2022 Season
Exclusive Program Series
for
Current ATBL Supporters!
Join us for a series of short, thirty-minute virtual events with British Library curators as they go in-depth about selected important objects and manuscripts that have been acquired, preserved, or maintained through ATBL Grants. Time will be reserved to ask the curators questions about these objects and their work.
Hosted by
The American Trust for the British Library
in partnership with
The British Library
Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, 1410. Lansdowne MS 851, f.2r.
Morning Tea
with the British
Library
May 17, 2022, 9:00 AM EDT
British Library Curator Julian Harrison presents on Geoffrey Chaucer
In 2021, the ATBL, on the recommendation of the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, provided a grant of $7,450 to digitize Geoffrey Chaucer’s late 14th-century unfinished masterpiece of medieval literature, The Canterbury Tales.
The Canterbury Tales is considered to be one of the most important works in early English literature and it remains popular with academic and public audiences alike. Written in Middle English, the text represents stories within a story: a narrative of 31 pilgrims en route to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury who each tell the group two tales to pass the time on the journey there and back home.
Today, the British Library holds 22 of the surviving 90 medieval manuscripts and manuscript fragments of The Canterbury Tales.
Egerton Gospel (P. Lond. Christ. 1, P. Egerton 2), Mid 2nd century. Egerton Papyrus 2.
Afternoon Tea
with the British
Library
July 13, 2022, 12:00 PM EDT
British Library Curator Peter Toth presents on the Library’s Greek Papyri
The British Library houses one of the largest and most important collections of papyri in the world, comprising items in Greek, Coptic, and Latin alike. Thanks to external funding, the Library’s entire holding of Greek and Latin papyri has now been fully digitized and is being catalogued and published in several stages in the Library’s online catalogue. High-resolution images are—and will be—published in the Library’s online viewer.
In 2019 and 2020, the ATBL provided $45,000 of grant support to complete the most recent project phase, completed in August 2021, which cataloged 610 Greek papyri in Library’s collection and identified c. 200 items that have counterparts in American collections.
My Mackerel Lover by Carolyn Trant, (Shelfmark: HS.74/1793) used with kind permission of Carolyn Trant.
Morning Tea
with the British
Library
September 15, 2022, 9:00 AM EDT
British Library Curator Mercedes Aguirre presents on Artists Books
In addition to the Library’s artists’ books and miniature books collections, UK fine press collections that extend from the late-19th century until the present, and the largest collection in the world of UK illustrated books, the Library also holds an impressive collection of artists’ books and fine press publications from across the Americas. Some of the artists represented in the British Library’s American artists’ books collection include Enrique Chagoya, Barbara Hodgson, Sol LeWitt, Angela Lorenz, Edward Ruscha, and Kara Walker, among many others.
In 2016 and 2019, the ATBL provided $90,850 to support the cataloguing of the American Collection of Artists’ Books, and related archival holdings.
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