Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was a writer, archaeologist, and colonial diplomat who played a significant role in the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1921. Although Bell spent the latter years of her life living in Baghdad, her archive and book collection were donated to our library by her family following her death in 1926. Bell’s archive remains one of our most heavily used collections and has recently been made available on our dedicated Gertrude Bell website after being digitised and catalogued to current archival standards. Bell’s book collection, which comprises her working and personal library, complements the archive by contextualising her activities and providing an insight into the way she worked and learned throughout her life.
Although Bell’s own output is impressive (the archive contains over 12,000 unique items), her book collection reflects her diverse interests and shows us the ways in which the work of others supported and inspired her travels. Additionally, Bell’s books are often annotated with notes which document the learning process whilst also serving as reminders of key information she regarded as important. The selection of books in her library and the copy specific information they contain can be interpreted by researchers looking to further understand the work and methods of this unique historical figure.
One item within Bell’s book collection which illustrates the way she used and interacted with her books is her copy of Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General (B910.2 REE) published in 1906 by the Royal Geographical Society. Hints to Travellers was originally created by the Society for,
“a person who, proposing to explore a wild country, asks what astronomical and other scientific outfit he ought to take with him, and what observations he may attempt with a prospect of obtaining accurate results”.
The guide included sections on a wide variety of topics including climate, geography, anthropology, and astronomical observations as well as comprehensive lists of pieces of equipment a traveller would need to take with them on their journey.
Bell’s copy of the ninth edition of Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General (Vol. 1) [Gertrude Bell Collection, B910.2 REE]
Bell owned a copy of the ninth edition of the Guide (above), which was published in 1906 and split into two volumes. The first volume, which focused on “Surveying and practical astronomy”, is particularly special as Bell has filled many of the pages with handwritten notes and diagrams. These notes document both her learning process and her use of the methods explained within the book.
Pages from Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General (Vol. 1) showing much of the blank space in the first section of the book filled with Bell’s handwritten notes and diagrams [Gertrude Bell Collection, B910.2 REE]
Bell has also included the latitude and longitude of locations in Lebanon (“Beirut”) and Iraq (“Baghdad Citadel”), which she has presumably been able to calculate using the guide.
Pages from Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General (Vol. 1) [Gertrude Bell Collection, B910.2 REE]
Many of the books within Bell’s library, such as language and grammar books as well as works focusing on history and culture within the Middle East, provide a unique insight into the ways in which Bell prepared herself for her travels across the region. They also indicate the voracious appetite she had for reading and learning, and the wide variety of subjects in which she took an interest.
Pages from Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General (Vol. 1) [Gertrude Bell Collection, B910.2 REE]
Bell’s copy of Hints to Travellers: Scientific and General can be requested here.
Written by Newcastle University Special Collections & Archives bequest student, Sam Bailey.
Books have a limited lifespan. The idea that one might deliberately take apart a book and use it for something other than the transmission of the written word might be cringe-inducing, but it was a practice that was widespread in the medieval and early-modern periods. When a book was no longer of use – because it was undesirable, out of date, or had been used to destruction, the expensive materials used could be recycled. John Dryden wrote in Mac Flecknoe (1678-83) that even the works of modern authors were destined to be ‘Martyrs of pies, and reliques of the bum.’ Anna Reynolds has recently shown how early-modern England was brimming with reused and repurposed scraps of paper, which provided imaginative inspiration for a variety of literary works. To our knowledge, the Philip Robinson Library does not contain any books that were once used in pie crusts or as lavatory paper, but it does contain books that were repurposed as binding material. Two books held in Newcastle University Special Collections & Archives, from the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, offer a window into the way that people recycled old books into new ones.
Binding of Tacitus’ Opera (Venice: 1497) [Incunabula, Incunabula 11]
Incunabula 11 is an edition of the complete works of Tacitus, printed in Venice in 1497. Unfortunately for Tacitus, most of the attention that this copy receives is due to its remarkable binding. As you can see from the images below, this book is bound with a limp membrane cover, which was once a beautiful piece of sheet music. The music that is visible here is from a chant: De Sancti Martyribus, which was sung to commemorate Christian martyrs. This is a well-presented manuscript, in a regular hand with decorated capitals. Why is this high-quality music manuscript on the binding of a printed book? The historian of medieval music Margaret Bent can help to answer this; she argues that in the medieval period:
Musical styles changed almost as rapidly as in pop music today, and even new pieces were often adapted, with added or removed voices or changed text. Old music books were regarded as expendable, sometimes dismembered within half a century; parchment was recycled for miscellaneous purposes, paper usually discarded. (623)
Margaret Bent
This chant most likely fell out of fashion and ended up as waste material. It is likely, based on the observable structure of the book, and the dating of both the text and the binding, that this manuscript was used to bind the book shortly after it was printed. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, most printed books were sold as ‘quires’ – unbound stacks of printed sheets that needed to be folded, trimmed, and then covered by a bookbinder. Bindings could therefore be customised based on the budget and tastes of the buyer. Music manuscripts were widely used as binding materials, a well-made manuscript made for a visually appealing cover. As membrane or leather were expensive animal products, reusing material in this way could cut costs for the purchaser. We do not know who first purchased this book, but if they were in an institution such as a monastery, it is possible that they already owned this discarded music manuscript, and reused what was available to them.
