the book collector
have to admit that the biggest challenge was to massage the longlist into themes! The other serendipitous inspiration was an unassuming book I had encountered while working on a project funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to catalogue the Parikian collection of early Armenian printing at Eton, which had been bequeathed in 1988 by the Anglo-Armenian violinist and book collector Manoug Parikian. A slim volume in contemporary limp parchment, Girolamo Rocchi’s Funerale della signora Sitti Maani Gioerida della Valle (Rome, 1627) commemorates the wife of the humanist trav- eller Pietro Della Valle, who spent twelve years travelling widely in the Levant. In Baghdad he married a beautiful Syriac Christian, Sitti Maani Gioerida (Arabic: Ma’ani Juwayri), who died in Persia in 1621 after the miscarriage of their first child. Della Valle had his wife’s body preserved and transported back to Rome for burial in the family vault. Nearly four centuries later, the book suggested questions about how travel marks our lives, and made me think about what we bring back from our journeys. It remained at the back of my mind as I wondered how to conceive an exhibition that would allow me to include it. This book, together with the slim manuscript account book (from the late 18th century) of the Christopher, a Liverpool slave ship, eventually formed the core of what became the final section of the exhibition (‘Ways of travel- ling’), the Old Etonian travellers having been reabsorbed into the various sections. Eton is incredibly fortunate to have such rich and varied collec- tions. Exhibitions have been held regularly in College Library since the mid-1990s, when a dedicated gallery designed by Alec Cobbe was opened in Lupton’s Tower. The exhibitions were originally organised in-house by librarians and keepers, but in 2011 the open- ing of a second exhibition gallery brought a dedicated exhibition coordinator onto the team and put our exhibition work on a more ambitious footing, including loan exhibitions and fruitful collab- orations with contemporary artists, such as our recent exhibition ‘Creative Destruction: volcanoes inspiring art and science’, which brought Eton’s copy of Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776) into dialogue with the work of modern vulcanologists at
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