A collection of mint condition Victorian literature from Cambridge University Library, taken 6/11/2012 [1024x577][OC]

So, last week I was lucky enough to go on a visit up the (normally locked) tower of University Library, Cambridge. One of the professors at my college did a deal with the archivists there many years ago to the effect that he could visit there whenever he liked on the condition that his supervisees occasionally help out with the sorting. What sorting, I hear you ask? Well, contrary to the rumours that the tower is where they keep all of the porn, it's actually full of uncatalogued books from about 1870 to 1930. Back then as a copywrite library, the UL got a copy of every book published in the country. Now it pretty much just asks for the academic ones, but back then they got all of them- children's novels, travelogues, satires, even board games and train timetables. Dismissed as irrelevant, they have languished up there in mint condition, unread and unlooked for, until a few years ago a grant from the Rockefeller foundation meant the librarians could begin the mammoth process of cataloguing them. The books are starting to be used as the incredible historical resource that they truly are, but me being a) primarily a medievalist and b) fundamentally childish decided to just take some photos of the funny titles (mostly to send to my dad, a vicar- hence the clerical theme running through). I hope you find the album as interesting as I found the whole experience, and I think it's pretty cool that I'm almost certainly the first person to open the book entitled 'My First Curacy' for more than one hundred years. Having the whole corpus of popular fiction for 1890, say, in front of you on a massive shelf is a pretty humbling experience

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