Our second book rockets us forward two hundred years, to the midst of the English Civil War and Interregnum of the 1640s. This is a copy of Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, a work of natural philosophy. It was printed in London in 1646, and it is bound in a typical mottled brown leather binding, with decorative blind rules on the top and bottom covers. Binding styles can be somewhat misleading when dating a book, particular as a style as generic as this endured for so long. Understanding precisely when a book was bound can offer a vital insight into provenance, and luckily, the wastepaper used in this book’s binding gives us a vital insight into its history.
Binding of Pseudodoxia epidemica or Vulgar Errors (London: 1646) [17th Century Collection, 17th C. Coll. 398.3 BRO]
Peeking out between the top cover and first leaf of the printed book, we can see the edge of a single leaf of another book. This is a leaf used as a binding scrap – a piece of paper used to maintain the structure of the binding, that is a feature of many hard-cover bindings. Binding scraps were made from wastepaper that was available to the bookbinder at the time. If we can date the binding scrap, then we can identify more precisely when the book was bound. At the top of this scrap, we can see part of the word ‘Apocrypha’, and we can see in a small blackletter typeface, a number of lines from scripture. A quick comparison between some of these lines and quotations from the Apocrypha sections of English Bibles reveals that this leaf contains lines 26-32 of the 2nd verse from the 2nd book of Maccabees, and lines 1-29 from the 3rd verse of the same book. From that, it is possible to compare printed editions of English Bibles that contain Maccabees and find out which edition this leaf originated from. At the bottom of the page, we see a ‘signature’ – an alphanumeric representation of the position of the leaf within its sheet, that would help bookbinders to keep the sheets in the correct order. In this case, the signature is ‘Yy’ which we can express as 2Y1 (i.e. the first signature of the second sheet labelled Y). To find the edition of the Bible from which this binding scrap was taken, all we must do is find Bibles where these verses are found on leaf 2Y1 and compare them. Only one edition of the appropriate period has these verses, in the same typeface, on sheet 2Y1: the 1641 Authorized King James Bible printed by Robert Barker and John Bill in London. If you compare our scrap to a full leaf from this edition they match perfectly.
Binding scrap found in Pseudodoxia epidemica or Vulgar Errors (London: 1646) [17th Century Collection, 17th C. Coll. 398.3 BRO]
1646 – the year that this edition of Vulgar Errors was printed – was a tumultuous year in England. The parliamentarians had won the civil war against Charles I. The new Puritan-controlled Church issued a new Catechism, a Confession of Faith and a Directory of Worship – documents that sought to transform the nature of the established Church of England. That Confession would reject the authority of the Biblical Apocrypha. Our scrap of Maccabees 2 – from a 1641 Bible, was an example of this newly rejected scripture. New Bibles would be issued without the apocrypha and some old Bibles had their apocrypha sections removed. This is most likely how these verses from Maccabees 2, taken from a fairly new 1641 Bible, ended up as scrap paper in the binding of a 1646 book. The removal of this leaf was intended as an act of textual destruction, but it lives on by serendipity in the spine of another book. This scrap of paper, tucked into the binding of an otherwise unrelated book, is a register of the ways in which political and religious turmoil shaped the lives of books.
Acknowledgement
I must give all credit to any meaningful identification of the sheet of De Sancti Martyribus to my colleagues in the department of music at Newcastle University: Michael Winter and James Tomlinson. What took them minutes would have taken me days!
References and Further Reading
17th C. Coll. 398.3 BRO. Browne, Thomas. Pseudoxica epidemica. London: 1646. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
Authorized English Bible. London: 1641.
Bent, Margaret. ‘Polyphonic Sources’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. Cambridge: 2011.
Dryden, John. Mac Flecknoe, Or, A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S. by the Author of Absalom & Achitophel. London: 1682.
