The American Trust had allocated $66,000 from its total grant giving for 2009 for the British Library’s upcoming fall exhibition entitled, “Evolving English:  One Language, Many Voices.  It will be the first ever exhibition exploring the English language in all its national and international diversity.  Iconic items and recordings will explore how English is spoken in the UK, from rural dialects to urban youth-speak, and celebrate English as it is spoken by 1.8 billion people around the world.

Rare Treasures at British Library Evolving Englishes Exhibit

The BL’s collection items will be set alongside engaging everyday texts to show the many social, cultural and historical strands from which the language is woven. Thus, treasures such as Beowulf, Shakespeare Folios, the King James Bible, Johnson’s Dictionary, Austen manuscripts, Scott’s diary and recorded speeches by Pankhurst, Churchill and Gandhi will be exhibited together with handwritten letters, recipes, posters, lists of slang, trading records, adverts, children’s books, dialect recordings, text messages and web pages. The interactive and media rich exhibition will emphasize how, from the very beginning, English has been shaped by the different cultures and languages with which it came into contact. It will demonstrate that the English language is by no means purely ‘English’– it is in fact a ‘mongrel’ tongue, mixed from centuries of influence from across the world, show the growth of English to the dominant world tongue, and show us where the language is now, where it has been, and – perhaps most important of all – where it is heading, for the new varieties of the language appearing in world literature and on the Internet show that this is a story which is by no means over.

Three curators of the BL gave ATBL a preview of the exhibit divided into English Comes of Ages, Everyday English, English around the World, Setting the Standard, English at Work, English at Play; and English around Britain and Ireland.  They saw rare and wonderful examples of what they BL will present:  an 11th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Manuscript, a handbook for Hobos, a 1612 map of Virginia, a Pidgin English kuk buk (cook book), the 1525 William Tyndale New Testament, British government posters from the First World War, a 1490 Eneydos (Aeneid), The Song of Solomon in various dialects of the Northern Britain, and Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers.

The Library is planning this major exhibition running for four-months at the Library October 2010-March 2011. They expect to attract 120,000 visitors.

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The 2009 grants are targeted at completing the cataloging of the BL’s magnificent Hebrew Manuscripts collection; and to aid in the purchase of the journal and charts of the 17th-century English naval explorer, Sir John Narbrough.  Some $66,000 of the total has been allocated for a yet unspecified purpose at the BL.

Golden Hagaddah

These monies had been originally assigned to help defray the costs of mounting some seventy items from the BL on loan to the New York Public library for its scheduled exhibition, Sacred, due to open in New York next October.  Sacred,  a compilation of important holdy books representing the three Abrahamic faiths, had been produced successfully in 2007 by the British Library in Lobdonb where it broke all attendance records.  A portion of it was scheudled to travel to the NYPL for the Sacred exhibition here.  In mid-December the BL regretfully had to cancel its participation in the NYPL show, it said, for security reasons.

The balance of the ATBL grants total has been forwarded to the BL for the Hebrew manusripsts and narbrough Journal projects:

Hebrew Manuscripts ($12,125) has been an ongoing project to catalog and digitize one thousand images from part of one of the world’s finest collections, namely, the more than 100 medieval Hebrew manuscripts, most of them illuminated in Europe.

At present there is limited online access to these treasures of Hebrew manuscript art which include the Golden Haggadah, the Barcelona Haggadah and the peerless Lisbon Bible. The project’s completion will add these treasures to the Library’s Digital Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts.

Narbrough Journal

The ATBL’s grant of more than $12,000, raised at a dinner in New York City last April to pay tribute to the late William Golden, has helped complete the project. Mr. Golden had been a longtime benefactor of the Library’s collection of Judaica.

Narbrough Autograph Journal and Charts ($30,000). The acquisition of this unpublished material detailing John Narbrough’s three-year voyage in 1669-71 to South America enables researchers to evaluate more thoroughly the explorer’s role in assessing for his country the commercial potential of South America.

Narbrough’s passage through the Straits of Magellan,  in both directions, demonstrated for the first time the viability of English trade in the Pacific. That in turn would dictate the course of English foreign policy for the next half-century.

Through these documents — which include colored charts along with illustrations of the natives and wildlife of Patagonia and Chile — Narbrough may be perceived as a crucial figure in the history of English exploration, standing midway between Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook.

The ATBL’s grant was made possible by funds from the Bernard Breslauer Bequest.

Other grants to the BL this past year was an ongoing pledge from the Caritas Foundaito of Greater Western kansas for the conservaiton of Thomas Crnamer’s prayer book.  And Roger Baskes, ATBL Board member and collector of maps and atlases, made an in

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Digitized Codex Sinaiticus

The World’s Oldest Bible

The fourth-century Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, whose ‘reunification’ project received early support from the ATBL in 2004, is increasingly a focus of media attention.

The latest illustrated article on what has now become a “digital scripture”, available worldwide on the internet, appeared in the December 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Codex Sinaiticus, handwritten on parchment in ancient Greek between the 1st and 4th centuries, resided at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. In the mid-1800s scholars from several countries removed sections of its fragile text for safekeeping. The divided Codex, which includes the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament, inspired a campaign four years ago to reunite what remains of the sacred text at the monastery with existing parts in Germany, Russia and the British Library. The American Trust made a $16,000 grant to support the early development phase of the campaign.

The now reunited Codex has become a virtual archive, each page appearing in high definition along  with a catalogue of details. The successful digitization effort has resulted in a new 21st century address for the world’s oldest Bible: codexsinaiticus.org.

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ATBL Executive Director Seana Anderson with Intern Nkwenkwezi Languza

The program of British Library Sound Archive internships is now in the middle of its inaugural year. The American Trust for the British Library has provided a bursary for Nkwenkwezi Languza who is completing a five-month internship.

Nkwenkwezi heads the Sound Preservation at the National Film, Video and Sound Archives in South Africa. He is responsible among others for ensuring the preservation and promotion of the sound collection, which includes indigenous music and oral history. Will Prentice, one of the British Library Sound Archive’s Audio Engineers, is supervising Nkwenkwezi’s training.

As well as developing his knowledge of the preservation of coarse groove discs, cassette tapes and digital media, Nkwenkwezi will also be creating some recordings to take back to his own archive. These recordings will be oral history interviews of South African performing artists who were members of the much-acclaimed Ipi Ntombi that toured Europe and other parts of the world in the 1970’s. The interviews will be based on their experiences as performers in exile.

ATBL will support a second Sound Archive internship in 2008-2009.  These internships at the BL are supported through the contributions from the general membership of the ATBL.
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We also heard recently from Beatrice Kitzinger, PHD Candidate at Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, Arthur M. Sackler Museum.  Ms. Kitzinger was an ATBL intern in the medieval section of the BL’s Department of Manuscripts in 2007.  This is what she wrote in part:

“I want to express my very great thanks for an invaluable internship period at the British Library made possible by the ATBL…  I found the experience extremely helpful for both my professional training and my dissertation research.  I was able to contribute to several different aspects of curatorial work in the department, and the access to the Library’s collections afforded by the internship enabled me to significantly advance my dissertation work….I would like to warmly thank you again for the commitment to young scholars’ research and training that your funding of this unique program represents.”

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