The Cunard Archive. Cunard & the city of Liverpool

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  • Book of comparison. Lusitania and Mauretania compared with St. Georges Hall, Liverpool. (early 1900s). D42/S7/1/6
  • Starboard view of the Aurania III at Liverpool. (1924). D42/PR2/1/29/C1
  • Servia, passengers embarking at Princes Landing Stage, Liverpool. (n.d.). D42/PR1/49/641
  • Mauretania II looking towards Liverpool waterfront. [1938] D42/PR1/13/12
  • Princes Landing Stage, seen from RMS Ascania at embarkation. [1952]. D42/PR2/9/9/4

As we look forward to the Queen Mary 2 arriving in Liverpool on Tuesday 16 July, we have chosen some items from the Cunard Archive that represent Cunard’s historic connection to the city of Liverpool.

Britannia. Exterior illustration. D42/PR2/1/36a/C1

Cunard’s first ever ship, the 1,156-ton Britannia left Liverpool on 4th July 1840 and arrived on schedule in Halifax just ten days later. Within a year Britannia and her three sister ships were providing the first timetabled weekly steamship service across the Atlantic.

The Mauretania II was the first ship to be built for the newly formed Cunard White Star Line and was laid down on 24 May 1937. Built on the Mersey in Birkenhead by Cammel, Laird & Co. Ltd, it was the largest ship ever to be constructed in an English shipyard at the time.

This booklet commemorates the launch of the Mauretania II at the yard of Cammell Laird & Co Limited, Birkenhead on Thursday 28th July 1938. The naming ceremony was performed by Lady Bates and was watched by spectacular crowds.

Cunard’s headquarters was based in Liverpool from its inception in 1839 until 1967 when it relocated to Southampton. As the company grew so did its administrative requirements meaning its original offices in Water Street were no longer suitable.  Completed in 1917 the Cunard Building on Liverpool’s historic waterfront became known as one of the Three Graces. 

This commemorative publication provides an overview of the design and construction of the building and is supplemented with illustrations.

…

More information about the Cunard Archive and how to access it can be found on the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives website: https://libguides.liverpool.ac.uk/library/sca/cunardarchive

New Accession: Cunard Associated Deposits

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Cunard printed W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts tour booklet . D1212/3

    D1212 – W. H. Rhodes Educational Trust Canada Tour, 1961

    We are pleased to share the news of an interesting new accession of material relating to the W. H. Rhodes Educational Trusts Canada Tour of 1961, now available to consult on request at Special Collections and Archives.

    Donated by David Phillips, a member of the 1961 Canada tour group, the collection includes printed information about the W. H. Rhodes 1961 tour, such as booklets and itineraries; material collected during the trip, such as Cunard ephemera and leaflets from places visited; and photographs and news cuttings that document the trip.

    D1212/4
    The 1961 Tour group. D1212/4 (p.2)

    It has been fascinating to learn about the history of the W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts

    The first Canada tour took place in 1937, as a result of the vision and generosity of Mr. W. H. Rhodes, C.B.E., Such was the success of this pilot tour that, the following year, Mr. Rhodes founded the W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts, under the terms of which students were selected to visit Canada in 1938, 1939 and every year from 1951 to 1963.

    The boys were drawn from secondary schools of the cities in which Mr. Rhodes had business interests.  The 1961 tour included 16 students from London and 8 students each from Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, and Manchester. The boys, aged on average 18.5 years and at the end of their last year of sixth form, were selected for their academic achievement and good character.

    The Foreword to the Report on the 1961 Tour to Canada (archive reference: D1212/4) discusses the great opportunity afforded to those boys chosen:

    To be transported at this juncture, from the industrial cities of Great Britain to the heartland of Canada, is a timely and broadening experience; to share in this venture with highly selected companions, in the most formative years of life, is a unique opportunity; to go as “representatives of one country of the Commonwealth visiting another” is an honour […] With the months of careful preparation behind them, they set forth determined to play their full part in helping to realise the high ideals and purpose of our generous founder, “in strengthening those ties of kinship, mutual trust and affection enduring among the countries of the British Commonwealth”.

