News of Acquisitions
The Mervyn Peake archive
Thanks to the generous support of The Art Fund, Friends of the British Library, Friends of the National Libraries and numerous individual donors, the British Library has acquired the archive of English modernist writer and artist, Mervyn Peake.
Peake is best known as the author of Gormenghast, for which he won the Heinemann Prize for Literature in 1951. His uniquely visual archive came to the British Library in 28 containers and includes Peake's own suitcase. The collection comprises correspondence with notable figures such as Graham Greene, Lawrence Olivier and Dylan Thomas, 39 autograph Gormenghast notebooks, a complete set of original drawings for Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, as well as lesser well known stories, war poems, radio plays and nonsense verses.
Writing and drawing for Peake were interchangeable: he made sketches of his fictional characters in order to help him visualise how they would move and act in the narrative. His Lewis Carroll novels exemplify his belief that the purpose of illustrations is to imbue text with another dimension, not simply to act as an aesthetic accompaniment to it.
Jamie Andrews, Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, said "Following the recent addition of archives of John Berger, Angela Carter, and Ted Hughes, this new acquisition confirms the British Library as the world's pre-emient collection of archival resources for the study and appreciation of English literature".
One of Peake's pen and ink illustrations is to go on display from mid-April in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery as part of a special exhibition, Curiouser and Curiouser: The Genius of Alice in Wonderland.
Sir John Narbrough's Journal
We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Sir John Narbrough's naval journal following a recent fundraising appeal. Thanks to the generosity of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Dr Bernard H Breslauer, the Gosling Foundation and a number of individual donors, this historic document will now remain in the UK to be researched and enjoyed.
An explorer, navigator and close friend of Sir Samuel Pepys, Sir John Narbrough can be positioned historically between Francis Drake and Captain Cook. Sir John Narbrough's journal records his two year voyage to South America from 1669 and contains maps and unresearched information on the ethnographical, zoological and political observations made. One of the most significant outcomes of the expedition was that Narbrough proved trade with South America could be profitable without Spanish consent, and this set the course of Britain's foreign policy for the next half century.
Peter Barber, Head of the Maps Collection at the British Library, said "We are thrilled that Sir John Narbrough's naval journal - a real hidden treasure - has been saved for the nation's seafaring heritage. It is arguably the first English modern nautical journal and contains charts that correspond to every child's idea of what a buccaneer's map looks like. Yet the artistic naivety of the charts belies the technical sophistication and accuracy that underpins them."
Once catalogued, Sir John Narbrough's naval journal will be readily accessible through the Library's reading rooms at St Pancras.
The Dering Roll Saved for the nation
Thanks to the generous support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund, The Friends of the National Libraries, Friends of the British Library and numerous individual donors the British Library has successfully acquired the Dering Roll, the oldest extant English roll of arms, dating from c.1270-1280.
The Roll, a vital record for the study of knighthood in medieval England depicts 324 coats of arms, representing approximately a quarter of the entire English baronage during the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307).
The Roll was sold at auction in December 2007 but was subsequently placed under a temporary export bar by Culture Minister Margaret Hodge. It was awarded a starred rating by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, who considered it to be of particular importance and of outstanding significance for the study of early English heraldry.
The Dering Roll will now be made available to researchers in the British Library's Manuscripts Reading Room and it will be on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library from 1 September 2008.
Claire Breay, Head of Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts at the British Library, commented: “The Dering Roll was identified as a priority acquisition for the British Library, and we are very pleased that we were able to secure the funding required to purchase the Roll and keep it in the UK. The Library holds an extensive collection of outstanding historical and heraldic manuscripts and the acquisition of the Dering Roll provides an extremely rare chance to add a manuscript of enormous local and national significance which will greatly strengthen and complement its existing collection”.
Harold Pinter Archive Saved for the Nation
Thanks to the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and generous grants from Dr Alice Griffin, the American Trust for the British Library, the Michael Marks Charitable Trust and other private trusts and donors, we were able to purchase the archive of the pre-eminent Nobel Prize-winning playwright and writer Harold Pinter in December 2007.
Comprising over 150 boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, programmes and emails, the archive offers an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars of Pinter's work for stage, cinema, and poetry. Highlights include an exceedingly perceptive and enormously affectionate run of letters from Samuel Beckett, letters and hand-written manuscripts revealing Pinter's close collaboration with director Joseph Losey; a charming and highly amusing exchange of letters with Philip Larkin; and a draft of Pinter's unpublished autobiographical memoir of his youth, 'The Queen of all the Fairies'. Together with material relating to the award of the Nobel Prize, cuttings books, and photographs, these papers amount to one of the most significant post-War literary archives of one of the greatest Anglophone playwrights of the 20th century.