To round off the end of an exciting anniversary year for the cphc, its’ pgr community came together for a visit to the Wolfson Centre which houses Birmingham Library’s Special Collections and Archives, is home to an internationally significant collection of archives, photographs and rare books relating to Birmingham.
As part of the visit, we were lucky enough to receive a behind the scenes tour of the stores. The stores are housed above the reading rooms, ‘in the yellow crown’ which sits atop the iconic building. The collections are stored in environmentally controlled conditions in a reduced oxygen atmosphere – the same conditions as being on a long-haul flight at altitude. At the last count, the archives occupy over twelve miles of shelving, which contain over 6,000 archive collections. As expected for such a prominent archive, the stores were vast and full of delightful treasures – there is no doubt that several members of our group could have quite happily spent several days squirreled away within them. Archivist, Nicola Crews took us round and pulled a few documents off the shelves as we went. As a group of printing historians, we were all especially excited to see the vast collection of printed material that the Centre holds (their Local Studies Collection includes over 60,000 items and they have a huge early fine print collection). One particular highlight was Shakespeare’s First Folio—the first collected edition of his plays, published in 1623. The folio is one of only a handful in public hands and was purchased specifically for the people of Birmingham. It is part of the Library’s Shakespeare Collection, the world’s first and largest dedicated Shakespeare library. Another highlight was the eclectic collection of objects which have found their way into the archive over the years—including a very large stone and a particularly fetching clock. Nicola also laid out a few choice items from the collection for us to look at in more detail in the reading rooms, including the archive’s oldest collection item which dates from the twelfth century, illuminated manuscripts and some fascinating photographs of the old Birmingham Library.
After the tour we retired to a bar in town for Christmas drinks and a proper catch up.
Further information about the Collections can be found here. Further information about the Shakespeare collection can be found here.
Andie Lloyd CPHC and Midlands4Cities ahrc Doctoral Researcher
THESIS TITLE An indissoluble unity: considering the relationship between outward influences and the design of Birmingham's radical newspapers 1815–36