From the 8th-century illuminated Lindisfarne gospels, which will be “coming home” to Palace Green Library in Durham for three months over the summer of 2013, to the typewritten 120-foot scroll of the On the Road, seeing a manuscript brings us close to its creator in a way that a transcript can never do.
While museums, libraries and archives want to encourage more people to see their treasures, the display of manuscripts and printed books can be problematic.
“It’s always a challenge to display manuscripts,” says Nat Edwards, the director of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayrshire. “The tradition for glass cases with labels doesn’t work with text because labels become redundant. There’s a barrier if text is used with text, so captions have to be minimal and succinct.”
People also have low tolerance to standing and reading, especially if the manuscripts have been placed too high or too low, and at low light levels.
“But research has shown that it is special to see originals, whether you are looking at it as a text with meaning, or as a cultural object,” says Edwards.
“So it is up to us to make the manuscripts come to life. It’s not so easy to do this in a university or library setting, where a lot of manuscripts are displayed, but there are ways in which they can catch up with advances in museum display, and get over the barriers by using props, ambience and interactives.”
Back to the text
The £21m Robert Burns museum reopened in late 2010 and is about the poet’s life and literary output. Interactives help to put the work into context, but they also aim to bring people back to the language and the texts.
“The most important context of all for me is that you can see and hear his manuscripts, language and song and lose yourself in imagination, and make your own meaning in the actual space,” Edwards says.
Language is at the heart of the experience and snippets and sprinklings are used throughout the different sites. It’s a mixture of old Scots, modern Scots and English, and though Scots words are picked out they are not necessarily translated.
“Burns’ manuscripts are not in a library or a metropolitan city or in a shoebox somewhere, but here in this museum,” Edwards says.
The Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere is rethinking the display of the many manuscripts, letters and rare books that it holds. “A report we commissioned concluded that when people are not familiar with the poetry, there needs to be more engagement through the artefact on which the words are written,” says Jeff Cowton, curator at the Wordsworth Trust, which runs the Cumbrian museum.
Cowton plans for a more responsive experience that goes beyond looking at the manuscripts in glass cases. Projects such as one where people with dementia were given facsimiles of the love letters of William and his wife Mary to open and read, have been successful in this way.
“Breaking the seal and unfolding the letters, as they would have been opened then, brought people into the moment,” Cowton says. “It gave them something physical to hold but also an emotional object to laugh and cry over. We want to translate this and other such ideas into the day-to-day experience of visitors.”
William Wordsworth’s handwriting from his poems and letters, or phrases from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, could be used throughout the site. “They could, for example, act as a leitmotif flowing through the buildings and garden, and be used on items in the cafe and shop,” says Cowton.
“We’ve got fantastic collections in a glorious setting,” he adds. “They are broad in scope and present great opportunities for innovative displays. We wish to place poetry and the manuscripts on which it appears at the heart of the experience.”
Cowton believes that while the words are important, manuscripts have the added potential to create meaning, feeling and understanding through their physical makeup.
He feels that fewer exhibits, chosen for what the object itself means as well as its content, displayed in a way that captures attention and stimulates learning through close looking and investigation, may bring an exhibition to life for those who might otherwise pass by.
“A good question to ask is: How much would the visitor lose in their experience if the manuscript was removed from display and only our caption and transcript remained?” Cowton says.
“A manuscript provides a springboard for the imagination. Visitors should be encouraged to spend more time on the manuscript itself, and less time on our words about it.”
Old and new technology
Buying the John Murray archive in 2006 gave the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh the opportunity to reach new audiences and readers. John Murray, a Scot, started his publishing business in 1768 in London, and he worked with many famous writers, travellers and scientists, including Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Lady Isabella Bird and Charles Darwin.
The archive cost £31.2m and contains over a quarter of a million items. The National Library of Scotland wanted the archive to be enjoyed by the public as well as used by researchers and academics, so a permanent exhibition was installed on the ground floor of the library.
