Tower books
A whole whack of books stored up in a Cambridge University tower for nearly 100 years have at last become available to students and scholars. Long thought to be made up mostly of porn (this is England, after all), the 170,000-odd books – most dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries — include such less-than-titillating items as a map of the route of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession, some decidedly English cookbooks (”calf’s foot soup,” anyone?), first editions of books by Dickens and the Brontës, a stack of “penny dreadfuls” (cheapo mass-market paperbacks known these days as “$15 dreadfuls”), and, best of all, a health guide recommending married couples not sleep together.
An American foundation has donated $1-million to have the collection digitally catalogued, a process expected to be completed in 2010.
Of course, not everyone was pleased to learn of the tower’s true contents. Cambridge’s population of trench-coated men and jumpy teenagers are reported to be thoroughly disappointed.
Related links:
Read about the unearthed Cambridge books in the New Zealand Herald
