Month 4 (October 2011)
This month I have been mostly... Organising and running events
What a busy few weeks! At the beginning of the month I participated in a family learning day at a Cambridgeshire primary school, with a new creative writing activity I devised using some of Butler’s photographs. Many of the adults were particularly taken with his striking black and white ‘snapshots’ of people and places in the nineteenth century, which has encouraged me to think about creating an online gallery of the photographs.
A photograph by Samuel Butler
The rest of the month was taken up with preparations for the Festival of Ideas: selecting and researching exhibits, and writing captions, for the Samuel Butler exhibition, and devising the activity for our ‘Imaginary Lands’ workshops. Almost 400 people visited the Old Library on Saturday 22 October and saw the exhibition, ‘Interested in everything: drawing inspiration from the collections of Samuel Butler’. Feedback was really positive – but then it’d be hard not to be intrigued, and impressed, by the range of Butler’s interests and his creative output.
Artefacts in the October exhibition
Following the exhibition we hosted a couple of workshops on Imaginary Lands, loosely inspired by Samuel Butler’s country of Erewhon, but using a number of early printed books from the Old Library collection to explore how the first mapmakers and explorers saw and imagined parts of the world. Workshop participants worked their way round an exhibition trail, then got some good old-fashioned paper and pencils and created their own imaginary lands. The activity worked really well and will be a great resource for future school group visits.
Imaginary lands... an illustration from a book in the Old Library collection