Intellectual Heritage for Everyone Our acquisitions 2015–2019 We build, curate and preserve the UK’s national collection of published, written and digital content Living Knowledge: the 2015 – 2023

Between April 2015 and March 2019 each of which had a market price Expert advice to Arts Council the British Library made around of £10,000 or above. England on the export of 2,000 heritage acquisitions. Many 80 books, manuscripts, maps of the items acquired cost less than Heritage items acquired during major heritage items a hundred pounds; others are of 2015–2019 included modern literary, and music major national importance with a historical and musical archives, and collections were During 2015–2019 British Library experts price to match their significance. medieval manuscripts, maps, safeguarded for the nation provided advice to the Department for Richly diverse in their origins and stamps, discs and early printed Digital, Culture Media & Sport (DCMS) focus, each of them enhances and books including incunabula. Many via Arts Council England (ACE) on the supplements the reflection of our are already available for research in export of heritage items to be sold past and current cultural life, which the Library’s Reading Rooms and overseas. Where an export licence is the Library’s collections offer to remotely, placed on public display recommended, a surrogate copy may be the nation and audiences around and available in digital form via £10.49m requested for the collections, and these the world. the British Library’s Digitised are added to the British Library’s holdings Manuscripts pages at bl.uk/ market value of assets and made available for research. Following our strategy Living manuscripts/ or via Explore the added to the British In 2018/2019, for example: Knowledge: the British Library British Library at explore.bl.uk/. Library’s collections 2015–2023, these acquisitions add value for researchers and The total Grant in Aid spent on 867 the number of permanent export engage a wide public audience major heritage items between 2015 licence applications advised upon with stimulating insights into the and 2019 was £5.54m. However, by British Library experts culture of the nation and its role in the acquisitions attracted £4.95m the world. We acquire individual in external support from generous £2.01 £28,221,631 items and collections after careful private donors, from the National the total of external total value of items and archives assessment of their importance Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art advised upon and their price, in many cases after Fund, Friends of the National support generated for tough negotiations by the Library’s Libraries, Friends of the British every £2.25 invested 12 expert curators. Library (Collections Trust) and the number of archives and items others, together with the Acceptance of which digital and print copies The following pages feature in Lieu (AiL) scheme and the Cultural were received a selection of our significant Gifts Scheme (CGS) administered by acquisitions, major national assets, Arts Council England. The Edward Elgar Archive and autograph English translation of Erasmus’s sketches relating to Pomp and Circumstance Enchiridion militis Christiani, 1523

Edward Elgar was the most important The archive includes 220 music In 2015/2016 the Library acquired The manuscript was placed under a British composer of the early 20th manuscripts, ranging from a few the only known manuscript of a temporary Export Stop and was acquired century, and one of the first from that complete works to many individual contemporary English translation of by the Library for £242,500 with the period to be appreciated worldwide. The sketch leaves, and around 11,000 letters the Enchiridion militis Christiani, or help of funding from the National acquisition of the first of his manuscripts to and from the composer, as well as ‘handbook of the Christian soldier’, by Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). through his daughter in the 1950s was digital images of the material. There are the great humanist scholar and reformer one of the major foundations of the also around 200 annotated proofs and Desiderius Erasmus. The Enchiridion, The manuscript (now Add MS 89149) Library’s unrivalled collection of printed scores, demonstrating Elgar’s a compendium of humanistic piety, can be viewed online at manuscripts by major British composers. changes to compositions during the was Erasmus’s most popular work and bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. The Library’s Elgar holdings now publication process, as well as evoked widespread interest in 16th- aspx?ref=Add_MS_89149. comprise the largest collection of performance annotations and decisions century Europe. Between 1501, when Elgar primary sources anywhere, about cuts made by the composer for Erasmus wrote the Enchiridion, and having significantly increased the the recordings he supervised. Other 1536, when he died, the original Latin amount of material over recent years. papers illuminate Elgar’s biography and text appeared in more than fifty printed In 2016/2017 the Library purchased range from his own writings, diaries and editions. Between 1533 and 1545 there nine folios of autograph sketches descriptions of pieces through to official were thirteen editions printed in English, relating to a sixth Pomp and documents and dealings with publishers. the