voyages of an eton librarian
early collections include a late 15th-century manuscript of Homer’s Odyssey by a Greek scribe working in Florence identified as Johannes Scutariotes, from the library of the humanist scholar Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, uncle and tutor of the more illustrious Amerigo. The display caption practically wrote itself! These two books gave me the theme of the first section of the exhibition (‘Odyssey’) and also brought literary as well as historical travelling to the forefront, suggesting the themes of the next two sections: historical travels (‘Explorations’) and literary travels (‘Imagined travels’). I spent some happy weeks delving into the catalogue and browsing the shelves, creating a longlist of books that sparked my interest, and mentally assigning them to these three categories; a fourth section, of course, was going to highlight some of the many travellers to emerge from Eton. This was my first exhibition as lead curator, and I initially had only the vaguest idea of how I was going to approach the business of selection and structure. My work on previous exhibitions (‘Aldus Manutius and the Renaissance book’ in 2015 and ‘Shakespeare on page and stage’ in 2016) and my existing familiarity with the subject and Eton’s collections suggested that a linear historical or geograph- ical approach would need to work around the inevitable gaps in the library’s holdings. The collecting interests of the college’s Provosts and Fellows since the 15th century and its major donors during the period of the collection’s major growth during the 18th century, and those of later librarians and bequests, mean the collection has great diversity and some surprising highlights, but the lack of a guiding collecting policy for most of the library’s history means that some key works and collecting areas are not so well represented. I was also mindful that the restricted dimensions and fixed layout of the exhibition cases might be particularly challenging for travel books, which often include large folded plates or atlases. From the start I was lucky to have the support and guidance of experienced colleagues. Our highly creative exhibitions coordina- tor encouraged me to start thinking in terms of ‘star objects’, and I soon had a rather eclectic shortlist of about a dozen ‘must-haves’ and an ever-growing longlist of ‘nice-to-haves’, chosen for their importance, their visual appeal, or for sparking ideas in my mind. I
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