Sol Rébora, image taken from her website 

The terms quoted in the title are just some of the words used to describe the bindings of Sol Rébora. The British Library Latin American Collections and Printed Heritage Collections jointly purchased an example of the work of this outstanding Argentinian multi prize-winning bookbinder on a copy of The Noble Knight Paris & the Fair Vienne (California: The Allen Press, 1956). The binding was a prize winner at the Designer Bookbinders Third International Competition 2017.[1] The opportunity to briefly review the progress of the craft in that country with reference to Sol’s career is too good to miss!

 

Upper and lower cover and spine of C.188.b.124, The Noble Knight Paris. The image is courtesy of Sol Rébora.

 

Sol began to work with bindings at the age of 17 and learned basic techniques at secondary school in Buenos Aries.   After graduation, Sol was fortunate to find Juan Gulin, at 83, was one of the few teachers of bindings in Argentina. Despite there being an association of binders, EARA, (founded in 1989) and the Bibliophiles Society of Argentina, who encouraged collectors, there was no active interest in design bindings.   For Sol, the solution was to reach out to practitioners abroad to expand her knowledge.   She drew from a rich source of know-how and encouragement provided by some of the finest contemporary binders in Canada, the USA, Switzerland and France, including Monique Lallier, Deborah Evetts, Sun Everard, Louise Genest and Betsy Eldridge.

 

Practical work at the bench is not enough to create a successful bookbinder. Sol’s belief is that whatever the support given by generous colleagues ‘you have to build your own university… it is not only knowing diverse bookbinding techniques… Learn from different teachers and then take the things you like and find your own way to work with books.’[2]  

 

In 2001, Sol had to do just that due to an economic crisis in Argentina. For several years, she could no longer afford to enrol on courses abroad so she established her own business in Buenos Aires and used what she had learned.   Thankfully Sol was later able to resume her travels and visited South American as well as American and European binders. Her studio is now on a firm footing but Sol continues to learn and to teach both traditional and non-conventional binding techniques.

 

There are now several workshops which are flourishing in Argentina. Some binders have been taught by Sol herself, including Florencia Goldztein, Valentina Villela, Sofia Mendizabal and Magdalena Gasquet. Not only do Sol (and her fellow binders) teach students from all over Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico, they also invite established binders (notably Pascale Thérond, Kathy Abbot and Helene Jolis) to pass on their knowledge. Furthermore, there is an official channel by which the craft is taught, the Diploma Programme in Bookbinding at the National Library in Buenos Aires. It is certainly over-subscribed. Last year there were 800 applications for 30 places!

 

It is not only the challenge of creation that inspires Sol. Her interest in the history of her craft is shown by the recent publication of a short article ‘Bookbinding in Argentina’ in the Designer Bookbinders newsletter.[3] Another concern is restoration. This has resulted in her development of new methods to preserve book structures. Such innovation is demonstrated in the British Library’s recently-acquired binding on   The Noble Knight Paris.

 

Note the series of ‘reversed stubs’ projecting from the head band and head cap in the image below. Sol devised this method to ensure the easy opening of the book enabling the pages to lie flat.

 

It is not possible to do justice to a binding through a description or an image. A binding is three dimensional and you must be able to hold it in your hands. This is particularly true of Sol’s work. The contrasting feel of the grain of the grey goatskin and of the cut away strips (comprising Japanese paper painted with acrylic) become obvious as you handle the book. Shape is also important. The inspiration for the decoration derives from the clothes in the illustrations, and the typography of the lettering.

 

Enlargement of goatskin cover incorporating pink and green painted strips.

The pink and green, the spine lettering (achieved via the partial application of pink foil) and the headbands reflect the tones used in the hand coloured woodcuts of the text. This repetition leads to a calm and harmonious progression from cover to text to cover. The grey reflects the stone used in French chateaux (a reference to the text).  

 

Sol does not neglect the intellectual underpinning which precedes the creation of a design binding. She has laid out her vision; “I think the openness and the preservation are the most important points in the construction process of a contemporary design binding, together with “good techniques and aesthetic criteria”…The design and the aesthetics or the artistic expression of the binding should be integrated to create one piece with intellectual and sensory reading from the outside. Finally, I would say the construction techniques of the structure, along with the design of the cover and applied materials, play together to achieve this.”[4]

 

The thinking process is of obvious significance to Sol, however it is important not to overlook the emotional response. With the bindings of Sol Rébora, this is usually a smile!

 

1. J. M. Marks

Printed Heritage Collections

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] http://www.designerbookbinders.org.uk/competitions/dbibc/2017/international_competition5.html.

[2] Pamela Train Leutz, The Thread That Binds, (New Castle, 2010), p. 136.

[3] No. 181.  Spring, 2018.  Notice. 4.

[4] http://www.herringbonebindery.com/blog/2014/11/09/bookbinder-of-the-month-sol-rebora-2/.