first being published by Wynkyn de Circumstance March by Elgar at the This part of the collection also includes Worde for John Bydell. cost of £38,000. In 2018/2019 the works by Alice Elgar, the wife of the major donation of the Edward Elgar composer and also an author and poet The manuscript is dated to 1523, pre- Archive from the Elgar Foundation in her own right. dating the first printed edition of the to the Library raised the profile of its text by ten years, and is also the earliest Elgar collection even further. The archive was the subject of a public known translation into English of any of concert and study day held at the Erasmus’s works. It has been suggested Library in November 2019. that the manuscript may represent a ‘lost’ translation of the Enchiridion by the religious reformer William Tyndale (d.1536). Two 16th-century accounts testify that Tyndale translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion into English in the early 1520s. To date, there has been no secure evidence that it survived and scholars have long debated whether the 1533 printed edition was of Tyndale’s translation. A preliminary comparison of the text of the manuscript with those of ten different 16th-century printed editions reveals that the manuscript preserves a hitherto unknown English translation of the Enchiridion. The Mostyn Psalter The Glagolitic Breviary

The Mostyn Psalter is a late 13th- The Mostyn Psalter-Hours belongs to a The Library holds the largest collection This volume was acquired at auction century manuscript Psalter-Hours group of highly significant manuscripts of incunabula editions (books printed in 2018/2019 for £101,400 with the produced in and is a significant produced in the last quarter of the with moveable type before 1501) in support of the Friends of the British addition to the largest collection of 13th century in the ambit of Edward I’s the world and regularly adds to it. This Library (Collections Trust) and funding medieval English Psalters in the world. court (r. 1272–1307). The manuscript’s Glagolitic Breviary was acquired as an from the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. The text includes a calendar, decorated original patron is unknown, but its high example of a rare printing type cut with twenty small miniatures of the quality illumination and fine script specifically for this work and hitherto The Breviarium Romanum glagoliticum labours of the months, and a Psalter indicate that it was made for an unrepresented in the Library’s collections. has been catalogued and is now with eight large historiated initials. important individual. This first owner IA.21702. Canticles, a Litany, Collects and Hours may have been a bishop, as an image This Breviarium Romanum glagoliticum of the Virgin with suffrages to saints of a bishop appears in the illustration was printed in Venice in 1493 and is the and the Office of the Dead follow. for Psalm 101, where a donor portrait third incunabulum printed in Glagolitic The manuscript remains largely might be expected. type for the Croatian community in Italy. uncropped and preserves its original, It is the first production of Blaž Baromi´c, impressive size. The manuscript was acquired by the who established the first printing press in Library by private sale and after a major Croatia in 1494. Baromi´c was a priest, a fundraising campaign in 2017/2018 canon, a jurist and the scribe of at least for £775,000. Funding came from the one Glagolitic Breviary in 1460. He may Friends of the National Libraries, the have been sent to Venice specifically to Friends of the British Library (Collections learn the art of printing books. Trust), the Art Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) The Library’s copy is one of only six and the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. known copies of this edition to survive today. It is in contemporary condition The manuscript (now Add MS 89250) and shows many signs of having can be viewed online at been in contemporary Croatian hands bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. and heavily used. Its original binding aspx?ref=Add_MS_89250. contains fragments from Glagolitic manuscripts. The arms of the City of Nuremberg on the upper cover were added later. The Granville Archive The Boosey & Hawkes Archive

The Granville Archive comprises the include some important material relating The business archive of the British work undertaken by the publishers in papers of several generations of the to the American War of Independence music publisher Boosey & Hawkes promoting their works in the concert Leveson-Gower family, including the and to the French Revolution. and its international affiliates hall and wider afield. In addition to papers of the first and second Lords contains manuscript scores, proofs, being the publisher of the works of Granville, both of whom held important The Granville Archive was acquired correspondence, contracts and major composers, Boosey & Hawkes political and diplomatic offices. The by private sale in 2018/2019 for ephemera dating from about 1880 to was also the pre-eminent publisher of archive consists of three main parts: £1,650,000 after a major external 1980. Since the early 20th century, brass and military band music, parlour first, the papers of Granville Leveson- fundraising campaign. Funding came Boosey & Hawkes has published the songs and other more parochial genres Gower (1721–1803) and his third wife, from the National Heritage Memorial works of major composers such as Igor which are all represented in the archive. the political hostess Susanna Leveson- Fund (NHMF), the Friends of the British Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Richard Strauss, Gower (1742–1805); second, the Library (Collections Trust), the Friends Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev, The Library purchased the Boosey & papers of Granville Leveson-Gower, of the National Libraries, the Bernard H. Aaron Copland, Sir Edward Elgar, Hawkes Archive in 2015/2016 in a 1st Earl Granville (1773–1846), British Breslauer Endowment, the Shaw Fund, Frederick Delius, Roger Quilter, Gerald private sale for a negotiated price of Ambassador to Russia and France; and the Blakeney Fund, the Eccles Centre for Finzi, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Dame £800,000 with funding from its Grant third, the papers of Granville George American Studies, the Library’s Grant in Ethel Mary Smyth, Ralph Vaughan in Aid budget. Leveson-Gower, second Earl Granville Aid budget, and a private donor. Williams, Benjamin Britten and Sir Peter (1815–1891), Foreign Secretary three Maxwell Davies. The archive contains Cataloguing is in progress and is being times under William Ewart Gladstone. The cataloguing of the archive has been extensive correspondence with and on funded from the Library’s Grant in Aid The bulk of the archive is contained funded from the Library’s Grant in Aid behalf of these major composers which budget. The Directors sub-series which within the papers of the first and second budget and from a restricted fund and changes our understanding of the makes up about a sixth of the entire Lords Granville. The papers of Granville was half way to completion by the end financial and contractual arrangements archive is now MS Mus.1813/2/1/1- and Susanna Leveson-Gower make up of March 2020. made between the composers and 301. the smaller part of the archive, but they their publishers. It also shows the The Michael Palin Archive The Margaret Forster Archive

The comedian, actor, writer and The near-complete archive of Margaret television presenter Michael Palin (b. Forster (1938–2016), author, among 1943) is best known for being one of other works, of (1965) the six members of Monty Python, who and Diary of an Ordinary Woman created the cult series Monty Python’s (2003), contains her personal diaries, Flying Circus, first broadcast on the BBC manuscripts and typescript drafts of between 1969 and 1974. From the late published and unpublished works, 1980s, Palin began to focus on travel adaptations for film, radio and television, writing and gained a high reputation and correspondence of a personal and as a travel writer and documentary- professional nature. Forster’s writing maker. He has also written and created process is well documented in the documentary films on art history, has archive, with successive revised drafts published one play and several novels. existing for almost all works. For many The collection represents the archive books there are also notes, illuminating of Michael Palin’s literary and creative correspondence with agents and editors, career and includes over 50 ‘Python and sometimes proofs, which together Notebooks’ containing drafts, working present a comprehensive picture of material and personal reflections relating the creative process from initial ideas to Palin’s Monty Python writing. It also up until publication. Four unpublished includes his personal diaries up to 2005 novels have been identified among and project files comprising material Forster’s papers, including her first relating to his film, television and attempt at a novel Green Dusk for literary work, including correspondence, Dreams from 1960. Among the drafts and annotated scripts relating to special correspondence are letters subsequent Python projects. from high-profile British writers including A S Byatt, Jonathan Coe, The archive of Michael Palin was Carmen Callil, Sebastian Faulks, acquired by donation in 2016/2017. John Fowles, , Michael Palin also paid for the Alan Hollinghurst, , cataloguing of the archive after its and . arrival at the Library, and the archive is now Add MS 89284. The archive of Margaret Forster was acquired by private sale for £25,000 A selection of documents from the in 2017/2018 with funding from the archive following Michael Palin’s career Library’s Grant in Aid budget. The from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s archive has been catalogued and is was displayed in the Library’s Treasures now Add MS 89408. Gallery in 2018. The Olwyn Hughes Archive The Tony Benn Archive

The archive of Olwyn Hughes (1928– the archives of other literary agents. The archive of the politician, writer scrapbooks and press cuttings over 2016), literary agent and sister of the Olwyn Hughes had a considerable and diarist Tony Benn (1925–2014), forty years; and around 2,000 political poet Ted Hughes, includes over 100 influence on the life and career of her Labour’s longest-serving MP, pamphlets covering a huge variety unpublished letters from Ted Hughes younger brother, Ted. Upon the death comprises diaries (both audio and of topics. While most of the archive to his sister as well as substantial of Ted’s first wife Sylvia Plath in 1963 transcript, daily thoughts and is paper-based, it also contains a correspondence from other authors, Olwyn abandoned her life in Paris and reflections in diaries kept both in significant amount of audio-visual including Seamus Heaney, Doris returned to England to support her and out of Parliament), papers from material. Lessing, Henry Williamson and Emma brother. She subsequently founded a his ministerial career, constituency Tennant. It provides a rich resource for literary agency and became papers, political correspondence The Benn Archive will be hugely scholars researching the life, work and not only of Ted Hughes’s work, but also (e.g. arranged by particular subjects valuable for current and future legacy of Hughes, Sylvia Plath and of that of Sylvia Plath. Olwyn and Ted were including the 1975 Common Market generations of researchers into the significant interplay between their extremely close and the archive reflects referendum, the Falklands War, post-war British politics and society, respective oeuvres. The archive reveals their deep personal attachment as well the Gulf War, Stop the War, and into the Labour Party and the labour the underlying influence of a literary as the business side of their relationship. also distributed within the other movement, as well as into the long agent on orchestrating the development, categories of material), Labour Party and influential career of Tony Benn reception, output, presentation and The Olwyn Hughes Archive was files (covering some of the pre- himself. It is a very substantial subsequent reputation of some of the acquired by private sale for £195,000 War history of the Labour Party, addition to the Library’s growing authors Olwyn Hughes represented. The in 2017/2018 with funding from both in Bristol and nationwide, also collection of contemporary archives in material builds on the Library’s collection the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. Benn’s chairmanship of the Party in the field of politics, campaigning and strengths, including the Ted Hughes Cataloguing of the archive is ongoing. 1971–1972, his campaigns for the activism. Archive, the Sylvia Plath material and leadership and deputy leadership, and particularly party policy and The Tony Benn Archive was acquired organisation in the 1980s), speeches for the nation under the Acceptance and articles (including many in Lieu (AiL) Scheme in 2018/2019. unpublished and never given), The Mervyn Peake Visual Archive Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, 1893

The Visual Archive of the writer Mervyn Mr Hyde, together with illustrations for Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) exerted Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking- Peake (1911–1968) complements the his own novels (including Gormenghast), very strict quality control over his Glass was purchased at auction for Mervyn Peake Archive acquired in 2010 children’s books, plays, poetry and publications, particularly over the £39,000 in 2018/2019 with funding and reunites the two archives of Mervyn television projects. The archive also printing of the illustrations in his books. from a restricted fund and the Library’s Peake’s work. While the Mervyn Peake includes drawings of famous literary, He received six copies of this particular Grant in Aid budget. The volume was Archive acquired by the Library in 2010 theatrical and artistic figures. Reuniting printing of Through the Looking-Glass displayed in the Library’s Cats on the is broadly literary in content, it contains both halves of the Peake Archive will from his publishers, and this copy Page exhibition shortly after acquisition a substantial amount of visual material, enable scholars to trace the creative contains a large number of annotations and will also be part of the UK tour of including Peake’s original drawings genesis of Peake’s highly acclaimed regarding quality, noting over-printing this exhibition. It is catalogued and is for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland children’s book Captain Slaughterboard of illustrations, unsatisfactory paper now C.194.a.1428. and Alice Through the Looking-Glass Drops Anchor (1939), for example. colour and poor folding which resulted as well as printing plates and proofs of in text appearing in the wrong place illustrations. The Visual Archive now The Mervyn Peake Visual Archive was on the page. adds to the material in the collection purchased after a major fundraising since 2010 and contains unpublished campaign for £513,823 in 2018/2019. When 60 copies of the 1,000 copy material and rough sketches which are Funding came from the National print run had already been sold, Carroll key to understanding Peake’s artistic and Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), the purchased the remaining 940 copies, literary development. It features Peake’s Art Fund, the Friends of the National had them bound in inferior cloth and illustrations for classic works of literature Libraries, the Friends of the British donated them to good causes. He then including Treasure Island, Household Library (Collections Trust) and the asked his publishers, Macmillan, to Tales by the Brothers Grimm, The Library’s Grant in Aid budget. issue a printed apology asking the 60 Hunting of the Snark and Dr Jekyll and purchasers to return their faulty copies for a replacement. As a result of Carroll’s intervention, only four copies of this edition in the original cloth are thought to survive. Unlike the copies of the print run that were sent to good causes, however, this copy is bound in superior red cloth, tooled in gold, with all edges gilt. This unique copy holds significant research value for the printing history of Carroll’s works and provides a valuable addition to the Library’s unparalleled collection of Alice-related material in print and manuscript. Autograph manuscript leaves from Updates on previous acquisitions Walter Scott’s Kenilworth

