Please join us to celebrate the launch of Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects from the Rylands by Stella Halkyard.

The event will be hosted by Stacy Boldrick and will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MffP74zKQOihHz6xuQcoJA#/registration

Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects From the Rylands plots the lifelong love affair between one particular bookworm and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, its collections drawn from every corner and period of the textual and meta-textual world. How do we read – and what can we read from – a potsherd, a locket, a fragment of papyrus, a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript, an envelope, a seemingly ordinary book?

Stella Halkyard, one of the library’s erstwhile archivists, tells the life stories of some of this great library’s previously unsung treasures and provides radical new readings for a few of its acclaimed gems. In a sequence of idiosyncratic and often playful short essays she celebrates the resonance of these objects and their ability to tell stories that range across time and place, from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, to John Donne’s shroud, eighteenth-century Chinese papermaking, Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, plastic surgery in sixteenth-century Italy, the lining of Walt Whitman’s hat, and Delia Derbyshire’s wartime gas mask. Selected from Halkyard’s popular ‘Pictures from a Library’ and ‘Archive Corner’ features published in PN Review over the last two decades, these essays have been brought together for the first time and put into productive dialogue with each other.

About the speakers:

Stella Halkyard studied English at the University of Newcastle, History of Art at the University of Manchester, and Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool. Since 1991 she has worked as the Modern Literary Archivist at the John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Stacy Boldrick is Associate Professor at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Publications include Iconoclasm and the Museum (monograph); Striking Images: Iconoclasms Past and Present (with Leslie Brubaker and Richard Clay); Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (with Clay). Curatorial projects include Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (Tate Britain; with Tabitha Barber) and Wonder: Painted Sculpture from Medieval England (Henry Moore Institute; with David Park and Paul Williamson).