Warden Abbey Manuscripts

Trinity College Library has the largest collection of manuscripts in the country from the Cistercian Abbey of Warden in Bedfordshire. These 14 volumes have recently been digitised and are freely available online via the Wren Digital Library selected using the donor search facility. Alternatively you can link to individual manuscripts direct from this blog. The …

The Wren Library by Mark Draper (2017)

Last week Trinity College received a very special gift. Since retiring from his career as a special needs teacher with curriculum responsibilities for creative arts, Mark Draper has combined his interests in architecture and ceramics by making clay models of favourite buildings. Mark has a studio at his home in Rushton, Northamptonshire, where he produces …

Bindings in the Spotlight (3)

Designed by the famous French binder Paul Bonet (1889-1971) in 1949, this is one of 28 different copies or versions of the 1937 edition of Alphonse Daudet's 'Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon' (Kessler.a.28).  Daudet's 1872 novel concerns the town of Tarascon and the misadventures of a certain Tartarin: "The Provençal town of Tarascon is …

From the Crewe Collection: Books belonging to Robert Southey

The Crewe collection contains four items belonging to the British poet, Robert Southey, who was born in in Bristol in 1774 and died in London in 1843.  He lived much of his life in Keswick where he supported, in addition to his own family, the wife of Coleridge and her three children after the poet …