“It doesn’t matter what you think of me. I know you love me-” – Erskine Childers’ goodbye

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me, I know you love me.” So wrote Erskine Childers to his friend Ivor Lloyd-Jones on 24th November 1922, hours or even minutes before he faced a firing squad. Robert Erskine Childers was executed at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, in the recently formed Irish Free State. Before his …

Ulysses: some editions at Trinity

February 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This blog highlights some of the inspiration for Joyce’s influential, if controversial, book and some of the different editions owned by Trinity College. Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses contains parallels to the Greek classic. The original epic poem tells the story …

Porcupines and Postage Stamps

Having recently blogged about the Grylls’ Collection, imagine our delight a few weeks ago when we uncovered one of the porcupine emblems from the top of the Grylls’ crest which originally adorned the bookcases specially-designed for his books. For reasons of space, these bookcases were decommissioned in the 1960s. The porcupine emblem led to some …

Trinity Poets

Carcanet Press has recently published an anthology of poems by members of Trinity College. Poems included date from the sixteenth through to the twenty-first century by well-known writers such as George Herbert, John Dryden, Lord Byron and A. E. Housman. The volume also contains poems by people who were known in other fields, but who …

From the Crewe Collection: The Rossiad, by Lord Alfred Douglas

The Crewe collection contains a number of early editions of works by Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900). Wilde was known to the 1st marquess of Crewe when he was Lord Houghton and a fellow member of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Crabbet Club. The collection also contains works about, and relating to, Wilde published after his death. …

Hockney’s Bigger Book – and a smaller one.

This morning we took delivery of A Bigger Book, David Hockney’s retrospective collection of more than 450 works from throughout his career. Measuring 70 x 50 cm, it is a spectacular survey of more than 60 years of Hockney’s work, from his teenage days at the Bradford School of Art, Los Angeles swimming pools in …

New acquisitions: Kabuki and Nō

This gorgeous set of two books on traditional Japanese theatre was kindly bequeathed to the library by Richard Marlow, Fellow of Trinity from 1968 until his death in 2013, and has recently been added to our collection. Both contain numerous photographs, both in colour and black and white, and useful reference information, such as illustrations …