“We wanted to get away from the traditional manuscript exhibition and explore different ways of displaying manuscripts”, says Rachel Beattie, an assistant curator at the National Library of Scotland.
The displays are designed to take visitors back to Murray’s 18th-century world. His famous Albermarle Street premises in London’s Mayfair has been re-created, and people can step into his drawing room, where writers came to discuss their books around the fireplace and where Byron’s memoirs were burned after his death.
Eleven cylindrical cases focus on individual writers and show manuscripts and letters. “We can only display around 35 items at a time, but these are rotated and updated, sometimes by just turning a page, or having a new character and their story,” says Beattie.
“We used a theatre-lighting system and props to flesh out the stories, so we include costume and belongings such as a tiger tooth bracelet and a lock of Lady Caroline Lamb’s hair, who reputedly haunted the Murray house.”
The exhibition is fairly small, but touchscreen podiums allow visitors to access layers of information. They can read transcripts of letters, leaf through pages, zoom in, and get background information.
“There is a paradox with the exhibiting of books,” says Helen Vincent, senior curator of rare books at the National Library of Scotland. “Once you put a book into a glass case you stop people from reading it and using it for the purpose for which it was made.”
People don’t always read books in display cases, Vincent says, but can look at them as beautiful objects, as in the case of illuminated manuscripts. Some can also have a kind of talismanic value, such as a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.
The big difference between museum and library exhibitions, explains Vincent, is that where books and manuscripts are often used as background in museum displays, about the writer’s life for example, a library has the opposite perspective because the books or manuscripts are the main focus.
“But on a practical level it is difficult,” Vincent says. “Lux/hour limits mean that you cannot always display the most visually interesting page of a book. I have seen books where title pages and illustrations have suffered light damage because they have been displayed so often, while the rest of the book is in good condition. This is what you want to avoid.”
An exhibition of rare Shakespeare editions is on show at the National Library of Scotland until 29 April. The books on display include a First Folio and early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems collected by different people throughout four centuries, all either Scottish or with Scottish connections.
The books are drawn from the combined collections of National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, a partner in the exhibition.
“We have found in workshops that there is always a strong emotional connection with our rare Shakespeare editions,” says Vincent, “People read the plays in modern editions and may never have expected to be able to encounter the original. This exhibition is about the people who collected the books, how they engaged with them, and Shakespeare in relation to Scottish culture.”
The displays are separated from an interactive area, where people can engage with Shakespeare’s language at varying levels of complexity, from arranging magnetic words to attempting a Shakespearean sonnet. Vincent says it is not an academic approach. “Our remit is to encourage people to read, but also to tap into their creativity.”
Contexts
“Academics can be out of their comfort zone in trying to translate their knowledge to exhibitions,” says James Loxley, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Loxley has collaborated with Vincent on the Shakespeare exhibition at the National Library of Scotland.
“Collaborating across the professional divide is now recognised as an important part of what we might and can do,” Loxley says. “We are tapping into the public enthusiasm for seeing manuscripts and first editions, and aiming to make our collections more accessible, rather than reserving them for academic research.
“But we don’t necessarily know about curating or conservation, light levels, how to write a label and so on,” Loxley says. “We have discovered that you have to make a whole series of decisions and interventions about how best to display the material.”
Cultural sensitivities also have to be considered, says Loxley. “In Stratford upon Avon our Shakespeare project would have an obvious context, but in Scotland we have to think differently. It’s not the default position that he is the bard – Burns claims that honour here.
"So we have to think about how we can give people something unexpected but engaging. The kinds of language used in a museum context can differ from those we use in the academy, and the sense of what is important about an object can differ, and those differences have to be negotiated.”
Novelist Jack Kerouac typed On the Road in 1951 onto a 120-foot scroll of architect’s tracing paper. He did this to prevent his flow of writing being interrupted by having to insert new sheets of paper into the typewriter.