    The tour groups travelled to and from Canada on Cunard ships, accompanied by a representative from the Cunard Company. 

    The 1961 tour sailed from Liverpool on R.M.S. Carinthia on 2 August and travelled back to the United Kingdom on the R.M.S. Saxonia, arriving at Southampton on 1 September.

    • Cunard printed W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts tour booklet . D1212/3
    • D1212/7
    • W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts tour booklet . D1212/1
    • Cunard Line luggage labels created for the W. H. Rhodes Educational Trust tour group . D1212/5

    For the outward journey on the Carinthia Cunard printed special W. H. Rhodes luggage tags and created travel booklets that included interesting information about life on board the ship, such as instructions on how to distinguish the rank of an officer on board, and guides to places they were visiting in Canada.

    The 1961 tour group visited Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara, Sudbury, Temagami and Camp Wanapetei. They had tours of Universities, Civic Buildings, Farms, Businesses and Factories (such as the International Nickel Company and the Queenston Hydro-Electric Project), and were welcomed by City Mayors, Businessmen, Academics and Politicians (including the Prime Minister John Diefenbaker).

    The new accession has been added to Cunard Associated Deposits, a collection of items deposited by individuals with personal connections to the shipping company. The full catalogue for the W. H. Rhodes Educational Trusts Canada Tour material is available online.

    Other W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts material can be found in the archive at:

    • D371/4/6/3-4: W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts tour to Canada, 1963 – booklet and report. (2 items)
    • D42/PR4/14/8/5: W. H. Rhodes Canada Educational Trusts tour to Canada,1952 – booklet. (1 item)

    The Lancelyn Green Pamphlets

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    This post was written by 2nd year History student Aneurin Evans, reflecting on his work on the Lancelyn Green pamphlets for the HIST200 module.

    As an undergraduate history student at the University of Liverpool, I was given the opportunity to work in the Special Collections and Archives of the University library. This was through my module History in Practice which was focused on practical applications of a history degree in employment. I worked on a collection of pamphlets donated by Roger Lancelyn-Green (1918-1987) of the prominent Wirral and Cheshire based family. The pamphlets were mostly collected by Thomas Green (d.1747), and as such most were printed in the years surrounding his lifetime between 1680 and 1740, though there are some outliers as early as the 1620s and as late as the mid 1800s. In total I went through around one thousand pamphlets, sorting them by size while noting their other physical characteristics such as inscriptions, damage, stitching and binding.

    The pamphlets are almost universally of a religious nature: printed sermons, essays and back and forth arguments on theology. They sometimes comment on political events such as the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, through a religious perspective, and there is general discussion of liberties and the rights of men. However, most comment on more down to earth issues such as day-to-day morals and religious practice, offering insight into the cultural and religious life of the time. It must be noted that the writings come from a very specific and homogenous section of society and contribute mostly top-down perspectives. However, they certainly are still useful sources. The prominence of the authors positions and the sheer number of them make this collection really valuable, especially for anyone studying the history of religion, politics or the printing and consumption of writings in this period. The focus of the pamphlets is an advantage in this sense as it can provide a historian with deep and specific detail. As part of my cataloguing I noted how many copies of each pamphlet were available at other British universities and institutions, using the ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue) database. A considerable number of pamphlets in the Lancelyn Green collection were one of five or fewer , and in some cases the only copy.

