Library Newsletter Michaelmas 2019

St John’s College Library Newsletter L

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1

Years

MICHAELMAS 2019

Working Library

Commemorating twenty-five years of the Working Library – a memorial to Professor Robert Hinde At the time of the Working Library’s opening in 1994, Professor Robert Hinde was Master of the College. His period as Master saw the conception, architectural design and construction of the Library.

A memorial to Professor Robert Hinde has just been installed in the foyer of the College Library to mark its opening a quarter of a century ago. A reception to celebrate this event was held in the Library on Tuesday, 26 November 2019 with Professor Hinde’s widow, Dr Joan Hinde, as guest of honour.

Also present at the reception were Vice-Master Professor Tim

Whitmarsh, Professor Malcolm Schofield (President of the College at the time of the Library building’s completion), current Fellows, JCR Presidents Anusha Ashok and Ollie Barnard, and members of Library staff.

It is important to recognise the debt owed by the College to Professor Hinde. He championed the whole project; it was his foresight that proved instrumental in seeing the project through all its various stages – from conception to completion.

Photos: Fellows and guests at the reception (left); Professor Malcolm Schofield speaks at the reception (right)

Professor Hinde claimed that the Library extension was necessary in order to cope with the increasing demand for its facilities. In response to changing times (the late 1980s and early 1990s were periods of financial hardship and government cut-backs to higher education expenditure), he stated: “fewer students are able to buy the textbooks that they need, and the departmental libraries in the University are unable to satisfy the demand.” He envisaged “a library which will take us forward into the twenty-first century,” and which “will provide modern methods of information storage and retrieval.” Such was his commitment to the project that he gave up part of the Master’s Garden in order to enable the Garden Wing of the new Library to be built.

Hinde stated: “these are hard times for everybody and education…

We at John’s, however, are determined not to let the present hard times hinder the high standards we provide for the students.”

Invitations were sent to a number of architects to submit designs for the new Library. The contract was eventually awarded to Edward Cullinan Architects, who subsequently won a Regional Architect Award for their design given by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The building contract was awarded to R. G. Carter (Cambridge) Ltd., who gifted a symbolic silver hammer to Professor Hinde on commencement of the building of the Library in 1992.

It is this hammer which constitutes the memorial now placed in the Library foyer.

To fund the project, the College launched a £7 million appeal to Johnians worldwide. Professor Professor Hinde cuts the ribbon at the official opening of the Working Library

Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian Photos: Nordin Ćatić; Nigel Luckhurst

The Working Library has long been a hub for the College community in its teaching, learning and research. Tens of thousands of students and visitors have come through the door since the modern Library opened in 1994. To celebrate the Working Library’s 25th anniversary, Professor David Midgley (Fellow in German), Professor Manucha Lisboa (Fellow in Portuguese) and Professor Richard Beadle (Fellow in English and Librarian from 1984 to 1988) – all of whom are long serving College members – share their thoughts and memories of the Library.

The creation of the Working Library in 1994 enabled the College to bring its provision for independent study up to date in several ways.

It incorporated digital facilities, a sizable stock of audio-visual material and a seminar room, as well as ample work stations. The adoption of the Library of Congress cataloguing system by the then Librarian, Amanda Saville, also made it easier to allocate an identifiable segment of the building to each subject cluster.

In technical terms, the architectural ploy by which the new structure was created was to build an apse across what had 1 traditionally been considered ‘an inoffensive neo-Tudor building’ and introduce a mezzanine floor within an area that had previously housed high lecture rooms. The ground floor incorporates a generous lobby in which, amongst other things, Anselm Kiefer’s huge installation ‘Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom’ was recently permitted to gradually shed its petals over the summer months.

More controversially, the development marked the College’s first venture into architectural postmodernism, with a massive swivelling entrance door housed beneath a portico which, while echoing certain of the disparate styles to be found in Chapel Court, also introduced a few of its own. (On seeing the designs, one senior Fellow was heard to mutter that by Palladian standards the new pilasters displayed too much ankle and too little thigh.)