Inc.11. Tacitus, Cornelius. Opera. Venetis: 1497. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
Korpman, Matthew J. ‘The Protestant Reception of the Apocrypha’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha, ed. Oxford: 2021.
Marianai, Angela., Giger, Andreas and Thomas J. Mathiesen (eds.). ‘Regino Prumiensis’ in Theseaurus Musicarum Latinarum. REGTONA_TEXT (indiana.edu). (Contains the text of Di Sancti Martyribus)
Morrill, John. ‘The Puritan Revolution’ in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim. Cambridge: 2008.
Reynolds, Anna. Waste Paper in Early Modern England: Privy Tokens. Oxford: 2024.
Written by Megan Hardiman, an undergraduate English Literature student.
Over the last few months, I have been working within the Special Collections team, focusing on material from the Rare Books collection. Here, I was tasked with collecting metadata for over two hundred playbills that advertised performances from 1819-1820 at the Theatre-Royal, Newcastle. From the Shakespearean classics of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’ to the forgotten plays of ‘Bamfylde Moore Carew’, each playbill offered a unique window into Newcastle’s theatre scene.
Page from Play bills and notices, 1770-1820 [Rare Books, RB 792(4282)]
As a third year English Literature student, I am admittedly an avid theatregoer, and often find myself at Northern Stage or Alphabetti Theatre indulging in upcoming and new material, so to see experimental plays were the heart and soul of the theatre in the 1820s was a pleasant surprise. However, the very nature of the plays has changed significantly, with titles such as “Of Age Tomorrow” and “The Day After the Wedding; Or, a Wife’s First Lesson” seldom featured in contemporary theatre. After reviewing the collection, there were thirty-four different titles that had negative gendered connotations, with some performances featured several times throughout the recorded year. The attached playbill illustrates the relationship between male and female performing bodies. Both Mr Young and Mrs Garrick are advertised as featured actors from London, yet Mr Young plays Hamlet, the fallen hero in Shakespeare’s tragedy, whereas Mrs Garrick is cast as Ophelia, who is driven to suicide as a consequence of Hamlet’s control, and Maria, the principal female role in ‘Of Age To-Morrow’. The playbill, like a time-traveling portal, allowed me to witness the disparity in roles assigned to male and female actors. While Mr. Young graced the tragic heights of fallen heroes, Mrs. Garrick drew the short end of the stick, predominantly featuring in what was deemed a musical farce.
Page from Play bills and notices, 1770-1820 [Rare Books, RB 792(4282)]
Shakespeare’s tragedy ‘Hamlet’ was also paired with ‘Ladies at Home; Or, Gentlemen, we can do without you’. This disparate pairing seemed strange at first, and I spent a while scratching my head as to why the company would have done this. After some deliberation, I came to the assumption that it was an opportune moment to trial the new experimental play and measure its success with a large audience. ‘Hamlet’ generally attracted a bigger reception due to its popularity, and this is evident through the notice at the bottom of the item stating, “Nothing under FULL PRICE will be taken”, which suggests that a sell-out audience was likely. This then gave way for the Farce “Ladies at Home” to be aired. Perhaps this was revolutionary, or simply a marketing technique to test the waters of a female cast, but either way the playbills have given scope for a gendered analysis.
Page from Play bills and notices, 1770-1820 [Rare Books, RB 792(4282)]
The relationship between the Theatre Royal and gender has inspired me to write a dissertation on the lying-in hospitals around Newcastle, by using the playbills as a portal into the comparative analysis of the presentation of performing female bodies and pregnant women. As seen in the playbill, there were benefit performances for the building of a lying-in hospital, that was completed in 1826 and built opposite the city library. As such, the playbill has become a window into the gendered expectations imposed on both actors and women during the nineteenth century, and I will use the research gathered in Special Collections to inform my third-year dissertation.
‘The Fig Tree’ illustration from Elizabeth Blackwell’s Herbal Vol. 1
Plate 125. The Fig Tree. Ficus.
It seldome grows to be a Tree of any great Bigness in England; the Leaves are a grass Green and the Fruit when ripe of a brownish Green; it beareth no visible Flowers, which makes it believed they are hid in the Fruit.
Its Native soils are Turky, Spain and Portugal; and its time of Bearing is in Spring and Autumn; the Figs are cured by dipping them in scalding hot Lye, made of ye Ashes of the Guttings of the Tree, and afterwards they dry them carefully in the Sun.
Figs are esteem’d cooling and moistning, good for coughs, shortness of Breath, and all Diseases of the Breast; as also the Stone and Gravel, – and the small Pox and Measels, which they drive out. – Outwardly they are dissolving and ripening, good for Imposthumations and Swellings; and pestilential buboes.
