The CERL Grant 2015

The grant was awarded to Thomas Theyssens, a graduate in Early Modern History from the University of Louvain, with a Masters in Heritage Management in Libraries from the University of Antwerp, and working experience at Flanders Heritage Library.

With the help of the CERL Internship and Placement Grant of 2015, Thomas Theyssens (University of Antwerp) was able to work from 14 March till 8 April 2016, as an intern within the Printed Heritage Collections Department for the British Library under the supervision of Tim Pye, Tanya Kirk and Adrian Edwards. The aim for this project was to identify all of the Strawberry Hill books (the books once owned by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) that were kept and used in his Gothic Revival villa, ‘Strawberry Hill’, and that were sold on the famous Strawberry Hill sale in 1842) that are now in the British Library collections, describe their condition, binding, Walpole identifiers, annotations etc. and to create a finding aid.

In these 4 weeks, no less than 137 individual titles in a total of 91 volumes were identified in the collections of the British Library. The results of this project provide us with a better insight in the history of these books (how did they end up in the British Museum/British Library, where were they before?) and a more detailed and accurate description and understanding of Horace Walpole’s provenance marks and the marks made by other previous owners. We now know how these books currently look, in what condition they are in, and in what exact location (i.e. shelf mark) they are kept. These results can help supplement or correct the descriptions in Hazen’s Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library (New Haven, London, 1969), still the main reference work on Walpole’s books, and can be of great value of curators and Walpole researchers. For now these results will only be available in a spreadsheet, but in time it is the intention to add the data to the British Library catalogue records and the English Short Title Catalogue database.