Voices of the Bodleian

April 2021: Dr Chris Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections

As Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Chris is interested in the development of its outstanding collections of rare or unique materials and making them available to the academic community in Oxford and beyond. He has a particular interest in literary archives and manuscripts, and contemporary artists' books:

I’m very interested in provocative things. Things that relate to legible culture very broadly. The Super Terrain edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for example, can only be read by holding a flame close to the pages to reveal its text and of course, as all users of the Bodleian have to promise never to light a fire within the library, this book will never be read. We recently acquired something called Remains by Stephen Emmerson. It’s ten vials containing the deconstructed text of a poem. For example, the ashes of the poem, the broken lead of the pencil that wrote the poem, the breath of the poet who wrote the poem - no student has ever dared to open that one, through curious reverence. It’s so interesting to see people’s physical reactions to things like that. We use them in teaching all the time. As a department, we are fascinated by material culture, the qualities of the ‘thing’ itself.

Something else that took my interest recently was a 19th century ‘noctograph’, acquired from a collector of typewriters. It has a metal grid to guide writing and uses a very early form of carbon paper. It was used for making copies of script at night or if you had poor eyesight or were blind. We started looking at Mary Shelley’s manuscripts for Frankenstein and noticed that these have very defined lines. And we know the Godwins [Mary Shelley’s family] were close to the inventors of this technology and were known to use this early type of carbon paper. The manuscript of Frankenstein might have been created by one of these machines. However, we couldn’t get the lines to quite match up so then again, maybe not.   But it shows you how the acquisition of objects like these really help our understanding of how manuscripts get made. 

We also have collections of pins, which were used to hold pieces of paper together before paper clips. We have a manuscript of Jane Austen’s The Watsons, one of her earlier unfinished novels. You can see that when she wanted to change something, she would pin a piece of paper over it. The pins can be dated, so they can help you understand how something has built up, almost like early post-it notes. 

Digitisation and digital preservation is hugely important and an interesting additional facet of my work at the Bodleian but it’s also extremely challenging. The Library of Congress tried at one point to archive the whole of Twitter but abandoned the noble effort. So far we’ve digitised a very significant quantity of our collections, but it’s expensive and done on a project-funded basis. It’s no good just taking digital images - you have to describe what people are looking at, so it’s an intensive process. Digital is good at conveying content. One thing it’s not so good at is capturing physical aspects. You can’t capture every aspect of the physical in digital. The things that are born-digital: emails, digital files, social media, they’re a massive challenge for libraries to future-proof. We collect personal and institutional archives all the time, but a big issue is the practicalities. How do you develop the protocols to preserve that material and make it available? There are considerations of confidentiality and viability of the platforms data is held on. That’s where libraries really have to focus their efforts. 

Even if we stopped collecting, it would take years to fully catalogue everything we’ve got in our own collections. It’s a source of anxiety that I’ll never know all the manuscripts we have in our collections! I used to be the curator of manuscripts at the British Library. It was a wonderful experience, focusing on the literary side. I moved to the Bodleian because I wanted to get back to a university library and have a more immediate contact with historical manuscripts and their student users. Things turn up, even within our existing collections. Things that might not have been catalogued correctly historically can be rediscovered. Recently a lexicographer was doing work on [James] Boswell’s early dictionary. It was originally thought to be another dictionary but the researcher recognised the handwriting. It’s a skill to recognise handwriting across multiple manuscripts. Applying AI technology to help recognise writing from various authors will be used more in the future but the technology isn’t perfect yet, and for now human skill is still superior. 

Since Covid, we are all missing being in a room with the objects, actually being in the presence of the Magna Carta or a [Shakespeare] First Folio. We’ve managed to achieve a lot remotely though. We used to run talks for Friends of the Bodleian and we now do these online and are reaching people across the globe. It’s making us more accessible. 

One really interesting trend of lockdown has been that more people have been rearranging their bookshelves, looking in their attics and then coming to us and saying ‘I’ve got something you might be interested in.’ We got a big list of things to investigate from the Covid clear-outs!

I don’t think written manuscripts will ever disappear. People will always write, and there will always be collectors. It’s interesting to see the explosion of interest in book artists. The rise of digital has thrown people back into the world of the tangible. Students really respond to beautifully designed and printed books. Some people want to get right back to the business of inky fingers, pressed onto paper- the most analogue and tactile forms of communication. We’re seeing vinyl and 35mm film having a revival and the same is happening with writing and books.