̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - emily dourish

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World

sjr81 — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 08:36:45 +0000

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World, opens free to the public this Friday (March 11) and celebrates 4,000 years of recorded thought through the Library’s unique and irreplaceable collections. More than 70 per cent of the exhibits are displayed to the public for the first time in this exhibition.

Tracing the connections between Darwin and DNA, Newton and Hawking, and 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones and Twitter, the exhibition investigates, through six distinct themes, how Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s millions of books and manuscripts have transformed our understanding of life here on earth and our place among the stars.

̽��ֱ��iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building, opened in the 1930s, now holds more than eight million books, journals, maps and magazines – as well as some of the world's most iconic scientific, literary and cultural treasures.

̽��ֱ��new exhibition puts on display Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s papers on evolution, 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a cuneiform tablet from 2,000BC, and the earliest reliable text for 20 of Shakespeare’s plays.

Other items going on display include:

Edmund Halley’s handwritten notebook/sketches of Halley’s Comet (1682)
Stephen Hawking’s draft typescript of A Brief History of Time
Darwin’s first pencil sketch of Species Theory and his Primate Tree
A 2nd century AD fragment of Homer’s Odyssey.
̽��ֱ��Nash Papyrus – a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments
Codex Bezae – 5th century New Testament, crucial to our understanding of ̽��ֱ��Bible.
A hand-coloured copy of Vesalius’ 1543 Epitome – one of the most influential works in western medicine
̽��ֱ��earliest known record of a human dissection in England (1564)
A Babylonian tablet dated 2039 BCE (the oldest object in the library)
̽��ֱ��Gutenberg Bible – the earliest substantive printed book in Western Europe (1455)
̽��ֱ��Book of Deer, 10th century gospel book: thought to be the oldest Scottish book and the first example of written Gaelic
̽��ֱ��first catalogue listing the contents of the Library in 1424, barely a decade after it was first identified in the wills of William Loring and William Hunden

̽��ֱ��six Lines of Thought featured in the exhibition are: From clay tablets to Twitter feed (Revolutions in human communication); ̽��ֱ��evolution of genetics (From Darwin to DNA); Beginning with the word (Communicating faith); On the shoulders of giants (Understanding gravity); Eternal lines (Telling the story of history) and Illustrating anatomy (Understanding the body).

̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “It’s extraordinary to think that the ̽��ֱ�� Library, which started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.

“Our spectacular exhibition showcases six key concepts in human history that have been critical in shaping the world and culture we know today, illustrating the myriad lines of thought that take us back into the past, and forward to tomorrow’s research, innovation and literature.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library, which is older than both the British Library and the Vatican Library, has more than 125 miles of shelving and more than two million books immediately available to readers – making it the largest open-access library in Europe.

̽��ֱ��first Line of Thought featured in the exhibition: From clay tablet to Twitter begins with a tiny 4,000-year-old tablet used as a receipt for wool, evidence of an advanced civilisation using a cuneiform script and Sumerian language, probably written in Girsu (Southern Iraq) and precisely dated to 2039BCE. ̽��ֱ��tablet is on public display for the first time in this exhibition.

From there, it charts the many and varied revolutions in communications throughout history, taking in Chinese oracle bones, the Gutenberg Bible, a palm leaf manuscript written in 1015AD, newspapers, chapbooks and 20th century Penguin paperbacks, before ending with a book containing Shakespeare’s Hamlet written in tweets.

Objects going on display for the first time during Lines of Thought include: the Book of Deer, Vesalius’s 3D manikin of the human body, William Morris’s extensively annotated proofs of his edition of Beowulf, a wonderful caricature of Darwin, and works by Copernicus, Galileo and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars.

“For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us,” added Jarvis. “Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding.

“Only in Cambridge, can you find Newton’s greatest works sitting alongside Darwin’s most important papers on evolution, or Sassoon’s wartime poetry books taking their place next to the Gutenberg Bible and the archive of Margaret Drabble.”

To celebrate the Library’s 600th anniversary, the Library has selected one iconic item from each theme within the exhibition to be digitised and made available within a free iPad app, Words that Changed the World. Readers can turn the pages of these masterworks of culture and science, from cover to cover, accompanied by ̽��ֱ�� experts explaining their importance and giving contextual information.

