Librarians have a very mixed attitude to markings, underlining, or scribbling on books. In most cases it is frowned upon. In one infamous case from the 1960s, the British playwright Joe Orton served six months in gaol for defacing books from Islington Public Library. However, in other cases, far from being viewed as vandalism, ‘markings’ … Continue reading Providential Provenance
UCD Library Special Collections has just completed the cataloguing of a major new W. B. Yeats Collection that it received as a donation in 2015. The interest of the collection stems not only for its contents, but also from the story of how it was gathered together and how it reached UCD Library. From the … Continue reading A Medical Marvel
Just over a decade before his death in 1967, the poet Patrick Kavanagh – a man equally at home in the fields of Monaghan and the pubs of Dublin – visited America for the first time. In the Kavanagh Archive at UCD Special Collections the poet’s two late transatlantic trips can be traced through letters and … Continue reading Mr Kavanagh Goes to America
In 1960 the New York Public Library sued Peter Kavanagh, for reproducing the letters of John Quinn which they held in their care. The letters were transferred to the library in 1924. Under an agreement between the library and Quinn’s estate they were not to be published until 1988. Peter Kavanagh decided to ignore this … Continue reading The Lion, the Letters and a Kavanagh