‘Therein lies a tale’: literary manuscripts at St John’s College

As part of the University Festival of Ideas St John’s College Library will be holding an exhibition of literary manuscripts and rare books on Tuesday 26 October, with a free evening talk examining some of the items in more detail. The exhibition spans seven hundred years of English literature, including medieval manuscripts of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, first editions of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, a Philip Larkin holograph, and the science fiction of Douglas Adams and Fred Hoyle.

The exhibition will be held in the beautiful seventeenth-century Old Library of the College. In the evening Dr James Harmer (St John’s) will speak about a sixteenth-century manuscript of Sackvilles ‘Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham’, and Dr Ian Patterson (Queens’) will discuss ‘T.S. Eliot, the Hogarth Press, and Poetry Publishing’.

Exhibition open 10am-1pm, 2pm-4pm and 7pm-8pm in the Old Library, St John’s College

Free public talk at 6pm in the Fisher Building, St John’s College

All welcome.