DO enjoy the views onto the Master’s Garden and the west front of the Chapel: the latter have been known to provide enchantingly eccentric perspectives for successful entries in the College’s annual photography competitions.

DON’T tell foreign visitors that the spire, with its discreet echoes of the neo-Gothic pinnacles elsewhere in the College, is only there to top off the ventilation system.

1

See Alec C. Crook, Penrose to Cripps (Cambridge, 1978), p.4.

Professor David Midgley

The Working Library in St John’s and I were ‘born’ at more or less the same time, in the sense that I joined St John’s in October 1993 and the new Library opened just a few months later. Its pending inauguration was one of the first things mentioned to me by the then-outgoing Master, Robert Hinde, whose pride and joy it was. My awareness of it carries many nice associations. Robert mentioned it to me on the occasion of my being invited for lunch at High Table, so that I could be scrutinised with a view to being offered a Fellowship. It was a marvellous experience in the course of which the Master, wearing a very nice Benetton jumper with, however, a number of moth holes in it, told me about the new Library whilst having his shoulders massaged right in the middle of lunch by an elderly gentleman who I later discovered was the illustrious Professor Jack Goody. I admired the jumper, envied the massage, listened to the tale of the new Library and thought: “If they offer me a Fellowship here I’m definitely saying yes!”

When Robert told me about the Library I explained that this was music to my years because one can never have too many libraries

and, ever since my undergraduate days, I had been a firm believer that librarians in general are magical creatures with benevolent powers, and to be revered as such. As I have discovered over the years, St John’s librarians are no exception. I have never asked any of them any question, no matter how esoteric, that does not elicit an answer, usually with unbelievable speed. My favourite one is the occasion when, for the purpose of something I was writing, I wondered whether anyone in the Library could help me find a certain book. All I knew was that I’d read it when I was about eight years old, in translation into Portuguese. I didn’t know what the original title was, let alone the name of the author or its country of origin. All I knew was the title in Portuguese, its plot, and that I’d read it in Mozambique, sometime in the 1960s. In half an hour I had the book’s author, title (nothing like the translated one), original language (French) and the call number for a copy available in the UL. In olden times this would have been called witchcraft, and it isn’t books that would have been burnt. I am so glad we don’t live in olden times. In these more enlightened ones, this is the kind of treatment I have always had in our wonderful College Library.

Professor Manucha Lisboa

In point of physical form and day-to-day function, few parts of the College can have changed as much as the Library has done over the last generation. When I arrived as an undergraduate to read English at the end of the 1960s the Library was a place one might visit for a few minutes once or twice a week to borrow or return books, but seldom to work, not least because there was scant space to do so—perhaps half a dozen gloomily situated seats among the tightly-packed, double height bookstacks of the Lower Library; and few lingered in the austere surroundings of the so-called Reading Room, converted from the two residential sets on the ground floor of F Staircase Second Court. On the other hand, during the period of intense preparation for Tripos during the Easter Term, the hallowed precincts of the seventeenth-century Upper Library were opened during the daytime to undergraduate readers who wanted to get away from it all to revise—a remarkable experience, unlikely to be made available nowadays.

Though well set in their own, long-established ways, the Library staff were nonetheless no less knowledgeable and helpful than their modern counterparts. The Sub-Librarian was the legendary Mr N. C. Buck, who, having begun work as ‘the library boy’ in the 1920s, had, by the time of his retirement, achieved a level of bibliographical erudition, and a world-wide reputation for services to readers and scholarship, sufficient to merit the award of the

degree of honorary Master of Arts from the University. In his spare time Mr Buck was well known also as one of the county’s premier bee-keepers; and it was understood that, should a swarm be reported in the somewhere in Cambridge, he might have an hour or so’s leave of absence from his desk in the Library in order to go and take it.

By the mid-1980s many factors and circumstances were combining to militate against the Library’s long-standing and sometimes relaxed arrangements, not least the arrival of IT on the horizon.

