ll be an instructive element: a book, I suppose a bit like an exhibition caption, carries some authority, and I want people to think about the nature of that authority, and about the correct application of scepticism. So, I suppose I could ask you: what do you get if you cross a lighthearted exhibition about jokes with serious educational ambitions? Well? What do you… what do you get when…’

The bartender looks unamused. Blank. Points at a sign. 400-WORD LIMIT.

‘Er, what?’ says the Special Collections Assistant.

And the bartender picks him up and throws him out of the Library Newsletter; his head collides with the ground, the infinite dark plain outside the Newsletter, once, and then once again.

Knock, knock.

‘”What strange tricks”: Fools, Hoaxes, Pranks and Jokes’ will be exhibited in the Upper Library from 10.00 to 16.00 on Saturday 1 April 2023, as part of the Cambridge Festival. An online version will follow.

Adam Crothers, Special Collections Assistant

Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian