I’ve been working at the Bodleian for nearly 10 years now. Before that I worked for nearly a year as an antiquarian cataloguer at Merton and Christ Church, but I was also here as a student.
I think really it’s a dream job. When I was here as a student, and as a graduate student, I did a bit of work on manuscripts and things like that in the Duke Humphrey library, but I never imagined that there could be a job where I do this every day.
Often there is no average day and we get thrown all sorts of things, but let’s pretend there is an average day. A lot of my time is spent reading booksellers catalogues, and quite a lot of what I do is buying antiquarian books for the library. We often get people coming in with what they say are very old books, that often turn out to be about 50 years old; which is something of a disappointment for me, because when someone says very old I think maybe a 16th century book, but that rarely happens.
Putting on the 24 Treasures exhibition has definitely been a highlight of my time here. You have an idea and you hope that the public is going to enjoy and understand it. When you see that they do, it’s incredibly satisfying. I wanted to have some pieces that people wouldn’t have seen and perhaps wouldn’t have expected to see in a shiny treasures gallery. I wanted them to know what we considered treasures didn’t match up with the idea of a treasure.
The placement of the artefacts in pairs was really a way of making people look freshly at something and to consider what makes something valuable, a treasure or special. My favourite is probably the draft of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, just because I love his poetry and you can read it in his own hand and see him making changes as he goes along. And I love looking at it with that beautiful 18th century poppy illustration hovering below.
My favourite book in the whole library is one that Henry VIII used to own. It’s a printed book and it contained advice to the bishops on how to implement his new reforms, but the book is annotated by him throughout in his own hand. For me, flicking through this book and seeing these annotations and the way he plays around with the Ten Commandments in a fairly wicked way is amazing. Personally, I hope to do another exhibition and I’d quite like to do one on epic poetry, which is one of my research interests. But we’ll see about that. I’m okay for the moment!
