Better late than never

I think I may have warned you that I'm bad about posting on blogs ... sorry! I will try and keep this as up-to-date as possible but I will let you be the judge of whether or not I am succeeding. When I last left off it was the first weekend of term ...

The Books students at the Chichester
Cathedral library.

Well, the weather has continued to be more or less atypical for England--lots of sun! It's been a little bit chilly but that's alright as I have assimilated and purchased a very English sweater which I am sure will feature prominently in photographs in the future. Ha ha! It's been especially nice to have such good weather because we bookies have doing LOTS of traveling. Hurrah for field trips! We use these trips to visit lots of libraries in the area and further afield to get an idea of what sorts of conditions exist in various book repositories and how these conditions affect (or even create) the degradation issues we work with as conservators. We also frequently bring back volumes to treat. Last week we visited the Chichester Cathedral library, right in town, and among other treasures are a handful of books that once belonged to John Donne! I unfortunately can't post photos of items from this library, but fear not--other photos should hopefully make up for it.

Check out those irons! The curtain of metal can be
quite impressive, to say the least.

This week we had two visits: one to a chained library in a small town called Wimborne, about an hour and a half away from West Dean, and the second to the Admiralty Library in Portsmouth, which houses the pretty extensive collections of the Royal Navy. What is a chained library, you ask? Pretty much all reference libraries back in the day were chained--more to keep order in the shelving and remind patrons of their reading-time limits than to deter thieves--but only a handful of libraries still retain their links (he he). Most of the chains in the library we visited had been replaced by the Victorians, which is not so great, but they did at least preserve the zeitgeist of the place by retaining the chains at all. They have some really neat items there including one of Elizabeth I's great seals and a copy of the first book printed in England to contain Arabic or Hebrew script! (Interesting side note about this library: it's housed in the church where Margaret Beaufort's parents are buried, i.e. Henry VIII's great-grandparents are buried there.)

I'm totally legit. See? The lady who checked
me in had some issues with my first initial.

The Admiralty Library was also really neat for several reasons--one of which is that it's on a naval base, so we had to show our passports to get it since it's operated by the UK Ministry of Defence. We had to wear ID badges the entire time, which was kind of cool. It's Trafalgar Day soon, the celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Admiralty Library for obvious reasons is important to these festivities as it is the repository of all the naval records relating to the battle. We saw some cool atlases of the English coastline that were reclaimed from captured French ships and illegal signal books which were kept by lower-ranking sailors so they would know what was going on in battle etc. Another cool thing about the Admiralty Library is that the naval base it's on contains the oldest ship of the Royal Navy, the Mary Rose, which dates back to Tudor times, the newest ship (some destroyer or other), and the most famous, the HMS Victory.

Literally with my nose to the grindstone,
putting that dang bevel on my knife.

Hmmm ... aside from visits, we've been kept VERY busy with various things including making our own paring knives for leather! We spent an entire week using Japanese water stones to turn hacksaw blades into knives by first flattening both sides and then using a Tormec to put a bevel on the blades, followed by even more flattening of the bevel to get it perfectly sharp. It was back-breaking and tedious, but I do feel rather a sense of accomplishment. I made a knife!

Not much else of note, really. The first weekend of term was General Conference and so I got a ride into Portsmouth from a friend for that since the local chapel doesn't receive the satellite signal. It was fun to see a different bit of England and get out of West Dean! And funnily enough, this weekend I will be going back for Stake Conference.

Next weekend I have Halloween to look forward to ... my (NOT) favorite holiday, but at the very least the following weekend is Bonfire Night! A true British holiday to celebrate will be really good fun. And if I get all my bookie ducks in a row, I may also go up to London next Saturday to spend the day with another friend from the States who's also getting a master's degree. Good stuff!