The Special Collections team have been busy looking through their archive and rare book collections to uncover unique Christmas Treasures for the return of the Special Collections #ChristmasCountdown advent calendar.
Starting on Friday 1st December 2017, join the team in counting down the days to Christmas. Explore our unique collections by opening a new door each day to reveal a Christmas Treasure.
Click on the calendar above to take you through to our Christmas Countdown 2017 advent calendar. Be sure to visit each day throughout December in the run up to Christmas to uncover a new image.
Once you’ve opened the door for that day, why not look through the previous days and see what you can find.
Why not follow @ncllibspeccoll on Twitter to keep up-to-date with Special Collections’ #ChristmasCountdown.
Special Collections are pleased to announce the launch of their new online resource Page Turners. Using Turning the Pages software, Page Turners allows us to make some of the highlights of the bound volumes within our collections available within your browser. We’ve also added some information about the items to help with their interpretation. This post is to give you a brief overview of the first items we’ve made available, and consider how we might continue to make use of it to share our collections with you.
Petre’s Gradual is a 14th Century manuscript book containing ecclesiastical chants for services throughout the year. Very few graduals survive in Britain, with many having been destroyed during the Reformation. Early copies of this book had existed in the British Library, however the volume itself had been thought lost. It had in fact been held securely within Special Collections since the 1990s as part of a bequest from antiquarian book sellers Marjorie and Philip Robinson (after whom two of our library buildings are named). Since its rediscovery, the 500 year old polyphonic music it contains has been brought back to life with public performances. By featuring the Gradual on Page Turners, it can be appreciated, studied and used by scholars, musicians and any other interested parties, not just in Newcastle, but throughout the world.
Page from Petre’s Gradual (ROB 405) 1
The second item now available leaps forward in time to the twentieth century. In 1914, Newcastle University’s Armstrong College was requisitioned for use as the 1st Northern General Hospital. During its lifetime, the hospital treated over 40,000 wounded servicemen. One of the individuals tasked with requisitioning the building, and contributing to its operation was Professor of Surgery Frederick Charles Pybus. The University holds Pybus’ archive of personal papers, and these include a volume listing the operations he performed while working at the 1st Northern. Based in Ward C, which is now the Hatton Gallery, the book lists over 1000 operations performed by Pybus. Now available on Page Turners, this resource will not only aid historians studying the war, the hospital or the University, but may also provide valuable information for family history researchers, tracing the movements of individual soldiers during the conflict.
Ward C Surgical Team (FP/1/3/9) 1
The final item selected to launch Page Turners is actually the first instalment of an ongoing project. The University has held the personal papers of four generations of the Trevelyan family of Wallington since the 1960s. One of the most prominent members of the family was Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan (1870-1958). A Liberal then later Labour M.P., Sir Charles was the last of the Trevelyan Baronets to live on the family estate at Wallington and his Socialist beliefs led him to donate the estate to the National Trust in the 1930s. One of the most engaging areas of the Trevelyan archives is a collection of 39 photograph albums and scrapbooks created by Charles and his wife Lady Mary Katharine Trevelyan nee Bell [Molly] (daughter of industrialist Sir Hugh Bell and half-sister of Gertrude Bell). The albums reveal an intimate picture of Charles and Molly’s family life at Wallington and feature the couple’s six children, Pauline, George, Kitty, Marjorie, Patricia and Geoffrey. The albums have previously inspired an exhibition at the library, and in this first instalment, three volumes are being made available – Volume 8 (1917-1918), Volume 9 (1919-1921) and Volume 12 (1925). The family albums provide a captivating insight into the life of a landed, if somewhat unconventional family, from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, through both World Wars, to the early 1960s.
Page from Volume 12 (CPT/PA/11) 1
Page Turners gives us a fantastic opportunity to share unique items such as these from within our collections in a new way. We hope that you’ll enjoy browsing the materials available. If you have any comments about Page Turners and the items featured, or any suggestions of what you’d like to see next, do please get in touch.
Front cover from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
Kathleen Ainslie was an illustrator, active in the years 1900-1911. She is best-known for her series of children’s books based on jointed Dutch peg dolls which were popular during the 19th and early-20th centuries (Florence Kate Upton’s The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg had been published in 1895.)
The first of two books that we have recently added to our Rare Books Collection is Catherine Susan and Me’s coming out, published in London by Castell Brothers Ltd. and in New York by Frederick A. Stokes, c.1906 (COPAC lists just one copy, at Cambridge University).
