John William Dunne is an intriguing and underappreciated figure in British history. Unusually, he achieved distinction in his day both as an aeronautical designer and pioneer and then later as an author and philosopher. He began his career as an army officer, serving in the Boer War. A heart condition returned him to England, where his interest in human flight took off. His many innovative aircraft designs, including an extremely stable tailless aircraft, ensured his high regard within aeronautical circles. As an accomplished engineer Dunne was honoured as one of the original six Fellows of the Royal Aeronautical Society. The archive is a pivotal assessment of Dunne as a literary figure and philosopher, containing a wide range of correspondence regarding his works.
Search FNL grants since 1931
This archive of Virginia Woolf material was gathered by Brownlee Kirkpatrick (1919-2007), the bibliographer of Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Edmund Blunden and Katherine Mansfield. The first edition of her Bibliography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1957. When Kirkpatrick began her research, many of those closest to Virginia Woolf were still alive, including her sister Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville West and Leonard Woolf. The Kirkpatrick archive provides valuable information about Virginia Woolf's printed works, most from the Hogarth Press, but also provides much detail about the Bloomsbury group, allowing the reader to delve deep into what Victoria Glendinning has called Leonard Woolf's 'management of the past'. This archive is a splendid addition to the collections at St Andrews, and the value of the archive to Woolf scholars cannot be overstated.
Thomas Manning was among the first European lay scholars of Chinese language and culture, and one of the earliest sinologists from the British Isles. He was the first Englishman to visit Lhasa, which he reached in 1811, and where he met the child Dalai Lama. Shaped by the intellectual climate of late-Enlightenment Europe, Manning was distinguished by a rare independence of mind and breadth of cultural sympathy that signifies him as one of Britain’s most interesting early Orientalists. This collection of papers represents by far the largest collection of Manning material that has ever come to light. It consists of over 400 ms. letters to and from Manning, as well as papers, notebooks, diaries (almanacs), visiting cards, and printed ephemera, and the 99 pp. ms. copy of the narrative of the journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, which was published in 1876 in Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa.
The Harrison & Seel archive consists of photographs, drawings, sketchbooks and miscellaneous items (press cuttings, magazines, copies of the official guide and other paper documents, as well as four mid-18th century hand-coloured engravings of Vauxhall & Ranelagh Gardens that the architects used as a source of inspiration). This extensive archive represents a very fine addition to the RIBA Collections, as it documents a very important moment in Britain’s cultural and architectural history, recording a lesser-known aspect of the Festival of Britain that has left even fewer physical traces than the South Bank Exhibition at Waterloo.
An early twentieth-century edition of ‘The Romaunt of the Rose’ by Geoffrey Chaucer. This publication was the first book printed by the Florence Press, an imprint of Chatto and Windus, intended to compete with private presses by producing books of similar style and beauty. The press commissioned a special type and often hired well-known artists to add lavish illustrations in a Pre-Raphaelite style. The University of Reading is well-known for its established and growing expertise in book and printing history, and this volume complements the University’s significant holdings in the areas of printing, publishing and typography.
This was the last book of poems Lawrence saw published in his lifetime. The typescript sheds further light on Lawrence’s battle with the British censors in the wake of the controversy surrounding the private printing and postal distribution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928. Lawrence had an enlarged and unexpurgated Pansies privately published in August 1929. This recently-discovered typescript is a previously-unknown typing with corrections in Lawrence’s hand; it proves that Lawrence typed Pansies no fewer than four times. It is astonishing that the consumptive Lawrence, who hated the mechanical business of typing, could summon the energy to re-type his longest book of poems so often, barely twelve months before his death, but he was wholly committed to fighting censorship.
The volume was described thus in the sale catalogue: 'Donne, John. XXVI Sermons. London. 1661. Contemporary calf, rebacked. Folio (11 1/8 x 7 in.; 283 x 178 mm). Woodcut printer's device on title-page, woodcut headpiece, initials, and initial-frame. Provenance: Thomas Middleton (near contemporary signature on title-page); R. E. Myddelton, Chirk Castle (armorial bookplate, press-mark C.3.Divinity). Acquisition: Francis Edwards, 1969.’ It is likely that the signature is that of Sir Thomas Myddleton III (1624-63), who was created first Baronet in 1660. He was the grandson of Thomas Myddleton I, who purchased Chirk, became Lord Mayor of London in 1613, and was one of the founders of the East India Company.
This medieval manuscript written in Scotland and used by the monastic community of Sweetheart Abbey, a few miles south of Dumfries, in the later Middle Ages. Sweetheart Abbey was a Cistercian monastery founded in circa 1273 by Dervorgilla de Balliol, mother of the Scottish king John Balliol. The first leaf of the manuscript bears a large inscription in a medieval hand: 'Liber sanctae Mariae de dulci corde [a book of St. Mary of Sweetheart]'. Only four other manuscripts survive from the library of this monastery, bearing similar inscriptions, but none of these volumes was apparently written in Scotland.
The Muriel Spark archive is one of the largest held by the National Library of Scotland. Dame Muriel held onto almost everything on paper, so readers and researchers to delve into the collection, mining its abundant riches for new perspectives and a deeper understanding of one of Scotland's literary greats. This final tranche of the archive includes an unpublished poem, written at the age of 11 or 12; an early, unpublished story; the typescript of a radio play written in Africa; drafts and typescripts of essays; correspondence; annotated books from Dame Muriel’s library, together with the extensive and heavily annotated drafts and corrections to Martin Stannard’s biography.
This is Magdalen College Library's most significant purchase in recent decades, a volume containing all the major works of the English lutenist and composer John Dowland (1563?–1626). The volume was originally owned by Sir Charles Somerset (1587/8–1665), music collector, friend of Prince Henry Frederick (1594 –1612) and alumnus of Magdalen College. His close connections to the College give additional lustre to this acquisition. The acquistion was made possible thanks to a substantial additional grant awarded by the B H Breslauer Foundation.