Voyages of an Eton Librarian stephanie coane My life has been marked by travel. Some of my earliest memories are of learning that my family was going to emigrate from the United States where I was born, to Italy where I grew up. As a young adult I lived for a time in Germany, attended universities in the United Kingdom and France, and finally settled in the United Kingdom, completing my higher education at Oxford where my doctoral research focused on literary aspects of late 18th-century French explorers – Bougainville, La Pérouse and others. I had been advised to abandon a projected comparative study of French and English accounts and mutual translations, which left a feeling of unfinished business when I turned to a career in libraries. On starting work at Eton College Library in 2013, I was delighted to find a set of first editions of Cook’s three voyages on the shelves alongside Johann Reinhold Forster’s English translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Around the World (1772) and many other early modern travel books. ‘Voyage’ was a word that stuck in my mind, and as I explored the collections further an idea began to form. Previous exhibitions had focused on individual travellers such as the Old Etonian Wilfred Thesiger, whose literary archive is at Eton, or topographical subjects such as Venice and St Petersburg, but apart from an exhibition on the Grand Tour, none had explored our holdings of travel books more generally. I hadn’t done much more than draft an early outline structure reflecting the stages of a journey (planning and departure, transit, arrival, return home) when, after working predominantly with the library’s pre-1800 holdings, I was appointed Deputy Curator of Modern Collections in late 2016 and decided to use the exhibition as an opportunity to get to grips with this new area of the library. Eton’s 19th- and 20th-century collections are especially strong in English literature, and include a remarkable copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses , one of the 100 copies on Dutch paper signed by Joyce, in a striking designer binding by Jean de Gonet. It so happens that our
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