Books sent to The Tower given exhibition reprieve
AN ALADDIN’S cave of books once deemed of no interest to Cambridge University academics, including translations of The
Hobbit into Cornish and Hawaiian, are to go on public display for the first time.
The university’s library has been entitled to a copy of all new published books since the Copyright Act of 1710, but those classed as non-academic were hived off into a tower.
The volumes, including children’s literature, cookbooks, car manuals and novels, were not originally entered into the university’s main library catalogue.
Almost one million items have been stored in a 17-storey tower, built in the 1930s to provide extra space for storage, and it is now almost full.
Its treasures will go on display to the public when a free exhibition called Tall Tales: Secrets Of
The Tower opens on Wednesday. Items in the Tower Collection are kept as part of the university’s responsibility as a copyright library.
Liam Sims, rare book specialist at Cambridge University Library, said: “I suspect many academics didn’t have any interest in this sort of material.”
He added that the items were “not deemed to be of academic use in a university library” but the librarians decided they should be “kept and preserved as part of the national printed record”.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of items could only be found by using cards until an online cataloguing project, funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, was completed in 2012.
“The Tower Collection is very much a bibliographical time capsule, the contents put out of sight and mind,” said Mr Sims.