A private collector bought the scroll in 2001 for $2.2m, setting a world record for a literary manuscript at auction.
Almost 10,000 people visited the manuscript when it was on display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham from December 2008 to January 2009. A specially built display case was made because it was too expensive to ship the original case over from the US.
“There was space to unroll just 30 foot of the manuscript, so there was a debate around which part to display,” says Dick Ellis, professor of American studies, who curated the display.
“I wanted to show the end, which has stark descriptions of drug-taking, and was also chewed by a dog, but eventually we chose the beginning because that is what everybody wants to see.
"But we made the new case wider so that we could include information panels and pages from the published book alongside the relevant parts in the manuscript.”
This revealed the editorial interventions, such as a segment where the sexual attraction between Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady was explicit in the manuscript but toned down when the book was published in 1957 because of the growth in homophobia in the US throughout the 1950s.
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (to 13 March) is the first major British Library exhibition to bring together its Royal collection of illuminated manuscripts collected by the kings and queens of England between the 9th and 16th centuries.
It is designed to unlock the secrets of the private lives and public personae of the royals and to give a better understanding of royal identity.
One of the curators of the exhibition is Scot McKendrick, head of history and classical studies at the British Library. “You can just salivate at the beauty of these objects but we wanted people to get more out of it than that,” he says.
“Lots of shows about illuminated manuscripts tend to be chronological or seen from the artists’ point of view but we wanted to hone in on their contextual purpose and relevance at the time.”
McKendrick says illuminated manuscripts are difficult objects for visitors to understand, in terms of their physical appearance and the complexity of medieval art and culture. What the library has tried to do is to simplify the story in the displays and to provide more layers of interpretation in interactives, in the catalogue and online.
“The basic fact is that when you show any of these books, there is a complex story and you can only show one part of it. So a lot of what we say people have to take on trust. It is very different from a lot of art objects, where you can walk around a sculpture and pore over a flat art object.”
Keeping it simple was not always easy, and McKendrick says he had to battle with colleagues to keep down the number of names and dates in the captions. “There was a lot of screaming and shouting about it but I felt very strongly that it turns people off.”
While museums, libraries and archives want to encourage more people to see their treasures, the display of manuscripts and printed books can be problematic.
“It’s always a challenge to display manuscripts,” says Nat Edwards, the director of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayrshire. “The tradition for glass cases with labels doesn’t work with text because labels become redundant. There’s a barrier if text is used with text, so captions have to be minimal and succinct.”
People also have low tolerance to standing and reading, especially if the manuscripts have been placed too high or too low, and at low light levels.
“But research has shown that it is special to see originals, whether you are looking at it as a text with meaning, or as a cultural object,” says Edwards.
“So it is up to us to make the manuscripts come to life. It’s not so easy to do this in a university or library setting, where a lot of manuscripts are displayed, but there are ways in which they can catch up with advances in museum display, and get over the barriers by using props, ambience and interactives.”
Back to the text
The £21m Robert Burns museum reopened in late 2010 and is about the poet’s life and literary output. Interactives help to put the work into context, but they also aim to bring people back to the language and the texts.
“The most important context of all for me is that you can see and hear his manuscripts, language and song and lose yourself in imagination, and make your own meaning in the actual space,” Edwards says.
Language is at the heart of the experience and snippets and sprinklings are used throughout the different sites. It’s a mixture of old Scots, modern Scots and English, and though Scots words are picked out they are not necessarily translated.
“Burns’ manuscripts are not in a library or a metropolitan city or in a shoebox somewhere, but here in this museum,” Edwards says.
The Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere is rethinking the display of the many manuscripts, letters and rare books that it holds. “A report we commissioned concluded that when people are not familiar with the poetry, there needs to be more engagement through the artefact on which the words are written,” says Jeff Cowton, curator at the Wordsworth Trust, which runs the Cumbrian museum.
Cowton plans for a more responsive experience that goes beyond looking at the manuscripts in glass cases. Projects such as one where people with dementia were given facsimiles of the love letters of William and his wife Mary to open and read, have been successful in this way.
