The making of ‘In Praise of Libraries’
I listened to the audio archive and selected various sections of the transcript. I then took a trip to explore books in the Readerships and Literary Cultures 1900-1950 book archive at Sheffield Hallam University. The archive is nestled in a custom made wooden pod within the Adsett’s library, it has book shelves (of course) and places to sit and read. It’s a special little reading place preserving words that were read in the first half of the 20th century. The work above is my first response, I’m planning 11 more.
Here is the second one. I especially like the Anderson shelter. It’s from WW2, but looks like it has been dug up and converted to a handy garden shed. This was common after the war had ended. The shelters date back to 1938 and were designed by Sir John Anderson each one protected six people from German air raids. I think that families must have been bigger then. The edition of Far From the Madding Crowd belonged to my grandfather, it’s bound in rather beautiful plum coloured leather with embossed gold lettering. I’m rather fond of the words from this transcript, we share some favourite books and I love the words ‘my life would have been less rich without reading’, so I have made sure that it is not obscured.
This is Josie. I choose to put The Scarlet Pimpernel there because she describes it as the first book that ‘grabbed’ her. Aesthetically the colour and it’s battered state appeal to me. This volume is in the Readerships and Literary Cultures 1900-1950 archive at Sheffield Hallam University.
The energy leaps out of the pages of Mavis’s transcript, if she ever sat down it was with a book. She seems to have read entire libraries, five books at a time, which is why there is more than one book in this piece of artwork.