Alongside the lack of reader space, the stock was only roughly grouped in Tripos subject sections, and was distinctly antiquated, students in English for example finding twentieth-century writers almost unrepresented. Books were placed on the shelves in order of arrival, as and where they could be, rather than according to any recognised classification. They were located by finding the number of the bay, the number of the shelf within the bay, and the number of the book along the shelf— a continuation of the shelving method used in the Upper Library, itself of medieval monastic origins. Access to this numbering system was provided by somewhat bizarre means: one consulted a copy of the Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh (1863), broken up into a number of separately bound sections and interleaved with blank pages, into which the St John’s shelfmarks, and the extremely numerous titles acquired since 1863, were inscribed, in a neat librarian’s cursive hand, by Mr Buck and his staff. It is preserved as a relic among the Special Collections.

Only the faintest of nostalgia is in order nowadays. Such conditions could not prevail. The Library Committee, and in due course an ad hoc Library Development Committee established by the Governing Body and the College Council, began to address major issues such

as a computerised catalogue of the Library, and to draw up an architect’s brief for a new building. The bringing to fruition of these projects, in the closing years of the twentieth century, must rank as one of the College’s major achievements of that era.

Professor Richard Beadle

This is the story of a ship, and those who sailed in her. It starts nd where it ends. On 2 September 2014 the wreck of the Erebus missing for almost 170 years was found on the ocean floor of the Canadian Arctic where it has lain since Sir John Franklin’s failed attempt to find a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1845-6. When Michael Palin, now traveller and writer, heard this news he knew there was a story to be told. Instead of another Franklin story (there are many) he decided to base the narrative on the ship rather than the man. Consequently we get two accounts of pioneering polar exploration, first in the Antarctic and then in the Arctic.

The Erebus, a small but sturdy wooden ship of only 372 tons, was built at Pembroke dockyard and launched in 1826. Later strengthened at Chatham to withstand sea ice, she was one of two ships (the other was Terror) chosen for James Clark Ross’s scientific

expedition (1839-43) to establish the exact position of the South Magnetic Pole. Thwarted by storms, sea ice and the daunting Antarctic land mass the pole was not found, but in the harshest of conditions Ross sailed further south than any (known) human being had ever done before. On his return he deserved his knighthood but, seemingly worn out and wanting to settle down he declined to face polar ice again in the Admiralty’s renewed attempt to find what had become known as the Northwest Passage. Instead Erebus, having again been refitted, sailed under the command of the experienced explorer Sir John Franklin. The second half of Palin’s book is devoted to this voyage (1845-6), the disappearance of the ship and the subsequent failed searches for Franklin and his crew.

While what is left of Erebus on the sea floor may yield some artefacts in the future (as the well-preserved wreck of the Terror is now doing), the details of the tragic loss of life may only ever be guessed at.

The nearest most of us can get to Erebus is the scale model illustrated in the book. To Franklin we can get a little nearer. When you are next in London look for his statue in Waterloo Place (just behind the Athenaeum in Pall Mall). Across the road is a memorial to Captain Scott. Both men were ultimately to be beaten in their quests by the same man, Roald Amundsen, but, as Palin notes in this well-researched and ‘very good read’, there is no memorial to this famous Norwegian in London… but that is another story. Read this one first!

Dr Robin Glasscock, Fellow in Geography

Displays of General Interest The display area on the ground floor of the Working Library is used to promote items which come from the sometimes-overlooked General Interest and Audio-Visual collections in the Library. As well as popular fiction and film, these collections also contain documentaries, non-fiction, travel guides, self-help books, TV box sets, and music.

The current display for the Working Library is ‘From Page to Screen,’ showcasing works of literature which have been adapted for the screen. Popular franchises such as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings take up most of the shelf space. However the Library’s book-and-DVD-pairs of lesser known titles such as Persepolis and Stardust are also promoted, alongside series such as Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

It’s always nice to see that students have taken items from the display to browse or borrow, and that by curating displays in a prominent place, overlooked Library items will cease to be so.

Ellie Capeling, Library Graduate Trainee

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