“Breaking the seal and unfolding the letters, as they would have been opened then, brought people into the moment,” Cowton says. “It gave them something physical to hold but also an emotional object to laugh and cry over. We want to translate this and other such ideas into the day-to-day experience of visitors.”
William Wordsworth’s handwriting from his poems and letters, or phrases from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, could be used throughout the site. “They could, for example, act as a leitmotif flowing through the buildings and garden, and be used on items in the cafe and shop,” says Cowton.
“We’ve got fantastic collections in a glorious setting,” he adds. “They are broad in scope and present great opportunities for innovative displays. We wish to place poetry and the manuscripts on which it appears at the heart of the experience.”
Cowton believes that while the words are important, manuscripts have the added potential to create meaning, feeling and understanding through their physical makeup.
He feels that fewer exhibits, chosen for what the object itself means as well as its content, displayed in a way that captures attention and stimulates learning through close looking and investigation, may bring an exhibition to life for those who might otherwise pass by.
“A good question to ask is: How much would the visitor lose in their experience if the manuscript was removed from display and only our caption and transcript remained?” Cowton says.
“A manuscript provides a springboard for the imagination. Visitors should be encouraged to spend more time on the manuscript itself, and less time on our words about it.”
Old and new technology
Buying the John Murray archive in 2006 gave the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh the opportunity to reach new audiences and readers. John Murray, a Scot, started his publishing business in 1768 in London, and he worked with many famous writers, travellers and scientists, including Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Lady Isabella Bird and Charles Darwin.
The archive cost £31.2m and contains over a quarter of a million items. The National Library of Scotland wanted the archive to be enjoyed by the public as well as used by researchers and academics, so a permanent exhibition was installed on the ground floor of the library.
“We wanted to get away from the traditional manuscript exhibition and explore different ways of displaying manuscripts”, says Rachel Beattie, an assistant curator at the National Library of Scotland.
The displays are designed to take visitors back to Murray’s 18th-century world. His famous Albermarle Street premises in London’s Mayfair has been re-created, and people can step into his drawing room, where writers came to discuss their books around the fireplace and where Byron’s memoirs were burned after his death.
Eleven cylindrical cases focus on individual writers and show manuscripts and letters. “We can only display around 35 items at a time, but these are rotated and updated, sometimes by just turning a page, or having a new character and their story,” says Beattie.
“We used a theatre-lighting system and props to flesh out the stories, so we include costume and belongings such as a tiger tooth bracelet and a lock of Lady Caroline Lamb’s hair, who reputedly haunted the Murray house.”
The exhibition is fairly small, but touchscreen podiums allow visitors to access layers of information. They can read transcripts of letters, leaf through pages, zoom in, and get background information.
“There is a paradox with the exhibiting of books,” says Helen Vincent, senior curator of rare books at the National Library of Scotland. “Once you put a book into a glass case you stop people from reading it and using it for the purpose for which it was made.”
People don’t always read books in display cases, Vincent says, but can look at them as beautiful objects, as in the case of illuminated manuscripts. Some can also have a kind of talismanic value, such as a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.
The big difference between museum and library exhibitions, explains Vincent, is that where books and manuscripts are often used as background in museum displays, about the writer’s life for example, a library has the opposite perspective because the books or manuscripts are the main focus.
“But on a practical level it is difficult,” Vincent says. “Lux/hour limits mean that you cannot always display the most visually interesting page of a book. I have seen books where title pages and illustrations have suffered light damage because they have been displayed so often, while the rest of the book is in good condition. This is what you want to avoid.”
An exhibition of rare Shakespeare editions is on show at the National Library of Scotland until 29 April. The books on display include a First Folio and early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems collected by different people throughout four centuries, all either Scottish or with Scottish connections.
The books are drawn from the combined collections of National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, a partner in the exhibition.