Have you heard of Instapoetry? In recent years, a new literary phenomenon has emerged – writing via social media. The poetry shared on Instagram has helped boost poetry sales significantly. Rupi Kaur’s book of collected instapoems, Milk and Honey (2014), remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for over 77 weeks, was translated into more than 25 languages and has sold upwards of 2.5 million copies worldwide. Kaur, hailed as the “Queen of ‘Instapoets’” by Rolling Stone Magazine, is a Punjabi-Sikh who moved to Canada at age 4, and started her career writing short texts on Tumblr and Instagram in 2013.

 

Rupi Kaur on tour. Wikimedia Commons 2017.

After years of submitting her poems and receiving rejections, Kaur considered self-publishing.  As her number of Instagram followers grew – she now has over 2.9 million – she was picked up by an American publisher (Andrews McMeel Publishing).  Her style is distinctive: most of her texts are accompanied by a simple illustration, and she writes exclusively in lowercase in a nod to Gurmukhi script (one of the scriptures used by Punjabi Sikhs) and her cultural heritage.

 

Instagram post by @rupikaur, 26/05/2018

 

 

Kaur is both the highest-selling and most controversial of Instapoets, but she is by no means one of a kind. Other influential instapoets include:

• Lang Leav
• Tyler Knott Gregson
• H.Sin
• Warsan Shire In 2014, Shire was named the first ever Young Poet Laureate of London, and her poetry has appeared in Beyonce’s latest album, Lemonade.
• Nikita Gill
• Nayirrah Waheed
• Yrsa Daley-Ward
• Atticus
• Key Ballah

What I find striking in this list is that among these successful instapoets, the majority are, if not women, then openly feminist, and come from ethnic minorities or immigrant backgrounds. Regardless of the literary quality of these texts, what this suggests is that these authors, who may struggle to find mainstream publishers for their work, are finding a creative outlet and an audience using social media.

Supportive communities develop on online international platforms, where people of minorities can share their everyday experiences of gender and racial discrimination with each other, but also talk about universally relatable human experiences. For most of these writers, Instagram is a stepping stone into the publishing industry, but even once their texts are published in book form, they continue sharing new texts and interacting with their readers. Their Instagram pages thus form a kind of a digital anthology.

One of the purposes of my placement is to make sure the North American collections are keeping up to date with migrant writing and collecting important material.  Instapoetry and other online writing challenge our practices, as the Library cannot acquire and collect a website in the same way as it can a book.

The British Library hosts the UK Web Archive, however it is strictly confined to UK-based or relevant websites (either hosted on a uk domain or authored by UK residents) which it can collect through non-print legal deposit. Social media are more complicated to archive – for example Facebook is based in the US and blocks attempts to 'harvest' content.  The UK web archive can pull information from web pages that don’t have a UK based domain if, and only if, there is a clear link with the UK. And even then permission is needed from the creators of the content and copyrights need to be cleared.

https://beta.webarchive.org.uk

The main problem with this situation is that the online space does not function like the print publishing world. Social media destabilise the clear-cut national boundaries that dictate our web archiving collection practices (as underwritten in UK law).  These are just some of the challenges that currently prevent the Library from collecting online literary phenomenons like instapoetry by non-British writers, and that significantly affects  our holdings.

The impact of social media on literature has been huge. The micro-poems, haikus and short texts shared and read on Instagram, and the flash fiction shared on Twitter within the 140-character limit (a genre sometimes called “twiction”), reflect the importance of technology in our everyday lives.  The shortness of these forms means that they are very suitable for reading during a quick break on a mobile phone screen. Arguably, this makes poetry more mainstream and less elitist – it is more accessible as it is easier to read: it is shorter, uses simple words and is sometimes accompanied by visuals.  But also, when shared on social media, it has the potential to reach a wider socio-economic audience than the poetry-buying public.  Instapoetry readers are able to interact directly with the writer and with each other, in a more democratic process.  It is no wonder then that a renewed popular interest for poetry has risen out of such social media writing.

The rawness of Instapoetry – some Instapoets claim they only post unedited texts – says something about our fascination with the instantaneous in a time when we are constantly connected with events taking place all over the world. Publishing on Twitter especially can be likened to speaking out: once something has been said, it is already gone and replaced by more recent tweets. Of course, you can scroll down these platforms and maybe you will eventually find what you are looking for. But the book form undeniably has a sense of long-term duration and inalterability to it.

In fact, much of the conversation/hype around Twiction and Instapoetry took place between 2013 and 2015, and many tweets and Instagram posts have probably been deleted since. Unfortunately, thus far, we hold no records of this in the UK web archive, and there are no entries for “instapoetry” and “twiction”, however you may be able to find and even nominate accounts of authors for inclusion.  The American internet archive (known as the Wayback Machine https://archive.org/web/) has a very limited number of entries for these terms, however you can find captures of social media accounts using this.

As a result, the BL collections are also missing the Twitter fictional initiatives taken by acclaimed Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole  between 2011 and 2014.

Teju Cole, wikimedia commons

In January 2014, he orchestrated a short story entitled “Hafiz” about a man who has a heart attack in a big city (you can read the whole story here). Cole texted other Twitter users 36 ready-made sentences to tweet, which he then retweeted in the right narrative order.  