These two leaves from the original In this second edition of Intellectual W H Auden’s notebook of 1939 manuscript of the novel Kenilworth by Heritage for Everyone, we would has been catalogued and is now Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) include like to provide updates on some of Add MS 89035. It can be ordered the end of Chapter III and beginning the acquisitions which featured in via Explore Archives and Manuscripts of Chapter IV. They are two of the the first edition, covering the years and consulted in the Manuscripts pages that had been removed from the 2013–2015. Since these acquisitions Reading Room. Twelve images of the autograph manuscript before it was joined the British Library’s collections, journal are also available as part of the acquired by the British (Museum) Library they have been made available to a Library’s online resource Discovering in 1855. They were given by Scott’s worldwide audience in a number of Literature: 20th Century: bl.uk/ publisher John Ballantyne (d. 1821) to ways, including through cataloguing, collection-items/w-h-audens-journal- the geologist William Edmund Logan. digitisation, scholarly articles and entry-for-1-september-1939. Reuniting these leaves with the original online resources. manuscript is of significant benefit to the The Bowes Playing Cards are the public and academic researchers. The extensive George Canning and subject of an entry in the Library’s Canning Family Papers have been Maps and Views blog which also The Kenilworth leaves were acquired fully catalogued, and the material is contains a selection of images: blogs. at auction for £16,041 in 2016/2017 available as Add MS 89143 (George bl.uk/magnificentmaps/2014/10/ with funding from the Friends of the Canning Papers), Add MS 89177 new-acquisition-the-bowes-playing- British Library (Collections Trust) and (Ulick de Burgh Papers) and MSS EUR cards-of-1590.html. the Library’s Grant in Aid budget. The F699 (Charles and Charlotte Canning leaves have been catalogued and are Papers). The papers can be ordered via The Catholicon Anglicum was the now Add MS 89229. Explore Archives and Manuscripts and subject of an article by Dr James consulted in the Manuscripts Reading Freeman published in the eBLJ in Room. 2016: bl.uk/eblj/2016articles/pdf/ ebljarticle52016.pdf. The equally large D’Oyly Carte Opera Company Archive has been fully Stephen Gardiner’s A traictise catalogued as Add MS 89231 and declaryng and plainly prouyng, that can be ordered via Explore Archives the pretensed marriage of priestes, and Manuscripts and consulted in and professed persones, is no mariage, the Manuscripts Reading Room. An but altogether unlawful (London, event to celebrate the completion of 1554), was the focus of the PhD thesis the cataloguing project was held in The Life and Theology of Bishop September 2018. This was followed John Ponet (1516–1556) completed by a display of material from the in 2018 by the Rev Dr Mark Earngey collection in the Library’s Treasures and supervised by Professor Diarmaid Gallery between September 2019 MacCulloch. and January 2020. The important late 15th-century The collection has been discussed in copy of Nizami’s famous Persian two articles: poem, the Khamsah (‘quintet’) from Pauline McGonagle, ‘A Transnational Sultanate India is now catalogued History of a Writer in Four Packages’, as Or.16969. Anticipating demands Wasafiri Journal, vol. 34, 2019, issue for international loans we are 3. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10. currently individually mounting 1080/02690055.2019.1613006 the 39 paintings. Meanwhile the Khamsah was the subject of a major Pauline McGonagle, ‘Researcher’s presentation on Sultanate painting Notebook: My First Encounter at Connected Courts: Art of the with ’, The South Asian Sultanates held at Still Point Journal, February 22, in September 2019. 2017. https://thestillpointjournal. com/2017/02/22/researchers- The Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Papers notebook-my-first-encounter-with- are the main focus of an AHRC ruth-prawer-jhabvala/ Collaborative PhD Studentship, hosted by the British Library and the There has also been international University of Exeter. The cataloguing media coverage of the Archive: of the Papers is part of the PhD and is Article by Hasan Suroor in the nearing completion. Business Standard, India (July 2018) Article by Danish Khan in the Pauline McGonagle’s project Mumbai Mirror (July 2018). is focussed on the idea of ‘disinheritance’ in the writings of An event, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and has A Celebration, was held in the featured on the Library’s website Library’s Knowledge Centre in July in a Collaborative Project Case 2018 with speakers including James Study: bl.uk/case-studies/pauline- Ivory, Anita Desai, Simon Callow and mcgonagle. Felicity Kendal. A recording of the event can be watched on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=tzwI0Ck6ReA bl.uk