King's College and the Victorian Gothic

On an unusually sunny and warm morning (thank you, weather gods!), we visited King's College Maughan Library and Special Collections. The library is part of a Victorian Gothic structure, complete with gargoyles, and the building was fascinating. The gift coordinator, John Welby, took half our class on a tour of buildings. The library was built with fire-proofing and cost in mind, and the building itself is made of cast iron, with a "cellular" structure: small rooms, which could each be closed off in case of a fire outbreak.

The library has its own mini round reading room, with a ceiling made of zinc (one of two in the UK, both of which are in this building) instead of the paper mache of the British Museum. The zinc is also flame retardant, but, I imagine, terribly heavy.

One of the original cell doors is still in place, and it is said to weigh a half a ton, and each cell that contained shelves and iron flooring weighed about 90 tons. !

The half-ton door:

When we returned from our tour, we got a wonderful introduction to the special collections materials. The archivists had put together an American table, a table on challenges for archivists, and a table on promotion activities. Each table was fascinating, and I particularly enjoyed the challenges table, because some of these things I'd never thought of: for instance, what do you do with a children's book that is horribly anti-semitic, but that is a historical artifact? You put it in protective plastic and let people continue to learn how history really went down.

We saw Ben Franklin's signature.

We saw "hiatus printing," which was a technical loophole for printers: they would leave out certain words or phrases that could get them shut down, and then hand-write the missing information post-printing.

We saw one of the first Bibles printed in India. The typeface gets smaller as the book goes on, because publishers realized the cost and tried to save space!

We saw (and touched!) several incunabula, or books that were printed before 1501.

We also saw some chapbooks, which are always interesting to me.

At the end of our tours and explorations of the tables, we had tea and biscuits in a beautiful room full of funerary monuments from the 17th century. I asked one of the archivists about children's books, and he later emailed me with such a wealth of information that I couldn't believe how generous these people had been to us. It was a truly wonderful visit!

I topped it off with a trip to the largest bookstore in Europe!