Earlier, he had already experimented on the same platform with his “Small Fates” project in which he imitated crime reports found in Nigerian newspapers, giving them an ironic twist. One goes “Ude, of Ikata, recently lost his wife. Tired of arguing with her, he used a machete”. Cole’s twitter page has been inactive since 2014, and shows nothing predating June 14^th, 2014 (yes, I scrolled down to see how far I could go). This points to the ephemerality of such literary movements and how quickly they spring up and disappear. How then can our collections keep up if they are not equipped to collect these moments?

The fact that Teju Cole was already a well-recognized and published writer when he conducted these literary experiments shows that for many authors, social media is an interesting alternative to print. Rather than choosing social media only for its marketing value or its artistic value (as the space constraints encourage a different kind of creativity), for these authors part of the attraction is political. The online space is more flexible and democratic than the publishing industry. As minority writers, moving outside of mainstream distribution channels and privileging social media is potentially more radical and powerful than seeking publication.

This, however, also makes it harder for libraries to keep a record. Some writers such as the ones I have mentioned have received their fair share of attention in the media, so although web archives encounter practical challenges to collecting these primary resources, they are certainly picking up on secondary material discussing it. In this sense it is worth reflecting on strategies to ensure the Library’s web-archiving collecting practices remain diverse in form and content, and don't involuntarily under-represent a crucial literary moment to future generations.  One such tool is user input: the UK web archive allows users and authors to nominate sites to be added to its collections. It is a simple process, and can make a vital difference to ensuring these forms of writing aren't lost to future generations.

- Laura Gallon

Sources

UK Web Archive: https://beta.webarchive.org.uk

The Wayback Machine (the Internet Archive): https://archive.org/web/

Leetaru, Kalev. “Why Are Libraries Failing At Web Archiving And Are We Losing Our Digital History?”. Forbes, 27/05/2017. 

Qureshi, Huma. « How do I love thee? Let me Instagram it.” The Guardian, 23/11/2015.

Roberts, Soraya. “No Filter.” The Baffler, 24/01/2018.

Rupi Kaur Official Website

Walker, Rob. “The young ‘Instapoet’ Rupi Kaur: from social media star to bestselling writer.” The Guardian, 28/05/2017.

Zakaria, Rafia. “Warsan Shire: the Somali-British poet quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade.” The Guardian, 27/04/2016. 

 

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Laura Gallon is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project assessing holdings of migrant narratives in the North American collections. She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Sussex which is looking at contemporary American short fiction by immigrant women writers. Her placement is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies.

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Before Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron immortalised Gershwin’s production, there was another young American in Paris. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, Eric Fisher Wood, a young American student, was ‘quietly studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts’ (foreword, v). The journal he kept at the outbreak of war describes the capital’s rapid descent into near chaos and his quick assumption of responsibilities as attaché at the American Embassy then headed by Myron T. Herrick . His account is fascinating for its candid and sympathetic description of the sudden and complete upheaval for Parisians, his fellow Americans and for the German citizens who, mostly by chance, had the magnificent misfortune of being on French soil when war was declared.

IMG 1. Caption: Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-Book of an Attaché, seven months in the war zone, 1915. 9082.ff.28.

As part of a PhD research placement, I have been working on a collection of French posters from the First World War and reading Fisher Wood’s account in tandem. The correspondence between his description of the period and the story told through the primary material in the poster collection is striking. On 2 August 1914, a poster was issued by the Police department prohibiting people from gathering (attroupement) in the streets.

IMG 2. Caption: Poster prohibiting gathering and seditious proclamations and songs in public under the state of siege. Tab.11748.a.F1(5)

In his entry for Tuesday 4 August, Fisher Wood writes ‘One sees everywhere on the sidewalk little knots of people talking in low, troubled voices, and each time just as their conversation is well started they are interrupted by a policeman who reminds them that it is not permitted to s’attrouper in the streets and that they must move on.’ (13) Similarly, in relation to restrictions on opening hours for bars, cafés and the métro, he writes, ‘The Champs-Elysées is probably at present the darkest avenue on earth. (…) The sun seldom rises without revealing the ruins of one of these lamps and of an automobile, the two having mutually destroyed each other in the darkness.’ (37-38). Illustrating this, poster no 15 in the collection gives us the material evidence of these new regulations being implemented, plunging the City of Light into darkness.

Government poster ordering all establishments selling alcoholic drinks to close by 8pm. Metro stations are to close at the same time. Tab.11748.a.F1(15)

Reading Fisher Wood’s chronicle, we get a sense of just how much daily life and business was completely overturned. He says that all buses vanished from the city to be turned into ambulances and meat wagons, causing scenes of despair and panic for the hordes trying to flee the capital. All kinds of private property, including horses, carriages, mules and even carrier pigeons, were requisitioned by the army to support the war effort, and we have the artefacts of the announcements in the collection.

