Friday’s Snapshot from Special Collections …

For the last few weeks I have been working with a work experience student while she only comes one day a week she has really made a difference in the library at Special Collections here at the University of Reading.  

We do many ‘background tasks’ for lots of reasons to do with staffing levels and also usage.  It is no good spending months or years cataloging a collection if it has no interest at all. But, then one man’s meat is another’s poison, we have no real way of knowing what is going to be the next interest. So we each beaver away hoping that someone some somewhere will ‘discover’  we have a fine collection of something super-duper.

Such are our dreams.

So with an extra pair of hands and a willing mind we decided to finish a background task.  We have a collection of Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum around 400 items. We have the first editions and many since so you can imagine it is an interesting collection and perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea. Nonetheless it has now attracted some interest with students; so we are delighted; especially as we draw to a close as other collections and background task need to be completed.

As I said; the Wizard of Oz is almost finished so we haven’t been ‘finding’ so many gems … but this one made us smile it is not by Baum but W.W. Denslow the illustrator of the first editions of the Wizard of Oz in the late 19th century.  

The images and text are funny …