“We have found in workshops that there is always a strong emotional connection with our rare Shakespeare editions,” says Vincent, “People read the plays in modern editions and may never have expected to be able to encounter the original. This exhibition is about the people who collected the books, how they engaged with them, and Shakespeare in relation to Scottish culture.”
The displays are separated from an interactive area, where people can engage with Shakespeare’s language at varying levels of complexity, from arranging magnetic words to attempting a Shakespearean sonnet. Vincent says it is not an academic approach. “Our remit is to encourage people to read, but also to tap into their creativity.”
Contexts
“Academics can be out of their comfort zone in trying to translate their knowledge to exhibitions,” says James Loxley, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Loxley has collaborated with Vincent on the Shakespeare exhibition at the National Library of Scotland.
“Collaborating across the professional divide is now recognised as an important part of what we might and can do,” Loxley says. “We are tapping into the public enthusiasm for seeing manuscripts and first editions, and aiming to make our collections more accessible, rather than reserving them for academic research.
“But we don’t necessarily know about curating or conservation, light levels, how to write a label and so on,” Loxley says. “We have discovered that you have to make a whole series of decisions and interventions about how best to display the material.”
Cultural sensitivities also have to be considered, says Loxley. “In Stratford upon Avon our Shakespeare project would have an obvious context, but in Scotland we have to think differently. It’s not the default position that he is the bard – Burns claims that honour here.
"So we have to think about how we can give people something unexpected but engaging. The kinds of language used in a museum context can differ from those we use in the academy, and the sense of what is important about an object can differ, and those differences have to be negotiated.”
The beat goes on
Novelist Jack Kerouac typed On the Road in 1951 onto a 120-foot scroll of architect’s tracing paper. He did this to prevent his flow of writing being interrupted by having to insert new sheets of paper into the typewriter.
A private collector bought the scroll in 2001 for $2.2m, setting a world record for a literary manuscript at auction.
Almost 10,000 people visited the manuscript when it was on display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham from December 2008 to January 2009. A specially built display case was made because it was too expensive to ship the original case over from the US.
“There was space to unroll just 30 foot of the manuscript, so there was a debate around which part to display,” says Dick Ellis, professor of American studies, who curated the display.
“I wanted to show the end, which has stark descriptions of drug-taking, and was also chewed by a dog, but eventually we chose the beginning because that is what everybody wants to see.
"But we made the new case wider so that we could include information panels and pages from the published book alongside the relevant parts in the manuscript.”
This revealed the editorial interventions, such as a segment where the sexual attraction between Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady was explicit in the manuscript but toned down when the book was published in 1957 because of the growth in homophobia in the US throughout the 1950s.
Displaying illuminated manuscripts
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (to 13 March) is the first major British Library exhibition to bring together its Royal collection of illuminated manuscripts collected by the kings and queens of England between the 9th and 16th centuries.
It is designed to unlock the secrets of the private lives and public personae of the royals and to give a better understanding of royal identity.
One of the curators of the exhibition is Scot McKendrick, head of history and classical studies at the British Library. “You can just salivate at the beauty of these objects but we wanted people to get more out of it than that,” he says.
“Lots of shows about illuminated manuscripts tend to be chronological or seen from the artists’ point of view but we wanted to hone in on their contextual purpose and relevance at the time.”
McKendrick says illuminated manuscripts are difficult objects for visitors to understand, in terms of their physical appearance and the complexity of medieval art and culture. What the library has tried to do is to simplify the story in the displays and to provide more layers of interpretation in interactives, in the catalogue and online.
“The basic fact is that when you show any of these books, there is a complex story and you can only show one part of it. So a lot of what we say people have to take on trust. It is very different from a lot of art objects, where you can walk around a sculpture and pore over a flat art object.”
Keeping it simple was not always easy, and McKendrick says he had to battle with colleagues to keep down the number of names and dates in the captions. “There was a lot of screaming and shouting about it but I felt very strongly that it turns people off.”