    Much of the value of this collection lies in the attributes I was recording such as the size, format, stitching and binding. The collection is particularly useful for historians wanting to research these material aspects of written sources as the pamphlets have almost all been kept unbound as they were originally issued. The intact and well preserved nature of the collection gives an insight into the way that pamphlets were collected and read, as well as a good idea of the kind of literature a man like Thomas Green would have had access to and been reading. The pamphlets were more visually interesting and varied than one might expect. Though most were of a simple black and white design with only text, many others had printed ornaments or other illustrations on the cover pages that I am sure would be of interest to researchers but also serves to make browsing the collection more engaging. One element of design that stood out to me were the numerous multi-coloured and marbled covers on pamphlets throughout the collection, something I did not expect of widely circulated publications from the period.

    Personally the work gave me an opportunity to experience a level of history I had not experienced before. By that I not only mean direct contact with physical primary sources but also the more practical side of research and preservation. Up to this point I had been more focused on secondary sources or reprinted primary sources. I knew relatively little about how high-level academic historical works were researched, compared to my undergraduate essays, and the ways in which primary sources are located and used by historians. In conclusion I would recommend that anyone interested in relevant historical research consults the Lancelyn Green pamphlet collection.

    • LGP pamphlet with printed ornament
    • LGP 565
    • LGP pamphlet with marbled paper covers

    References:

    Digitized copies of the texts (mostly from copies in other libraries) of the Lancelyn Green pamphlets can be consulted online (with institutional login) in the following databases:

    • EEBO Early English Books Online
    • ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online
    • Roger Lancelyn Green, the donor of the collection, wrote about the pamphlets as they were originally kept in the Library at the family home on the Wirral in: Poulton Lancelyn. The Story of an Ancestral Home (Oxford, 1948)

    The Grace Library – Sir Isaac Newton: beyond the maths.

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    This is the third in a series of posts by 2nd year History student Eddie Meehan. Eddie is working on The Grace Library of the Department of Applied Mathematics, a collection of 17th to 19th century mathematics texts, centred around the collections of Walter and Alicia Stott and Duncan C Fraser, and named after Samuel Forster Grace. The collection is rooted firmly in the city and University of Liverpool, and particularly in the Liverpool Mathematics Society and the Worshipful Company of Actuaries.

    The Grace Library collection contains a wide range of volumes relating to Sir Isaac Newton, including many that were written by him. Newton is world famous for his work on physics, particularly Newtonian mechanics, but there are a range of other volumes written about and by him that are significantly less well known in the Grace Library collection. Newton’s works make up a significant part of the Grace Library collection, with 11 volumes written by Newton himself and a number of others written by others regarding Newton’s work.

    The collection contains a work written by Newton named The chronology of ancient kingdoms, published in 1728, in which Newton detailed the history of various kingdoms located principally in the Near East. This involved linking various figures of Greek and Roman mythology to Biblical and historical events, and ultimately sought to prove that Solomon’s kingdom and temple were the earliest in human history. In doing this, he deviated massively from what is now accepted as Mesopotamian and Egyptian history and from the contemporary chronology of the Near East. The volume itself is part of the collection bequeathed by Duncan Fraser and named after Walter Stott, who were both Liverpool actuaries. However unfortunately it bares no other identifying provenance marks.

    Another volume written by Newton is the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, published in 1733. This volume is a work of theology, another departure from Newton’s more well-known works of physics and maths. The work is a collection of various notes written by Newton and published after his death by his half-nephew, Benjamin Smith, and as such is divided into two parts. This particular volume has a far clearer provenance history to it, bearing bookplates of ownership of a Rob Taylor and a John Baker, along with also being part of the Walter Stott collection.

    The collection also contains many of Newton’s more well-known works, such as Opticks and Principia, along with French translations of the latter that were possessed by University College London and given out as examination prizes. Opticks bears a bookplate of Sir Ralph Milbanke. He was one of a line of baronets that formed part of the family of Ada Lovelace, a mathematician known for her work on Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, an early predecessor to the modern computer.