Government poster calling for all heavy vehicles and cars that haven't already been requisitioned to be presented to the Commission of Requisition on 4 and 5 August 1914. Tab.11748.a.F1(10)

Alongside, Fisher Wood’s journal provides an additional layer describing how these requisitions manifested themselves in daily life: ‘All the fast private automobiles are requisitioned for the army, and one sees them tearing along vying in speed with the flying taxis, each one driven by a sapper with another sapper in the footman’s place, while one or two officers sit calmly behind, trying to smoke cigarettes in spite of the wind.’ (14)

During the War, posters constituted one of the principal channels through which information was disseminated to the public, which is perhaps difficult to imagine in our era of instant news feeds and instantaneous information sharing. Fisher Wood notes the ambient confusion and uncertainty that pervaded the population: ‘There are persistent rumours throughout Paris of battles “near Metz” or “on the borders of Luxembourg,” of “two hundred and thirty thousand French troops already in Alsace”, “ten thousand French killed at Belfort,” or “forty thousand German prisoners taken.” (14) In this atmosphere of insecurity, one can imagine just how important these posters were in keeping a fraught population informed of the war’s developments and of the steady stream of government pronouncements.

Parisians huddled around a mobilisation poster. August 1914. Préfecture de Police, Service de l’identité judiciaire/BHVP/RogerViollet.

Fisher Wood remarks too that when Général Gallieni, military governor of Paris, was handed power, he took advantage of the new authority to usher through changes that had been hindered by ‘politics’ for years. The scourge of absinthe was suddenly outlawed as were slot machines, designed to ‘catch the hard-earned-sous of the workmen’. (39)

Poster issued by the Préfecture de police announcing the decree of 7 January 1915 prohibiting the sale of absinthe and similar spirits. Signed by Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré. Tab.11748.a.F1(36)

 

 

 

Government poster detailing two articles of the law prohibiting slot and gaming machines issuing cash winnings or drinking tokens. Tab.11748.a.F1(22)

Eric Fisher Wood went on to serve in the British then American Armies, parts of which he recounts in the latter part of his ‘Note-book’. Following the war he returned to the United States and played an instrumental role in setting up what became the American Legion and later established himself as an architect. However the vivid, first-hand account of the experiences of this particular American, in Paris and beyond, especially when read alongside the primary resources of the posters, remains a powerful account of the civilian – and foreign – experience of the turbulent first months of war from the French capital.

- Phoebe Weston-Evans

 

References

[A collection of British and French War Posters.] 1914-1919. Tab.11748.a.

Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-Book of an Attaché: Seven Months in the War Zone (New York, 1915). 9082.ff.28.

Charles Lansiaux, Paris 14-18: la guerre au quotidien. Photographies de Charles Lanciaux (Paris, 2013). LF.31.a.5681.

Christine Vial Kayser and Géraldine Chopin (eds) Allons enfants! Publicité et propagande 1914­–1918 (Louveciennes, 2014). YF.2017.a.11967.

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Phoebe Weston-Evans is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project cataloguing a collection of French War Posters.  She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Melbourne which looks at the author Patrick Modiano.  Phoebe is also a published translator.

As part of a series of events titled '1918: A New World?', the British Library will be hosting a symposium on the 26 October, titled 'Revisiting the Black Parisian Moment, transnational black military, musical and intellectual histories, 1918 - 1919'.  The Call for Papers is open to submissions until Sunday 2 September.  Please see below for the full Call for Papers.

We are pleased to announce that we will be joined by jazz composer and pianist, Jason Moran who will be discussing his latest work on the 369th infantry band also known as the 'Harlem Hellfighters'.  Registration cost will be £20, with discounts available.  Please see the British Library 'What's On' page for updates on tickets.

A session of the Pan African Congress, Paris, February 1919

This symposium will explore the connections between black intellectual thought, military presence, and jazz cultures at the critical juncture of Paris in the immediate post-war period.  Additionally, it will consider the present-day uses of these black histories, particularly in cultural activism.  As Tyler Stovall has argued, “comparable dynamics drove both black politics and black culture in postwar Paris.  Both Parisian jazz and the Pan-African Congress of 1919 combined complicity and resistance…”[1].  This symposium will seek to draw out these complicities and resistances.

In 1919 the ‘1^st’ Pan-African Congress took place in Paris.  The Congress is widely discussed in the literature on the subject as a false-start to later more radical anti-colonial movements.   More recently, it has been repositioned within a broader spectrum of early 20^th Century black anti-colonial thought that is important in its own right.  The Congress took place in a Paris already awakening to black cultures.  Just a year previously, the military band of the African American 369^th Infantry Regiment led by James Reese Europe, aka the Harlem Hellfighters, toured French music halls and fought alongside French and African troops.  The 369^th were welcomed back to the US with a parade from Fifth Avenue to Harlem watched by 250,000 people.  It was an instance of the renewed determination of African Americans in the fight for equality spurred by the war – as W.E.B. DuBois proclaimed in an editorial that ran in the May 1919 issue of Crisis: “We return from fighting.  We return fighting.  Make way for Democracy!”  The symposium will take an interdisciplinary approach to reconsider the overlaps taking place in wartime Europe, through the crystalising lens of Paris in the immediate post-war period.