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World opens to the public on Friday, March 11, 2016 and runs until Friday, September 30, 2016. Entry is free.

̽��ֱ��exhibition is also available to view online, and items from the exhibition have also been digitised and made available on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts – texts which have altered the very fabric of our understanding – will go on display in Cambridge this week as Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library celebrates its 600th birthday with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of its greatest treasures.

What started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.

Anne Jarvis

Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World

Graham CopeKoga

Priceless treasures: in a shot commissioned to celebrate Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s 600th anniversary, Professor Stephen Hawking is pictured with Newton’s annotated first edition of Principia Mathematica.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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A kingly gift: Royal Library goes on display in Cambridge

sjr81 — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 09:01:17 +0000

His Royal Favour: the Books that Built the Library will be opened by HRH ̽��ֱ��Duke of Gloucester on October 1 and looks at how the remarkable royal gift transformed the Library’s collections like no other donation before or since.

Painstakingly collected at huge expense by the Bishop of Ely John Moore, the 30,000 books and manuscripts he accumulated include many unique surviving copies. When Moore died in 1714, a day before Queen Anne, the fate of his collection was a hot topic, and the high price asked placed it out of reach of many private book collectors. In the end, the only person who could afford them was George I, who was persuaded to present the collection to Cambridge in recognition of the ̽��ֱ��’s loyalty to the new Hanoverian king.

̽��ֱ��kingly gift trebled the size of the ̽��ֱ�� Library overnight and transformed it into an internationally significant research centre for the first time.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “Every book George gave is of great historical significance as an artefact as well as by virtue of its contents. ̽��ֱ��300th anniversary of their arrival in Cambridge is the perfect opportunity to celebrate a treasure that remains at the heart of our mission to this day.

“ ̽��ֱ��importance of the collection can be measured by the number of unique early printed books, the number of times books and manuscripts have been consulted by researchers, and the number of items that have featured as star exhibits in many of the previous displays we’ve held at the Library.”

Exhibition curator Emily Dourish added “With a collection of this importance, the greatest difficulty is in selecting just a handful of items to give an impression of the treasures it contains. We could have filled every case ten times over.”

Highlights of the exhibition include the eighth-century manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (the ‘Moore Bede’), written at his own monastery within a decade or two of his death and which at one time belonged to Charlemagne; one of the earliest manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and the ‘Moore Psalter’, a 13th-century French manuscript with stunning illuminated decoration, in which every spare space is filled with animals and figures both real and imagined.

Discoveries are still being made. In the last year, a previously unknown poem – an epitaph on King Henry VII – attributed to 15th-century philosopher Erasmus was noticed in a volume of his epigrams printed in 1518. ̽��ֱ��new discovery goes on display to the public for the first time in this exhibition and exemplifies the ongoing work on Moore’s books – and the discoveries still being made 300 years after they were passed into the Library’s care.

Elsewhere the collection contains unusual editions – such as the 1508 Book of Carving, a manual for young men learning the rules of serving at table in a polite household, and Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the world’s first atlas to include city plans from all the major cities of the Old World, several in Asia and Africa and two in the New World, Mexico and Cuzco, which are on display.

̽��ֱ��great majority of Moore’s books remained on open access for users to browse until the 1950s. Since then, the books have been moved into top-quality conservation-standard book stacks, to preserve them for centuries of future Library users.

Added Jarvis: “As a wealthy collector with excellent connections, Moore was able to form a library of unparalleled importance. His library brought to Cambridge works that the ̽��ֱ�� had thus far failed to provide its scholars such as Newton’s Principia, Hooke’s Micrographia and a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

“Volumes from the Royal Library have been included in half of the major exhibitions held in the Library. We thought it was about time the collection had an exhibition of its own.”

An exhibition celebrating King George I’s gift of 30,000 books and manuscripts to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library - including the celebrated 8th-century ‘Moore Bede’, the world’s first atlas to include city plans, and a previously unknown Erasmus poem - has opened to the public today (October 2).

With a collection of this importance, the greatest difficulty is in selecting just a handful of items to give an impression of the treasures it contains.

Emily Dourish

Royal Library: ̽��ֱ��books that build the library.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

A plan of Mexico City, taken from the 16th-century Civitates orbis terrarum, the world’s first atlas to include city plans

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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