    Various volumes also appear that were not written by Newton, but were written about Newton. Among these are volumes that seek to analyse his work, such as Henry Brougham’s Analytical view of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. Brougham was a significant Whig politician of the early 19th century, who supported free trade and an end to the slave trade, but also was a well-regarded lawyer and scholar who was one of the founders of University College London in 1826. Once again, this volume was part of the Walter Stott collection donated by Duncan Fraser to the University.

    Nightingales in Abercromby Square

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    During the University’s Wellbeing Week Abercromby Square has hosted bird life great and small, from the eagles, owls and falcons of Cheshire Falconry, to postcard-sized ‘Nightingales.‘ A flock of six were released to celebrate the bicentenary of the composition of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale, in the form of six poems newly-commissioned for Pavilion Poetry.

    The poems were also available in support of the RSPB at a talk by the English Department’s Bethan Roberts on Nightingales in poetry and science in the age of Keats. Bethan’s talk, accompanied by recordings of the Nightingale’s song and a display of books from Special Collections & Archives, brought an audience of nearly 50 birdlovers to the School of the Arts Library comprising University staff and students and members of the public from across the Liverpool City Region.

    The nine books on display covered Ornithology, Poetry, and the unlikely topic of Nightingales in Liverpool…

    • Bewick’s Nightingale
    • Morris’s Nightingale
    1. Thomas Bewick, 1753-1828 History of British birds. The figures engraved on wood by T. Bewick (Newcastle, 1797-1804). Two volumes. SPEC L45.19-20 (vol. 1 Land Birds, 1797 has woodcut of Nightingale).
      Thomas Bewick, wood engraver, revitalised the art of woodcuts with his detailed natural history illustrations: he was driven to improve on the crude illustrations in the books he knew as a child. His work impressed Matthew Gregson of the Liverpool Print Society, who gave it “the highest Encomiums of Praise”, and commissioned his tradecard from Bewick. The hugely successful  History of British Birds (mentioned in Jane Eyre) illustrates each major British bird species, and has lively ‘tail-pieces’ providing pictorial ironic comment.
    2. Charlotte Smith, 1749-1806 A Natural History of Birds, intended for young persons (London, 1807). JUV.A429.
      Charlotte Smith, poet and novelist, was praised by her contemporaries, including Wordsworth and Walter Scott, for her descriptions of nature. Her works for children were a successful new venture towards the end of her career, including the posthumously published Natural History of Birds, a mixture of description, mythology and fables about birds of Britain and Europe.
    3. Francis Orpen Morris, 1810-1893 A history of British birds (London, 1870). Six volumes. SPEC Ryl.P.3.11-16 (vol. 10 has hand-coloured lithograph of Nightingale).
      Francis Orpen Morris, clergyman and naturalist, collected birds and insects as a child and his writings on natural history were the best-known of his wide-ranging publications. Morris campaigned for the protection of wild birds and co-founded the Plumage League to oppose the extravagant use of bird’s feathers in fashion. The engravings in A History of British Birds are by the renowned woodblock colour printer Benjamin Fawcett.

    Some other early ornithological books in Special Collections include:

    • William Yarrell, 1784-1856 A history of British birds illustrated by wood engravings (London, 1837-1845). Three volumes with supplement. SPEC Noble D.20.12 -14
    • Thomas Pennant, 1726-1798 British zoology (London, 1776-1777). Four volumes. SPEC L16.37-40 (vol. 2 has illustration of Nightingale).
    • Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, The natural history of birds, illustrated with engravings. Nine volumes. SPEC L24.51 (vol. 5 has engraving of Nightingale).
    • Portrait of John Keats in 1820 edition.
    • Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale
    • Nightingale cover design on Keynes’s anthology
    1. John Keats, 1795-1821 Lamia, Isabella, The eve of St Agnes, and other poems (London, 1820). SPEC J22.28.
      One of the other poems in this book is Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ This Liverpool volume (presented to the University by Mr S. Samuels in 1947) has a pencil drawing inserted as frontispiece, inscribed on the back ‘John Keats from a Sketch by [Joseph] Severn presented to his kind friend Thos. Pickering by Charles Cowden Clarke’. Correspondence from 1943, when the book was sent to the National Portrait Gallery in London, suggests that Samuels bought the book from the bookseller Elkin Matthews.
    2. John Keats, 1795-1821 Odes, Sonnets and Lyrics (Oxford, 1895). SPEC Noble A.15.29.
      Twenty-five poems by Keats selected by the poet Robert Bridges (1844-1930) and printed at the ‘Arts and Craft’ Daniel Press in Oxford. C.H.O. Daniel (1836-1919), Fellow and later Provost of Worcester College, produced limited editions of high quality on a printing press set up in a cottage in his garden at the college. This volume (no. 27 of the 250 copies printed) was bought by William Noble (1838-1912) who bequeathed his fine collection of private press books to the University and endowed the William Noble Fellowship.
    3. A watch of nightingales: [an anthology of poems on the song of the nightingale] edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Kt., and Peter Davidson. (London, 1981). SPEC S/Z239.2.S885.K41.
      This modern private press book was printed in an edition of 400 copies at the Stourton Press, and uses as its title the collective noun for nightingales. The collection of nearly 50 poems and fragments on nightingales stems from Keynes’s attempts to identify his 1784 etching of a poem ‘To A Nightingale’ as the work of William Blake.

    Some other Nightingale poetry in Special Collections:

    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’ in Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798). SPEC Fraser 390 (1890 reprint).
    • John Clare Poems descriptive of rural life and scenery (London, 1821).
      SPEC Fraser 1601 (4th edition)
    • William Blake, ‘Spring’ in Songs of Innocence; Milton ( Many editions in the William Blake collection).
    • Special Collections also holds editions of John Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, Paradise Lost, and nightingale sonnet and works by Ovid including the myth of Philomela.
    • Rathbone Nightingale
    • Liverpool Royal Institution Catalogue of birds
    • Gould’s Hummingbirds
    1. The poetry of birds: selected from various authors; / with coloured illustrations by a lady. (Liverpool, 1833). SPEC J24.59.
      This anonymous work is a compilation of poems about birds, with corresponding hand-coloured illustrations, and additional coloured illustrations of birds pasted in. The text and drawings are the work of poet, editor, artist and writer Hannah Mary Rathbone, née Reynolds (1798-1878), a member of Liverpool’s renowned Rathbone family. The book was printed and published in Liverpool by George Smith at Tithebarn Street, and survives in very few copies.
    2. Liverpool Royal Institution Museum: entries for Nightingale and Blackcap in Catalogue of birds (1836). Liverpool Royal Institution Archive LRI 2/2/1/4.
      The Liverpool Royal Institution was founded in 1814 by a group of Liverpool merchants and professional men, associates of the Liverpool philanthropist William Roscoe (1753–1831). The grade II Liverpool Royal Institution building, which still stands on Colquitt Street, was built in 1799 as a house and warehouse for the merchant and slave-trader Thomas Parr, and adapted to house the LRI’s collections and activities, including the natural history museum. Most of the collections were acquired by gift or deposit, including the nightingale and blackcap (‘the Northern Nightingale’) specimens listed in this catalogue (51 and 52 on the page displayed). The surviving Library and Archive of the LRI are housed in Special Collections. The American naturalist and artist John James Audubon (1785-1851) exhibited seven  paintings at the LRI’s 1827 exhibition: two of these, ‘An Otter Caught in a Trap’ and ‘A Pounce on Partridges’, are on display in the VGM’s Audubon Gallery.
    3. John Gould, 1804-1881 A monograph of the Trochilidae or family of humming birds (London: published by the Author, 1849-61). Issued in 25 separate parts; with a 5-part supplement completed by Richard Bowdler Sharpe, 1880-87. SPEC 300.1.
      John Gould was described by Sacheverell Sitwell as ‘model and prototype for the Victorian bearded man,’ and his home in Bloomsbury as ‘a taxidermist’s paradise’. Sitwell also commented that Gould’s illustrations were chiefly drawn by his wife, by Edward Lear, and William Hart. These illustrations (418 in this work alone) were then lithographed and hand-coloured.  The shimmering effect of the birds’ plumage is replicated in the illustrations by the inclusion of gold leaf under a transparent layer of oil paints and varnish (note from catalogue of the Royal Collections Trust). Many of Gould’s works were acquired for the Library of the Liverpool Royal Institution, which is now part of Special Collections.       

