Tom Roper's Weblog

The Welsh National

Postponed from the week after Christmas, the highlight today is a very open Welsh National. I don't fancy Synchronised, the favourite, nor the much-hyped Maktu, and have gone instead for Paul Nicholl's entry, Watamu Bay.

Chepstow 110: Sam Winner
Chepstow 145: Watamu Bay
Chepstow 220: Fine Parchment
Kempton 240: Minella Class
Kempton 315: Fiendish Flame
Wincanton 330: I'm a Legend

No sign of ability

That phrase was not taken from one of my school reports; look to your right in the side bar under testimonials for that. Instead, it came from the race card for yesterday's Sussex National Meeting at Plumpton, which I attended with my daughter. It was the compiler's judgement on Arctic Flow in the last race, the Hugh Taylor Handicap Hurdle. Arctic Flow won, convincingly, at a price of 40/1.

Though not very satisfactory from a betting point of view, it was a day that demonstrated how jumps racing in winter is the highest form of the sport. The sun shone, there was a large and appreciative crowd, the champion jockey and Sports Personality of the Year was present and won three races. What more could one ask?

Though only of archival interest, let me record our selections, and the results:

140 attheraces.com E B F National Hunt Novices Qualifier: Mister Hyde (self); Invictus (darling daughter). Winner: Mr Hyde. Hurrah. First blood to Daddy

210 attheraces.com Sussex National: Noble Bily (self); Marty's Mission (darling daughter). We thought Master Overseer, without a run since a victory in the same race a year ago, would not make it, but he fought hard. Neither of ours finished, but only half the field did. Winner: Minella Boys

245 attheraces.com Be a Virtual Owner Handicap Hurdle: Black Phantom (self; looked impressive in paddock); Diamond Eclipse (darling daughter). Winner: Manshoor, AP's second for the afternoon

315 attheraces.com Virgin 534 Handicap Chase: The Hardy Boy (the choice of us both; we had seen him win here in the same race four years ago). Winner: Manmoon

345 attheraces.com Exclusive Hugh Taylor Handicap Hurdle: Tocatchaprince (self); Snow Patrol (darling daughter). Winner: Arctic Flow, as you know

NB we arrived late, so missed the first two races

On tea-making

An article by Christopher Hitchens on tea-making has attracted some attention, with the writer's customary reference to Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, novelist and police informer.

I bet neither Hitchens nor Orwell had the Wolf Cub's second star,  which I won in an unhappy time in Lord Baden-Powell's militaristic organisation. To earn this, I had inter alia to make a pot of tea, which I did under the stern eye of Mrs Langford, who 'did' for my mother in the afternoons. Mrs L 'signed off' my effort, as we didn't say in the early 1960s, though I don't remember her actually drinking it. But I do remember the three commandments of the British tea ceremony:

1. Take pot to kettle
2. Warm pot
3. Use a teaspoon of tea per person, and one for the pot

The Wolf Cubs wisely stayed away from the milk-in-first/afterwards controversy, on which Lord B-P left no instructions.

32nd Annual Conference on Book Trade History: The Book Trade and the Classical World

I am disgustingly late in writing up my notes from the 32nd Annual Conference on Book Trade History: The Book Trade and the Classical World, which took place nearly a month ago. I plead pressure of work, and the difficulty of understanding my notes after such a time-lapse.

This page may demonstrate some of the difficulties the notes pose for a paleographer:

Nevertheless, since the official proceedings may take some time to prepare and publish, I shall offer some of what I can remember and decipher.

On the first day, the first speaker was David Butterfield of Christ's College Cambridge, on Verses to Order: the prominence of Latin and Greek verse composition in British publications of the 19th century. Dr Butterfield took us through the history of the practice of composing verse in classical languages, based mostly in schools and universities. Though Milton and Vaughan had both composed verse in Latin, by the 18th and 19th centuries original composition took second place to translation of existing pieces of English into Greek or Latin, most often in the manner of the Attic tragedians or the Augustan poets.

The development of prizes for verse writing gave an impetus to verse composition and booksellers and publishers saw a new market for texts in public and grammar schools.

Dr Butterfield divided the published output into manuals for boys to help them with this task, and collections of compositions such as Musae Etoniensis. These collections included attempts to render classically influenced poems such as Gray's Elegy (and Gray himself was a classicist) and Tennyson, or Jabberwocky, done as Mors Iabrochii. Latin was favoured over Greek. I came across an Oxford example in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes quite recently. It occurred to me, though it would be a huge task to assemble them, that school magazines of the nineteenth century must contain many examples.

Then Freya Cox-Jensen of Christ Church, Oxford spoke on The Distribution and Circulation of Classical Texts in England, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries in the 16th and early 17th centuries. She based her work on Peter Burke's paper of 1966, A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians† , but has been able to take advantage of the greater availability and searchability of bibliographic tools, particularly the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), due to go online next year, to conduct a bibliometric exercise covering the first two centuries of printing . She emphasised that printed texts did not supplant manuscript immediately, that reading was not synonymous with reading a printed book for some considerable time, and that the book trade was international, so that texts, and their printers, migrated from country to country.

After lunch, the Librarian of the Warburg, Jill Kraye, talked about the history of the library, from its beginnings as Aby Warburg's personal collection in Hamburg to its move to England, and the Deed of Trust with the University of London, supposed to guarantee its future, though this, like so much in British cultural life, is now called into question. They are building digital collections of their rare books, and an iconographic database. Jill's''s talk was followed by a tour of the library.

Then Ceri Davies spoke on Some Latin Writers from Wales, their printers and publishers. I had no idea there were so many humanist scholars in Tudor Wales. Jos van Heel finished the first day by telling us about Images of Ancient Texts: Eighteenth-century facsimiles of Greek and Latin text manuscripts, before an evening reception at Dr Williams Library.

On the second day Dirk Imhof spoke on From School Books to Luxurious Editions of Classical Authors: the Antwerp publisher Jan Moretus I, based on his analysis of the printers' archives. Moretus inherited Plantin's business, not without controversy. for Plantin's family felt it was rightfully theirs. Then Nichols Poole-Wilson, Managing Director of Bernard Quaritch spoke on Classics and Fashion among English Book Collectors, a fascinating insight into books as objects of luxury, fashion, vanity and status, taking us into byways of bibliomania such as leather fetishism (the 18th century craze for morocco bindings), and the vogue for bleaching and washing texts to make the pages whiter, annihilating marginalia in the process. He ended with the tantalising speculation that collectors in the future might wish to track down manga versions of classical authors,.

The final speak was Christopher Stray, whose life of W H D Rouse I read some years ago, on OUP’s Classical Publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century, the results of some extraordinary detailed work in the Press's archives, including accounts of the development of Liddel and Scott's Greek lexicon in its various incarnations of the Big Liddell (aka the Great Scott), the Middle Liddle and the Little Liddle, as well as Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary.

†A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700

Peter Burke

History and Theory
Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), pp. 135-152

Available from JSTOR, if you're one of the chosen few

Seven fat years

'And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fat-fleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow'
Genesis 41:18

I wrote my first blog post seven years ago today, on the death of Alan Davidson, followed closely by a piece on Reed Elsevier and scholarly publishing and capitalism's tendency to monopoly, an account of the Varsity Match ( an 11-11 draw), and a rant about the train service. Plus ça change, except that these days my philippics against Southern Rail are more often found on Twitter. Since then I have written 1545 posts, and readers have been kind enough to comment on them 744 times. The blog has recorded 137,504 pages views, an average of  56.84 page views a day.

As for the title of today's post, I remember asking an RE master at school why everything in the bible seemed to happen in either seven or forty units of time. He was wary; our questions about the bible did not often come from piety, or from a wish to understand the text better—thus typical questions might be, in relation to St Paul's baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, 'Sir, Sir, what's a eunuch, Sir?'. But, doubtless thinking that I deserved an answer, he told us that the ancient Hebrews lacked the arithmetic and linguistic ability to express large numbers, so forty was used to convey the meaning of a lot. I accepted this, but if I'd given it a moment's thought, I'd have realised that this was an inadequate explanation. After all, the Babylonians seemed to have no difficulty with complex calculations involving large numbers.

Thank you for your attention. I shall press on, even if the next seven years are lean and ill-favoured.

Edward Dudley and subversion

Like so many in the profession, I was saddened to hear that Edward Dudley had died. We will be poorer without his intellect and wit.

Edward influenced me long before I met him. I went to what was then the Polytechnic of North London's School of Librarianship and Information Studies for the postgraduate course in 1983, at the Essex Road site. a curious place with its own culture. When we moved over the summer of that year, the postgraduate course following the calendar rather than the academic year, to Ladbroke Grove, we lost something.

