| Description | Collection of commonplace books assembled by the historian and author William St Clair. Primarily compiled by women, they commonly include poetry (copies of published works and original verse); extracts of prose; quotations, mottoes, and epithets; drawings and sketches; engravings and other printed illustrations (sometimes hand-coloured); press cuttings; pressed flowers and other miscellaneous enclosures.
Some volumes are the work of a single compiler, either the original owner or presented as a gift, whilst others have entries written and signed by many different hands. This relfects a common practice of passing a book around friends and family for contributions. Some items show evidence of being used over multiple generations.
There are also a small number of printed exemplars throughout the collection. |
| AdminHistory | This collection was assembled over many years by the historian and author William St Clair (1937-2021), for whom the collection is named. Educated at the Edinburgh Academy and St John's College, Oxford, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1973 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. He was variously a fellow at the Huntington Library, California, Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls, Oxford and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He was also co-founder and Chair of Open Book Publishers. |