    Z is for Zaehnsdorf

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    In the final post in our A-Z of Books, we look at bindings by the famous English firm of Zaehnsdorf, founded by Joseph Zaehnsdorf from Hungary and continued by the same family from 1843 to 1947. The Zaehnsdorf name is now incorporated in the firm Shepherds Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

    The British Library Database of Bookbinings, which can be searched by binder, has images of a range of Zaehnsdorf bindings.

    The collections in Special Collections hold Zaehnsdorf bindings dating from the 1880s to 1953 (the latter after a design by Fazakerley of Liverpool).

    Two examples: SPEC Y88.3.324 (volume 5) and SPEC J24.39 show all aspects of their fine binding work. The first volume was owned by Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton (1844-1916), a pioneering experimental pharmocologist renowned for his work on the treatment of angina. The second volume is no. 17 of a limited edition of 500 copies of George Chandler’s William Roscoe of Liverpool (1953), sponsored by Liverpool City Council.

    SPEC Y88.3.324 v.5 in signed Zaehnsdorf binding.
    SPEC Y88.3.324 v.5 page edges.
    SPEC Y88.3.324 v.5 Zaehnsdorf name on verso of marbled endpaper.
    SPEC J24.39. Bound by Zaehnsdorf Ltd., after a design by Fazakerley of Liverpool.
    SPEC J24.39: doublures and turn-ins.

    The Grace Library – The Brilliant Booles

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    This is the third in a series of posts by 2nd year History student Eddie Meehan. Eddie is working on The Grace Library of the Department of Applied Mathematics, a collection of 17th to 19th century mathematics texts, centred around the collections of Walter and Alicia Stott and Duncan C Fraser, and named after Samuel Forster Grace. The collection is rooted firmly in the city and University of Liverpool, and particularly in the Liverpool Mathematics Society and the Worshipful Company of Actuaries.

    Particularly connected to the Grace Library collection are the Boole family, partly through Walter Stott, the husband of Alicia Boole. The most famous Boole is George Boole, known for Boolean logic, a key component of computer science and the philosophy of logic. Operators used on computers today such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ are known as Boolean operators.

    George Boole (1814-1864)

    George Boole taught briefly in Liverpool at Mr Marrat’s School , which would become part of the expanding Lime Street Station, at 4 Whitemill Street. This move was forced on Boole due to the collapse of his father’s shoe-making business. The school was run by William Marrat, who was, much like George Boole, self-taught in maths and science.

    His wife, Mary Boole, specialised in the education of maths, writing various texts on education along with a variety of other topics including the occult. She was entirely self-taught, and was involved in the writing and editing of many of George Boole’s works. She was also the niece of Sir George Everest, after who Mount Everest was named.

    In the collection, there is a bound collection of papers collated by Francis William Newman, one of which is written by and has a pencil inscription by George Boole. The collection also holds a bound group of papers written by him and owned by his daughter, Alicia Boole. Outside of the Grace library, the university library possesses a range of items relating to the Booles, including holdings from the transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, which George Boole contributed to.

    Dedication from Boole to Newman.

    Alicia Boole was also a mathematician, focusing mainly on four dimensional geometry, which she became interested in after receiving a set of small coloured wooden cubes from her mathematician brother-in-law, Charles Howard Hinton. She became a very well regarded mathematician, so much so that she was elected the president of the Liverpool Mathematics Society in 1914 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen.