Edward had left the Polytechnic, succeeded by Kevin McGarry as Head of School, but the course I followed showed the work Edward had put in to make PNL, as it was then, one of the best library schools in the country. I believe he followed the management principle, too often ignored, of appointing good people, giving them what they needed, and letting them get on with it. The result was eclectic and stimulating, and only Edward could have created a department that contained, in relative harmony, people such as, on the one hand,  Derek Langridge of the Cataloguing Research Group, evangelist for  Ranganathan and all thing faceted and, on the other, radical believers in the progressive role of the public library such as Jim Hennessy and Bob Barker. I held the position of student representative on the Academic board, and  had the privilege of seeing this disparate group debate the future direction of library education. No blows were exchanged. I was also grateful to Edward for his 1953 FLA thesis, which CILIP tell me is still available, and which I must re-read in his honour. Entitled Libraries in the USSR: some post-war developments it was a key resource for my dissertation on Krupskaya, libraries and literacy.

I also became aware of his journalism. At that time New Library World, whose editorship he took on  in the year I was at PNL, was a much more interesting read than the Library Association Record. His editorials, in particular, became required reading and when having finished library school, I found myself working in Hendon Reference Library, I would often be distracted from my task of checking in journals onto cards held in metal trays by the latest NLW. These were sent over to headquarters for the Borough Librarian, the Deputy Borough Librarian and the Principal Assistant Borough Librarian to read, but I took some satisfaction in knowing that I had read them first.

Yet at this time I had not met the man. I think we first met at a LIbrary Association AGM. Guy Daines and I, both then active in the infant Library Campaign, proposed a motion at the AGM (in itself unusual in those pre-democratic days) asking the LA to work with the Campaign and the trade union movement to oppose cuts and closures in library services. I am sure we owed a debt to Edward. In the run up to the AGM, the LA leadership, led at that time by George Cunningham, a former MP who had joined the SDP renegades from the Labour Party, lost his seat and so found himself a refuge as our Chief Executive , made fierce oppositional noises to the motion, claiming it would put us in breach of the Royal Charter. We expected a fierce debate at the meeting, and were not sure it was one we could win. When we turned up at the meeting, held I think at Glaziers' Hall, we found that the leadership, I'm sure as a result of Edward's expert string-pulling, had had a complete volte-face and were no longer going to oppose our motion.

After an AGM, Edward approached me. I don't recall the conversation exactly, but I told him of my historical interests, particularly  in the scientists who in the 1920s, 30s and 40s joined or were close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, people like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, whose post-war work on the information needs of scientific researchers bears re-reading sixty-five years later, Lancelot Hogden and Hyman Levy. Not only did Edward know these eminent figures, he had served many of them in the branch library he worked in, Belsize Park in what was then the borough of Hampstead and, I hope I recall correctly, was a member of the same Communist Party branch. Edward discovered my interest in the literature of that period and would often suggest books to me, generously asking if I had a copy of a particular Left Book Club edition of which he had a spare.

I also became a willing recruit to his campaign to bring a little democracy to the LA, and then CILIP.  Of an evening the telephone would ring. It would be Edward. Would I consider seconding a motion at the next AGM, proposing the dangerously radical notion that Presidents should be elected by the whole membership, not just council? Of course I would. And I was invited to attend, in what capacity I was never quite sure, meetings in his and Kate's Barbican flat to prepare the CILIP in London regional branch as the new organisation came into being. He remained a moving force in London affairs right up to his death.

I have further cause to be grateful to him. When I left health libraries for a time in 2006, I also stood down from the Editorial Board of Health Information and Libraries Journal. I missed it, because there is nothing like involvement in a journal to teach library and information people about how the material we organise and make available comes into being. Quite out of the blue, in 2008, I was invited to joint the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, JOLIS, which Edward had been instrumental in founding, persuading the LA of the need for a theoretical journal,. Once more, I could enjoy his contributions to a debate, always fresh, never clichéd or formulaic.

He was always keen to understand new technologies. He read my blog, I know, and would sometimes refer to it in his column in Update. At the famous CILIP 2 open meeting of Council in 2009, addressed by Phil Bradley, who I heard yesterday won the election for Vice-President, he approached me afterwards. What was my assessment of this Web 2.0 carry-on? I wrote at the time that I made some vague and semi-coherent noises about how I was interested in the aspects of Web 2.0 which seem to offer greater opportunity for democracy. He thought briefly. 'Yes,' he replied, 'and subversion'. I trust we will all be as subversive as we possibly can, in his memory.

