The Literary Clinic: September 2012

Sunday 30 September 2012

The Caxton Window at Stationers Hall, London

On Friday, we took the new students to visit Stationers Hall, in London. One of my favourite things there is the Caxton Window, which shows Caxton with the young King Edward IV and his Queen, Elizabeth Woodville. On the floor, bottom left, is Wynkyn de Worde. The window was given by Joshua Butterworth, the law bookseller, as his gift as Master in 1894.
My photograph doesn't do it justice at all - the colours are beautiful, and the story it tells and the details around the edges mean it's hard to tire of looking at it. The rest of the Hall has further stained glass panels depicting Shakespeare, Tyndale, St Cecilia, Caxton and Cranmer: it is a stunning location, and easy to feel centuries of publishing history pulsing in the atmosphere....

Weird and Wonderful!

A little something to lighten a dull Sunday afternoon: take a look at this post from another blog, The Private Library (http://privatelibrary.typepad.com/the_private_library/2011/04/really-weird-titles-and-the-private-library.html)

Quotations

"The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something lofty about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic." Alan Bennett, The Common Reader, pp. 30-31.

"Any external pressure to write scholarly books and articles is pernicious not only because it may well divert a career from its natural course, thus causing a great deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship." Richard D. Altick and John J. Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research, p.13

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things." Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve” - Montesquieu

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Milton, Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicenced printing to the Parliament of England

“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”― Thomas à Kempis

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas à Kempis

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorge Luis Borges

The book was the culminating event in medieval culture before it was the first invention of the modern world...The printed book...is in the first instance an agent of the continuity of medieval culture rather than its rupture.

James Carey, 'The Paradox of the Book', Library Trends 33, no 2(Fall 1984): 110.

How many realize that the borrowing of a reasonably well-written novel, instead of the purchase of a semi-illiterate periodical or novelette, is a move full of hope and fraught with possibilities?
Stanley Unwin, 1935

Sunday 30 September 2012

The Caxton Window at Stationers Hall, London

Weird and Wonderful!

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