Catherine Susan and Maria are weary of household chores so they issue a public notice to announce that they are ‘coming out’. Their coming out is both in the sense of venturing out on a trip to London and of being presented to society.
Pages 1-2 from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
Of course, such a momentous occasion requires clothes and the dolls have nothing appropriate to wear. Dutch peg dolls were sold undressed and children made clothes for them from scraps of cloth. Towards the end of the 19th Century, the female silhouette changed rapidly and, certainly in the early 20th Century, styles, designs and fabrics from other cultures had become more influential in fashion. In the haberdashery store, the dolls argue about whether to wear muslin or white satin, both of which were considered stylish at the time. In the 1880s and 1890s, small hats ornamented with birds, feathers and artificial flowers were fashionable. The mischievous dolls chase hens and then secure the feathers to their heads with hammer and nails!
Pages 11-12 from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
Catherine Susan and Maria squeeze into car and find a warm welcome in London. They are invited to attend a ball – in the 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous balls were held for members of ‘high society’. Debutante balls were occasions at which young women ‘came out’. Fans were essential: not just part of the outfit but a form of non-verbal communication conveying rejection (a closed fan), interest (an open fan) or excitement (a fluttering fan). Catherine Susan isn’t shy and sits with her fan open and, later, dances with a gentleman she tells everyone was a prince.
Pages 17-18 from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
The dolls go to a polo match. Polo had been imported to England in the 1860s, from India, and its popularity grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the dolls exclaim at how fast the horses gallop, British polo was slower and more methodical than the polo played in Manipur. They also try their hands at punting. Punting boats were first built for pleasure in England in the 1860s. Pleasure punting probably started on the River Thames but became increasingly popular in the early 1900s. In the evening, they go to the theatre – although Maria doesn’t remember what they saw, from the balcony scene, it looks as though it might have been Romeo and Juliet. Victorian productions of Shakespeare’s plays often prioritised ‘authentic’ costumes and scenery and to be a bona fide actor/actress, like Henry Irving (1838-1905) or Ellen Terry (1847-1928), was to be a great Shakespearean actor.
Pages 27-28 from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
By the end of the book, the dolls are both exhausted.
Pages 29-30 from ‘Catherine Susan and Me’s Coming Out’ by Kathleen Ainslie (Rare Books 823.912 AIN)
The second book by Kathleen Ainslie that we have added to our Rare Books Collection is What I did, published c.1905 (COPAC lists copies held at the British Library, Manchester University and Oxford University.) Inside the front cover, someone has written in pencil “I hope you will like reading this book. It is very amusing”. This time, the protagonist is a naughty Dutch doll schoolboy and the book recounts his boarding school escapades: fagging (i.e. slaving) for an older boy called Tomkins; swimming; playing cricket; cavorting in the dormitory; and smoking.
We do not currently have any more of Kathleen Ainslie’s Dutch peg doll books but in other stories, Catherine Susan and her companion, Maria, celebrate holidays, take on odd jobs and even agitate for women’s suffrage (Votes for Catherine Susan and Me, 1910). Ainslie wrote about 25 books (the first being Me and Catherine Susan in 1903), as well as illustrating a series of six calendars (1906-1911). They all feature the same brand of humorous chromolithographed illustrations.
Professor Frederick Charles Pybus (1883 – 1975) was a surgeon and alumni of our College of Medicine, graduating in 1905. He joined the 1st Northern General Hospital shortly after its formation and was serving as its Registrar in 1914. As a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, except for a brief posting at the 17th General Hospital in Egypt, he served as a surgeon at Armstrong College throughout the war. Up until 1919, he carried out at least 1,364 operations on wounded servicemen.
WW1 MRC
Professor Pybus went on to have a distinguished career as a surgeon in the Royal Victoria Infirmary from 1920 until his retirement in 1944, becoming Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine in 1941. Amongst his claims to fame was inventing a drink to sustain patients before operations, which was later developed and sold by a local chemist to Beechams, becoming Lucozade.
Lucozade
His lifelong concerns included cancer research, developed during his 50 year surgical career from 1924 and pursued through his own cancer research laboratory. He was amongst the first to make the link to atmospheric pollution as a major contributing cause of cancer and his work directly informed the Clean Air Act 1956.
For some 40 years Professor Pybus also built up a collection of international importance on the history of medicine, including books, engravings, letters, portraits, busts and bleeding bowls. In 1965, he donated the collection to the Library, where it remains a valuable source of information for medical historians. Meanwhile, his papers, also held in Special Collections, offer a unique insight into a renaissance man of medicine.
