| Description Of Item | This is an anonymous scrapbook created likely during the mid 19th century, though it is unknown when it entered the College’s possession. The volume has been rebound by the College, given the title ‘Dwarfs, Giants etc.’, and was previously catalogued in the Library at BF.10.38, and in the Archive as ANO/60.
The scrapbook is predominantly concerned with what could be best termed ‘medical curiosities’, which is to say people with physical conditions that made them notable. A small minority of items are related to people who were simply not of European descent, though there is no apparent distinction between these two groups in the eyes of the creator or creators.
Many of the entries use period-appropriate but insensitive terminology.
The vast majority of the collection consists of press clippings, with the remainder being book extracts, letters, woodcuts, flyers and playbills. Most of the cuttings are dated by hand, though there is no indication of where many of them are sourced from. A minority of clippings are duplicated, with some clearly taken from different publications, while others may simply be different editions of the same publication.
Most of the cuttings are grouped together by subject, although there are also some subjects that recur multiple times across the volume, separate from other mentions. Many cuttings have handwritten headings, often with either the name of the subject or by sobriquet, or sometimes both, and with a date. These are mostly written directly onto the page, but sometimes are on slips of paper that are also attached to the page. There are also multiple pages that include such headings and dates but are not accompanied by any cuttings.
In some instances, for example on the page that included OBJ/PAM/1/51-53, a handwritten entry appears in lieu of a clipping, many of which include a reference to where they are copied from. Some of them are on subjects that are featured elsewhere, while others are unique. None of these handwritten entries have been individually catalogued.
Most of the handwritten elements of this collection are in the same hand, though this is not universally true, and none of the writers are identifiable. The earliest items in the collection are from the 1730s, while the latest are from the 1840s, and so it is likely that the scrapbook was the work of multiple people.
Most of the collection is organised ‘thematically’, as attested by a list at the beginning of the scrapbook, which is a broadly chronological list of many of the topics covered by the collection. There are some omissions and inconsistencies in this ordering, and there are no numbered pages, but it broadly acts as a contents page for the scrapbook.
Transferred from the College library. First catalogued onto the library catalogue in 2019, no previous provenance known. |