notes on reading Tristam Shandy
Paula Szturc
I open the 1815 edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , just after restrictions are lifted. 7 The four volumes of Sterne’s works are stored on the top shelf in the Roland Penrose Library section, within the Gabrielle Keiller Library Room – an architecturally charged gallery and mezzanine space that blurs the boundary between library, study and exhibition space. Here, paratextual density brings together works that span half a millennium, with Tristram Shandy and Henri Matisse’s Jazz occupying the same space. Both Keiller and Penrose collections centre around Dada and Surrealist publications. Penrose’s bequest contains small section of books he chose to keep from the vast manuscript and rare books library of Baron Peckover, his maternal grandfather.
The enmeshing of institutional and personal geographies results in a unique situation – the recreation of the original proximities of objects within the collections. Sterne’s four volumes with the remnants of marbling on their covers and tiny evidence of gold in the ornamented embossed details on the spine, share the shelf with the copy of first collected edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel printed in 1564 in Lyon, and a 1545 Venetian edition of Orlando Innamorato .
7 After lockdown and the slow opening of public institutions, 18 months later I was allowed to examine The works of Laurence Sterne, in four volumes, containing the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. a sentimental journey through France and Italy; sermons, - letters, etc with a life of the author, written by himself. / Volume the Second printed in London by A. Strahan in 1815, now part of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Roland Penrose Collection, Peckover Library, GMA A35/2/RPL4/062.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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