369th Infantry band playing in France

Additionally, we will engage with the question of what these histories have meant for future generations of black activists and cultural producers.  It will speak directly to new work on the Harlem Hellfighters by acclaimed jazz composer and performer Jason Moran, which will be performed at the Barbican in November.  “James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin moves through past, present and future as it reflects on the African American presence in Europe during the war – and the marks it left here during the subsequent century.”  The work emerged from conversations between Moran and filmmaker John Akomfrah who have said they were inspired by Caribbean American sociologist Orlando Patterson’s suggestion that the creative chaos of jazz provides a language for countering what he termed ‘an absence of ruin’ in black histories and intellectual thought: “how do African Americans deal with histories vanishing constantly, and how does the music become the structure?”

Jason Moran

While the emphasis of the symposium will be on the US connection, this is understood within the dynamics of a transmigrational black Atlantic and we welcome papers that explore an approach to anti-colonialist thought, ‘le soldat noir’, and/or jazz from a colonial perspective, including a Caribbean context.  We also welcome papers from any discipline, in French, Spanish, Portuguese, or bilingual papers.

Possible subjects for papers include but are not limited to:

• The historiography of the Pan-African Congress, and ‘le soldat noir’.
• The imaginary topography of Paris, France as a site of pan-African exchange.
• The experiences of African American and Caribbean military personnel in France, and upon their return to the US.
• The 369^th Infantry: its musical and military accomplishments.
• James Reese Europe’s musical legacy and contributions to Harlem, including the Clef Club.
• Other jazz bands in Paris/Europe in this period, eg. Louis Mitchell and the Jazz Kings
• The historical work of jazz.
• Cultural primitivism in the immediate postwar years.
• Afro-modernism and black responses to négrophilie in the immediate postwar period.
• Black Paris / the returning WWI black soldier, as expressed in the American and/or Caribbean imagination.
• Tracing the influence of early pan-Africanist thought on Négritude, African American internationalism, or the later Black Power movement.
• Connections to the escalating events in the US that culminated in the ‘First Red Scare’ and the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919.
• Conference organisers, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, Blaise Diagne, and/or Gratien Candace.
• The reappropriation of fraternité from military and colonial ends, for black rights.
• The repurposing of Wilson’s rhetoric of ‘national self-determination’ for African, and/or African American contexts.
• The uses of primitivism at the conference, and its relationship to the advancement of African independence movements/African American rights.
• The African Blood Brotherhood, Cyril Biggs, Richard Moore, and Wilfrid Adolphus Domingo.
• Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial thought in the Black press, eg. Crisis, The Liberator, The Crusader, and Negro World.
• Critiques of European colonial rule at the Congress, and calls for international oversight (eg. League of Nations mandates).
• Theorising ‘The Absence of Ruin’.
• The uses of these histories as contemporary cultural politics

 

Please submit abstracts of max. 400 words with a brief one-paragraph bio in the same document to [email protected] by midnight, Sunday 2 September.

 

This event is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies, Serious, Jazzfest Berlin, 14-18 Now, and the Kennedy Centre.

- Francisca Fuentes Rettig

 

[1] Tyler Stovall, ‘Black Modernism and the Making of the Twentieth Century: Paris, 1919’, Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, eds. Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. P.20.

 

The British Library subscribes to numerous digital databases that have both historic and more contemporary holdings from across the Americas.  Crucially, a number of these are available remotely, so registered readers can access them from home.  You can access all of the databases discussed below through the 'databases' link on the Newsroom's webpage.  The below are just a selection of what you can access through our digital subscriptions, do dig around for more, and of course there is more to be found from the rest of the world. 

 

REMOTE RESOURCES

These are perhaps the most popular of our newspaper resources, available to registered readers at just a few clicks from the comfort of your own home.  They include the following databases, each of which contains hundreds of historic titles:

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and Series 2, 1827 - 1998

Providing online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This collection features papers from more than 35 states—including many rare and historically significant 19th century titles.

 

Caribbean Newspapers, 1718 - 1876

The largest online collection of 18th- and 19th-century newspapers published in the Caribbean. Essential for researching colonial history, the Atlantic slave trade, international commerce, New World slavery and U.S. relations with the region as far back as the early 18th century.

 

Latin American Newspapers, Series 1 and Series 2, 1805 - 1922

This database includes over forty titles and tens of thousands of digitised issues of Latin American newspapers from across the region – Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil and the Southern Cone.

 

Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690 - 1876

Includes reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which collects the records of the US government operation that translated the text of daily broadcasts, government statements, and select news stories from international non-English sources.  This is particularly interesting for researchers working on US foreign relations, but also a good record of international resources otherwise not available.

 

 

Access World News/NewsBank

Another extraordinary database, though not available remotely, is Access World News/Newsbank.  This currently provides access to more than 1800 American news sources and is accessible in all British Library Reading Rooms.

On the United States ‘homepage’ the sources are listed by state but can also be searched by region. Clicking the ‘Source Types’ tab reveals the following categories, as well as the number of sources for each of them: audio, blogs, journals, magazines, newspapers, newswires, transcripts, videos and web-only sources. A summary of each source provides the date range covered, the media type, publishing frequency, circulation, ownership and – where applicable – the URL or ISSN. In addition, the news magazines can also be accessed under ‘Short-Cuts/America’s News Magazines’ on the left-hand side of the home-page. Finally, clicking the ‘Source List’ tab reveals an alphabetical list of all news sources, along with their date range, location and source type.