The Hennessy

The Fighting Fifth has been relocated to Newbury, to add even more excitement to an afternoon already rendered piquant by Denman's reappearance to defend the Hennessy Gold Cup.
In this race though, along with everyone else, I would be thrilled to see Denman win again, I can't see it happening.
Selections, all at Newbury
1225: Binocular
230: Big Buck's
305: Weird Al
340: Working Title

Tower of porn (with apologies to Leonard Cohen)

Anne Jarvis, the University Librarian, disappointed her audience at Senate House by telling us that the undergraduate rumours that the tower of Cambridge's University Library is stuffed full of pornography acquired under legal deposit are baseless. In fact, there is now a project to exploit and make known the riches of the collection in the tower, which Anne described as the airport literature of the past, and of course there is a project blog, the Tower Project Blog. Other University Library projects also have blogs, such as  the Incunabula Project and the Sassoon project. what was interesting here was not simply that they had established project blogs, which seems to be a requirement nowadays but how they had used these to involve scholars. Thus, she told us, on the Incunabula blog, scholars had become involved in some of the intricate cataloguing issues such material can raise. What interested me about his approach was that Anne described it as a way to show the 'human face of the profession', to let people know what it is that we do. This lesson could well be applied outside university libraries, for example to show those who think public librarians can be replaced by volunteers.

She told us that the library had rubbed along happily in much the same way for 640 of its 650 years, but then the past ten had been a decade of revolutionary change. She showed a slide of walls, emphasising that keeping people out was an important part of Cambridge's history. 48% of staff time is spent on work with materials on their 100 miles of shelves. An OCLC analysis of their 4 million catalogue records found that they had publications form 239 countries in 446 languages, but the whole collection probably consists of 7-8 million items: nobody knows. And they have rich special collections; Anne mentioned the Siegfried Sassoon collection above and Gilbert de Botton's Montaigne Library, acquired in 2008.

She described their digitisation projects, Not all are as open as they should be, for example a project the UL is undertaking with CUP, but she recognised the problem. The Foundations of Faith and Science project, though as far as I can tell not yet online, will be freely available, and will digitise some of the UL's unique holdings in the history of science, such as Darwin's manuscripts, 9,000 of his known 14,000 letters, and some of their theological treasures. And she spoke of the lunacies of the pricing of digital subscriptions, when trying to rationalise the holdings of over a hundred college and departmental and  faculty libraries.

She has opened up the collections to the world, and to visitors, allowing undergraduates to borrow for the first time in the library's history, and encouraging school visits. She said that we remain poor at measuring our impact. She spends £12 million a year, and £8 million comes from the University (how will £9,000 fees change this, I should have asked). That leaves £4 million to be found elsewhere. Donors are changing too, and expect more tangible results from their donations.

Much of what she said will be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate about the future academic library. I suppose what I took from her talk was a better understanding of the complexity of moving forward in such difficult times in such a large and inherently conservative institution. Speaking of conservative institutions, we heard her in the Senate Room, and the senators, venerable men, clearly have no need for electronics, so there was no 3G signal not public wifi. Consequently I post this some days after the event.

I have my own memories of the UL. Ann mentioned that they were opening up the UL to school children, but I pioneered that in the 60s. An annoying child, I was obsessed with heraldry and read everything the public library had on the subject. My father who used the library as one of the privileges of a Cambridge MA, infiltrated me into the building after school and persuaded the staff, many of whom were his patients, to admit me, I spent long happy hours getting to grips with the unusual shelf arrangements. My father knew the foreman of the bindery too, who would bind his flute music. Later, as an undergraduate, my father arranged for me to use the UL in my vacations form the University of Kent, though I spent more time in the tea room than I did on serious study.

Attract more Twitter and Facebook followers the Paul Nicholls way

Browsing the day's racing from the comfort of a stool in Coral's, I came across the 1.15 at Haydock, the Follow Paul Nicholls On Facebook And Twitter Handicap Chase. Clearly the reason why I have so few followers on both media is that I have never sponsored a race. I shall be on the phone to Plumpton first thing on Monday. I wonder how much a bumper or a novices' hurdle would cost me? It was only the other week that Mrs Angry and I were discussing some of the stranger race sponsors.

To business. There's some exciting racing today, but some short-priced favourites. I go for the following:
150 Haydock: Clerk's Choice
205 Ascot: Master Minded
235 Ascot:   Silviniaco Cont
250 Haydock: Grands Cru
325 Haydock: Imperial Commander

Looks good, tastes good and, by golly, it does you good

Who remembers Mackeson? Can one still buy it, I wonder? It was a stout, and gave its name to today's big race at Cheltenham, the Gold Cup Chase. The race is now sponsored by Paddy Power, after Murphy's and Thomas Pink both briefly lent it their names. Apropos, I might organise a competition to find the most ludicrous and inappropriate sponsorship in racing; in my experience a meeting I attended a few years ago sponsored by a lingerie shop would be the most obvious contender.
However, today's selections:
Cheltenham 1250: Tiffany de Sarti
Cheltenham 155: Character Building
Cheltenham 235: Long Run
Cheltenham 310: Supercede