By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
This week we celebrated the completion of a huge project to catalogue and number about 2500 pamphlets in the Cathedral Library. The smiles say it all! Every week for about a year, our dedicated volunteer, Elizabeth, has been helping to improve access to and information about a fascinating collection of pamphlets dating from the 18th century to the present day. The work has been meticulous – and not especially glamorous! – but it’s been crucial to transform a large and previously difficult-to-navigate collection into a valuable and accessible resource.
At its heart is a remarkable collection of printed ephemera produced by or about Exeter Cathedral, including guides and leaflets in different languages, old fundraising and marketing leaflets, guides to former exhibitions, invitations to events, printed lectures, talks and articles – and even copies of our newest series of What’s On leaflets. It’s not the sort of material that is collected by other institutions or easy to come by second-hand – in fact, most ephemera has a very small print run and when it’s gone, it’s gone. It also has a notoriously poor survival rate; however, ephemera is important in telling the story of the Cathedral’s history and activities, and in capturing fleeting moments in time.
It requires a special sort of enthusiasm to face shelves and shelves of uniform grey boxes so I’d like to say a special thanks to Elizabeth – and a wider thanks to all our Library and Archives volunteers for helping us preserve and share information about our collections. Incidentally, if any of our Cathedral Life readers have examples of early printed ephemera relating specifically to Exeter Cathedral that they think we might not have in the Cathedral Library, please do get in touch: [email protected]