The database’s many notable highlights include:

Full-text coverage of more than 1300 newspapers, including: Boston Herald (1991 – );  Daily News (NY) (1995 – ); The Dallas Morning News (1984 – ); The Denver Post (1989 – ); The Detroit News (1999 – ); Los Angeles Times (1985 – ); The Miami Herald (1982 – ); New York Post (1999 – ); Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (1990 – ); Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1990 – ); and the San Francisco Chronicle (1985 – ).

Transcripts of features on nearly seventy news programmes, including: 60 Minutes (CBS; 2004 – ) ; CBS Evening News (2005 – ); The Charlie Rose Television Show (PBS; 2004 – ); CNN (2004 – ); Face the Nation (CBS; 2010 – ); Fox News Channel (2003 – ); Meet the Press (NBC; 2012 – ); MSNBC (2003 – ); NBC Nightly News (2014 – ); NPR (1990 – ); and PBS NewsHour (2006 – ).

Full-text coverage of more than twenty news magazines, including: The Atlantic (1994 – ); Foreign Affairs (1994 – ); The New Republic (1993 – ); The New Yorker (2012 – ); Newsweek (1991 – ); and The Saturday Evening Post (1994 – ). NB: These are all listed under ‘Short Cuts/America’s News Magazines.

Output from more than 270 web-only sources, including Accuracy in Media (1998 – ); The Centre for Investigative Reporting (the oldest non-profit investigative reporting organisation in the US) (2003 – ); The Center for Public Integrity (2007 – ); The Daily Beast (2008 – ); Newsmax.com (2002 – ); and Slate (1996 – ).

 

Access to 64 newswires, including: Associated Press News Service (1997 – );  AP State Wires (from all states, 2010/2011 – ); CNN Wire (2009 – ); and UPI NewsTrack, (2005 – ).

Audio of The Diane Rehm Show (2000 – ), a daily news, arts and discussion show airing on NPR since the 1970s; a transcript is available from 2010.

The newspapers and news magazines in this database are text-only – they do not include the original page-layout, photographs or advertisements.

 

We hope that this provides some insight into just how much material is available through our digital subscriptions.  We continually add to these, and will post any updates on this blog so please do subscribe if you want to keep informed on the latest available resources.

 

- Jean Petrovic and Francisca Fuentes

Continuing on from yesterday's post on the opening of the Newspaper Library at Colindale in 1932, it seemed appropriate to revisit historic posts on this topic which give very useful guidance and tips on accessing these vast and rich collections.

Tomorrow we will look at digital resources, including remote access resources that British Library registered readers can access from home.  But first up, a guide to the dailies and weeklies we currently subscribe to.

On microfilm these titles may only be read in the Newsroom and there is usually a three month time-lag in availability; any relevant indexes are held in the Newsroom on open access. In the Reading Rooms, access to the online version of both the dailies and weeklies is variable, so please check the listing below.

DAILIES:

Chicago Tribune, 1849 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark for the Chicago Tribune is MFM.MA207, although our holdings are imperfect for the first decade or so; its Index (1972 – ) is on open access in the Newsroom at shelf-mark NRR071.94. Online access to the Tribune’s business-focused articles is provided via two databases: Gale Cengage Business & Industry (1987 – 2002), which is available in all Reading Rooms, and Factiva (from 2003) which is available in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom.

International New York Times, 2013 –  : This paper was first published as The New York Herald (European edition) on 4 October 1887. Since then it has had numerous titles, including the International Herald Tribune (1966 – 2013). In all its incarnations it has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA1*. Full-text access to the International Herald Tribune (1994 – 98) is available on CD-ROM in the Humanities 2 Reading Room; this may be extended to other Reading Rooms soon.

Los Angeles Times, 1881 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA46 and the Index (1972 – ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NRR071.94.  Full-text online access to the LA Times (from 1985) is available in all Reading Rooms via Newsbank/Access World News; my next blog will focus on this extraordinary database.

The New York Times, 1851 –  : The microfilm version has shelf-mark MFM.MA3 and the Index (1851 – present ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NRR071.47. The New York Times, 1851 – 2010, is available as part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database: this provides full facsimile page and article images and can be accessed in every Reading Room. Beyond 2010, access to business-focused news is offered via Factiva (from 1980), which can be accessed in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom, and Gale Cengage Business & Industry (from 1994), which is accessible in every Reading Room.

The Wall Street Journal, 1889 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark for the American edition is MFM.MA78 and its Index (1967 – ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NNR071.47. Online access (1990 – today’s edition) is available via Factiva in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and on two PCs in the Newsroom.

The Washington Post, 1877 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA370. Full-text online access to the Post’s business articles (from 2007) is available via Factiva in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom.

  

WEEKLIES:

The New Republic, 1914 –  : Now published twice a month, for most of its life The New Republic was published weekly, hence our decision to list it here; it has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA57. Online access (from 1993) is available in every Reading Room via Newsbank/Access World News: once in this database, click on ‘America’s News Magazines’ which is listed in ‘Shortcuts’.

