Library Lives by Stella Halkyard

Library Lives by Stella Halkyard

Library Lives plots the lifelong love affair between one particular bookworm and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, its collections drawn from every corner and period of the textual and meta-textual world. How do we read - and what can we read from - a potsherd, a locket, a fragment of papyrus, a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript, an envelope, a seemingly ordinary book? Stella Halkyard, one of the library's erstwhile archivists, tells the life stories of some of this great library's previously unsung treasures and provides radical new readings for a few of its acclaimed gems. In a sequence of idiosyncratic and often playful short essays she celebrates the resonance of these objects and their ability to tell stories that range across time and place, from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, to John Donne's shroud, eighteenth-century Chinese papermaking, Elizabeth Bishop's letters, plastic surgery in sixteenth-century Italy, the lining of Walt Whitman's hat, and Delia Derbyshire's wartime gas mask. Selected from Halkyard's popular 'Pictures from a Library' and 'Archive Corner' features published in PN Review over the last two decades, these essays have been brought together for the first time and put into productive dialogue with each other.

'Halkyard is a formidable critic and her aesthetic preferences are enriched by profound observations' - Alberto Manguel, from the 'Foreword'

Stella Halkyard studied English at the University of Newcastle, History of Art at the University of Manchester, and Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool. She was the Joint Head of Special Collections at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester where she curated its Modern Literary Archives, Art, Photography and Object Collections for many years. Her research interests include the material cultures of literature and art and the history of photography. Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 and is an Argentine-Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor and a former Director of the National Library of Argentina.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781800174375
ISBN 10	1800174373
Title	Library Lives
Author	Stella Halkyard
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Carcanet Press Ltd
Year published	2024-09-26
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.