From the founding of St John’s College in 1555 through to the present day, the life of the Library has been one of bold choices and big changes. Our current exhibition, Stories from the Shelves, explores the Library and its readers throughout the ages using items from our special collections. Here you can see aContinue reading “Stories from the Shelves”
Category Archives: Past Exhibitions
“excuse the scrawl”: literary letters from St. John’s special collections
Alongside collections of manuscripts and early printed books, St. John’s College’s Special Collections include personal papers of a number of well-known literary figures: Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, Jane Austen, Philip Larkin, Spike Milligan and Professor J.B. Leishman. Included in these papers is a great deal of correspondence, occasionally between other literary figures, or concerning literaryContinue reading ““excuse the scrawl”: literary letters from St. John’s special collections”
Do we need pictures? Illustration of the earliest printed books.
St. John’s holds an important collection of incunables, i.e. books printed before 31st December 1501. The process of printing with movable type was invented around 1450 in Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg, as recorded by the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, a text which preserves the testimony of the first printer of Cologne, Ulrich Zell, who hadContinue reading “Do we need pictures? Illustration of the earliest printed books.”
In the Library
A selection of livres d’artiste from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is on temporary display in St. John’s College Library. It has been drawn from the college’s collection of such books, a collection which Dr Peter Hacker built when he was the Library Fellow at the college. In the glossary of French Livres d’artiste inContinue reading “In the Library”
Not An Illustration: Livres d’artiste in the Special Collections of St. John’s College, Oxford
“Experience of our age in terms of painting—not an illustration of—(but the equivalent.)” – Jackson Pollock This is an exhibition of a selection of the college’s livres d’artiste and some other rare books which were produced in the early 1930s, in collaboration with Leonard Lye, a modernist film-maker and sculptor. In the glossary ofContinue reading “Not An Illustration: Livres d’artiste in the Special Collections of St. John’s College, Oxford”
‘The Field of Human Conflict’: War Exhibition 2014
The Library at St John’s College houses extensive Special Collections, which date back to the 9th century and include some 400 manuscripts, 20,000 early printed books and significant collections of modern literary papers. In order to give College members the chance to learn more about these, we organise exhibitions displaying a number of items ofContinue reading “‘The Field of Human Conflict’: War Exhibition 2014”