Newsweek, 1933 –  : The American edition  (1933 – 1998) has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA390 and the hard-copy Overseas edition (1948 – 2009) has shelf-mark LOU.A391. Full text online access to Newsweek (from 1991) is available in every Reading Room via Newsbank/Access World News: as above, once in this database, click on ‘America’s News Magazines’ which is listed in ‘Shortcuts’.

Time, 1923 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA397. Online access to Time’s business articles is available in every Reading Room via ESBSCOhost Business Source Complete (from 1990) and ProQuest ABI/Inform (from 2000, excluding the last three months).

The Village Voice (New York), 1955 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA481.

 

- Jean Petrovic

August 23 marks the date on which the British Museum opened the Newspaper Library in Colindale to the public for the first time, in 1932.  This week, in a series of posts, we will look at the Library’s rich newspaper and magazine holdings from the Americas.

Credit: Caroline Ford, Wikimedia Commons

To help celebrate the Colindale anniversary the Eccles Centre for American Studies is delighted to announce that its guide to the Library’s US and Canadian newspapers is finally available in digital format!

Download PDF British Library Newspapers US & Canadian holdings

This guide was first published in hardcopy in 1996. 

Shelfmark 2719.k.1795, or Open Access Humanities 2 Reading Room HUR Enquiry Desk 011.350973, or Document Supply m02/16737

At that time the catalogue at Colindale only offered access to these newspapers by title and town: searching for these publications by state or province was completely impossible. To address this, the Eccles guide listed the newspapers by title – the US newspapers first, followed by those from Canada – and then provided an index to these holdings by state/province and town.

In the years since the guide’s publication there have obviously been updates to the Library’s holdings. Some titles are no longer received, while others have been added. All of the titles in the guide, and more recent acquisitions, are included in the Library’s online catalogue Explore.  Yet, in spite of these changes the guide still provides the easiest and most effective way into these collections.  It is constantly used by the curators themselves, who find it invaluable, so please do take a look!  And do remember that you can always ask for help from reading room staff in the Newsroom, and from reference services.

We'll be posting more about newspapers in the Library's collections over the coming days, so be sure to watch this space.

- Jean Petrovic (née Kemble)

Language has inevitably played a significant role in Canada’s immigration patterns. Reflecting the country’s colonial history and occupation by both the French and the English, the two most commonly-spoken languages in Canada remain English (the mother tongue of 56% of Canadians) and French (that of 21% of Canadians). Of course, other factors influence human relocation, but it is easy to see the attraction of such a linguistic context for immigrants from former colonies. The Haitian-Canadian community is an especially good illustration. According to the 2011 Census, 97% of Haitian immigrants live in Quebec – the second most populous region of Canada, but more crucially, home to the largest French-speaking community in the country, and with French as the official language. The attraction is clear for people from Haiti, a former French colony that has retained French as the language of education and bureaucracy. And the Haitian community in Quebec has produced a significant amount of prominent migrant writers, such as Emile Ollivier, Marie-Célie Agnant, Gérard Etienne, Joël des Rosiers, Gary Klang and Anthony Phelps, many of whom are published by Mémoire d’encrier.

Dany Laferrière. Wikimedia Commons. 2014.

 

But the best-known of them worldwide is Dany Laferrière, a political refugee of the Duvalier regime who has lived in North America since the 1970s. Born to a politician and an archivist, Laferrière worked as a journalist before fleeing Haiti soon after a colleague and friend of his was found murdered on a beach – most probably by the government. His autobiographical novel, Le Cri des Oiseaux Fous (2000) [The Cry of Mad Birds] narrates this event, its impact on him and the horrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in more detail. After moving to Montreal as a 23-year-old, he spent several years scraping a living from insecure jobs, living in cheap flats and reading novels. His first novel, provocatively entitled Comment faire l’amour à un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) [How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired] was a resounding international success. The story followed the lives of two Haitians sharing a flat in Montreal, and satirically engaged with racist stereotypes. A film adaptation followed four years after but was censured in the U.S, revealing the country’s continuing discomfort with racial issues. Over thirty years on, and with over thirty books to his name, Laferrière will be honoring the Institut Français of London with a visit on 24/09/2018 as part of the British Library’s French Caribbean Study Day.

Kim Thúy at the Salon international du livre de Québec 2011. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Another important migrant writer from Quebec is Kim Thuy. Born in Vietnam, her family escaped the communist regime in her homeland when she was ten years old and she spent several months in a refugee camp in Malaysia before being relocated to Quebec where she had to learn French, the language in which she now writes. First working as a translator and later as a lawyer, Thuy never severed her links with her homeland. As a lawyer for example, she went on an advisory assignment to Vietnam with a group of Canadian experts. Back in Montreal, she also opened a Vietnamese restaurant called Ru de Nam. She then turned to writing and explored themes such as Vietnamese immigrant women, the culture shocks of immigration, the mother-daughter relationship and Vietnamese food. Her latest publication, Le Secret des Vietnamiennes (2017) [Vietnamese Women’s Secret] is actually a cookbook of Vietnamese recipes handed down from mothers to daughters. Her first novel, Ru (2009) was a bestseller in Quebec and France, won prestigious awards worldwide and was translated into over twenty-five languages. It tells the story of a family’s journey from Vietnam to Quebec and their difficult adaptation to Canada. Loosely based on her experiences, it tackles the Vietnamese “boat people” refugee crisis involving dangerous escapes from Vietnam on over-crowded boats to refugee camps. Significantly, more than 50% of the Southeast Asian boat people came to Canada as a result of a government program.