    Many of the volumes in the collection are linked to Alicia Boole through her husband, Walter Stott, who was a local actuary. Stott worked for the Worshipful Company of Actuaries in Liverpool, and was also elected president of LivMS. Much of the collection bears bookplates from the Walter Stott collection, and many bear inscriptions from him.

    Y is for Yellowback

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    ‘Yellowbacks’ were an innovative and distinctive publishing format developed in the middle of the 19th century. These small format books were covered with glazed (usually yellow) paper covered boards, which was block printed with eye-catching imagery.

    Designed to appeal to a growing market of readers, emerging in part as a result of the spread of education, the development of the ‘yellowback’ was also closely linked to the emergence of the first railway bookstalls. The format was designed to grab the attention of travellers in a hurry, and to capitalise on a spirit of adventure. Yellowbacks were small, light, and cheap to buy – part subsidised by the use of advertisements.

    Inside these striking covers yellowbacks typically contained sensation novels, crime fiction and adventure stories – usually stereotyped reprints of earlier print editions of popular texts by well-known authors.

    References and Further Reading:

    UCLA Yellowback Cover Art Gallery

    James, Elizabeth. “Aspects of the Victorian Book: Yellowbacks”.

    Shilton, Tom. “The Yellowback: Sensational Stories on the Railways.” 2017

    X is for χ

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    The X-like letter in the title of this post is actually the lowercase form of the Greek letter ‘chi’ (the uppercase is X). It earns a place in our A to Z of Books for its role in the collation of printed books: that is, recording all the leaves and gatherings (or quires) that make up the physical volume, as explained in our A is for Alphabet post.

    You will see the note ‘Signatures’ in many of the newer catalogue records for our early printed books, for example this 18th century volume from the library of the Liverpool Royal Institution:

    catalogue record for SPEC Y76.2.167

    Signatures: *⁸ ²*² **⁸ A-I⁸ K¹² [chi]⁴ L-Ee⁸ ²A-B⁸.

    For many books, the letters of the printer’s alphabet (excluding J, U and W as being easily confused with I and V) are sufficient to describe the book in hand, but sometimes it is not so straightforward, which is where Greek letters come in. It is common to find these spelled out, as in the example above, instead of using Greek characters which may not be accessible across all devices.

    But what do they mean? It is common to find books in which not all the gatherings are signed (that is, marked with, for example, A, A2, A3… at the foot of the leaves in the folded sheet), but there isn’t an obvious gap for them in the alphabetic sequence. So, unsigned leaves at the start of the book, before gathering A, are indicated by the Greek letter π [pi] and unsigned leaves elsewhere are given the signature χ [chi].

    And like all oddities in early printed books, looking at the physical volume may reveal what was actually going on as the book was printed and why these unsigned leaves are there.

    References and further reading:

    Karen Attar, “Collational formula” in Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and H.R. Woudhuysen eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book, 2010.

    Erin Blake, Signature statements in book cataloging The Collation. Research and Exploration at the Folger (blog)

    Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 1995.

    Art in Menu Cards

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    Cunard Archive

    The sweets of a delightful meal may become as the waters of Marah by a menu card that offends the eye


    Queen Elizabeth, Luncheon Menu 15 Feb 1958.
    Image shows King Charles’s Tower, Chester.

    Menu cards within the Cunard Archive are enjoyed by archive users not only for the information within them, but also for their attractive cover designs.

    An article published in Cunard News in 1922 describes how art printed on a menu card is carefully chosen to enhance the dining experience of guests.

    Cunard News, 1922

    Menu cards were popular mementos, kept by passengers to remind them of their experience on board a Cunard ship.

    There are many menu cards within the Cunard Archive, and more are deposited regularly by members of the public.

    An overview of the Cunard Archive is available here