A small selection of our holdings by French-language Canadian migrant writers (from left to right): Mona Latif-Ghattas (from Egypt), Abla Farhoud (from Lebanon), Hedi Bouraoui (from Tunisia), Ying Chen (from Shanghai), Naim Kattan (from Iraq), Régine Robin (from France), Sergio Kokis (from Bresil), Kim Thuy (from Vietnam), Blaise Ndala (from Congo), Marco Micone (from Italy), Dany Laferriere (from Haiti) and Aki Shimazaki (from Japan).

 

As you can see, Laferrière and Thuy are just two of the many French-language Canadian writers and the British Library holds books many more Canadian multicultural writers than I can even allude to in this post. Now let’s have a quick look at what we hold in terms of English-language migrant writing:

A small selection of our holdings by English-language Canadian migrant writers (from left to right): Kim Fu (of Chinese descent), Esi Edugyan (of Ghanaian descent), Austin Clarke (from Barbadia), M.G Vassanji (from Kenya, of Asian descent), Shani Mootoo (from Trinidad), Michael Ondaatje (from Sri Lanka), Madeleine Thien (of Chinese descent), Shauna Singh Baldwin (of Indian descent), Dionne Brand (from Trinidad and Tobago), Olive Senior (from Jamaica) and Neil Bissoondath (from Trinidad).

 

Although technically speaking still a newcomer to the international literary scene, Lebanese-born writer and photographer Rawi Hage has been particularly in vogue since the publication of his first novel in 2006.  Hage witnessed the civil war in his homeland and moved to Canada in the early 1990s where he had to work as a security guard and taxi driver to pay his way through university. Hage wasn’t the only person to relocate because of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In fact, as the war dragged on, Canada and Australia were the only Western countries to set up special programs to welcome Lebanese refugees. The 2011 census shows that Lebanese-Canadians still form the largest Arabic-speaking group in Canada. Language certainly had a role in this too, as 45% of Lebanese nationals can speak French. While Hage writes in English – his third language – up to quite recently he lived in Francophone Montreal, like about half of the Lebanese-Canadian population. His award-winning debut novel, De Niro’s Game (2006), tackles the hard choices that young Lebanese people faced during the civil war. His second novel, Cockroach (2008), charts the trials of an impoverished Middle Eastern immigrant in Montreal through his sessions with his therapist after a failed suicide attempt, leading the reader to question the success of Canada’s multiculturalism ambitions.

Rawi Hage at Quebec Writers Federation, 2012. Vimeo.

 

Hage’s colleague writer and common-law partner Madeleine Thien has rightly argued that the Canadian literary prize-awarding establishment generally prioritizes white writers over nonwhite ones). And when “multicultural”/minority writers are included, they generally tend to be men. Evoking the prestigious Giller Prize, she remarks that only 12 nonwhite writers were shortlisted over a ten-year period, and that “this number includes twice each for Rawi Hage, M.G. Vassanji, and Michael Ondaatje”. Thien’s point is all the more significant considering the extent of nonwhite and multicultural women’s writing in Canada’s literary history. The Caribbean feminist and/or queer women writers Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Shani Mootoo, Makeda Silvera and Nalo Hopkinson are only a few examples.

Esi Edugyan. A portrait by Johann Wall, reproduced with his kind permission.

 

But in 2011, Esi Edugyan made history by being the first black woman to win the Giller Prize. Her novel, Half-Blood Blues, followed the lives of Afro-German and African-American jazz musicians fleeing the Gestapo in 1930s Berlin and Nazi-occupied Paris. Edugyan’s parents left Ghana in the 1970s, during a period of drastic change and political unrest following independence. Like many of their compatriots, they moved to Canada, where Ghanaians became the second-largest African immigrant group. Her family’s first-hand experiences of racism and difficulties adapting to life in Canada has inspired much of her writing. Her first novel for example, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), shows the disillusionment of a Ghanaian immigrant living in Alberta in the late 20^th century, a character loosely based on her father. In the past few weeks, Edugyan has made the news again, by being long-listed (for the second time!) alongside Ondaatje for the Man Booker Prize. Her competing novel, Washington Black (2018), is an unconventional slave narrative which charts the life of a twelve-year-old slave working in a Barbados sugar plantation before fleeing an unjust execution in the 1830s, travelling to America, Canada, England, the Netherlands and Morocco. Good luck to her!

Laura Gallon.

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Laura Gallon is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project assessing holdings of migrant narratives in the North American collections. She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Sussex which is looking at contemporary American short fiction by immigrant women writers. Her placement is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies.

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