This important project is making the material accessible to support scholarly research, teaching and enjoyment. It is also helping staff to learn more about the collections and focus cataloguing activity to support current areas of research. Here are some examples:

An unassuming book in the Orrery collection turns out to have, jotted on the front fly-leaf, “the Gests of his Ma[jes]tie's progress”, containing brief details of a journey by James I and Queen Anne in the early seventeenth century. The book, De la charge et dignité de l’ambassadeur by Jean Hotman, marquis de Villers-St-Paul, bears an inscription by Walter Cheyney dated 1606 recording his purchase of it for 12 pence; it is the only copy in Oxford and one of two in England.

Since next year is the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Lewis Carroll’s great nonsense epic The Hunting of the Snark, work on the Jon Lindseth Lewis Carroll collection donated last year has concentrated on editions of the poem. In addition to a complete run of early printings of the first edition there are translations into French, Russian, Danish and Faroese, and an early private press edition printed by a woman typographer, Helen Bruneau Van Vechten, at Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1897; the only copy in a public collection in the UK.

The recent focus of the Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) archive cataloguing project has been the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and privately printed pamphlets from the Jon A. Lindseth Collection. This is an eclectic mix of materials related to different aspects of Dodgson’s teaching, academic work on mathematics, voting and logic, as well as his artistic and literary interests.

One of the highlights is a set of manuscript notes outlining Dodgson’s 1864 mathematics pamphlet on ‘The Enunciations of Euclid’, an early work on Euclidian principles, a subject he would return to numerous times in his career. In this unique document, Dodgson plans out the structure and content of the pamphlet in his distinctive purple ink. Copies of ‘The Enunciations of Euclid’ are extremely rare, as it was printed for a limited audience of Oxford students. There are only two known surviving copies, including one at the Bodleian which contains annotations and corrections corresponding with notes in this item.

Sticking with the theme of Dodgson’s work as Mathematics Tutor at Christ Church, another singular item in the collection is a set of 38 printed sheets for marking examinations. The unbound sheets, enclosed in brown boards and titled “Miscellaneous”, record the results for Matriculation and Moderations papers in Arithmetic, Algebra and Euclid for 28 students between 1871 and 1881. Each sheet records the students’ surname, subject examined and term of examination. Below is a table which breaks down each subject into the topics examined, filled in by Dodgson in an unexplained and inscrutable coded alphabetic notation system.

Moving to the artistic side of Dodgson’s work, the collection contains a small set of original drawings. Dodgson was meticulous about the design and composition of the illustrations in his books. To ensure the illustrators understood what he wanted from them, Dodgson would send them preliminary sketches. One of these in the Lindseth Collection, a drawing of a six-legged spider-like man, was likely one of many sent to cartoonist Harry Furniss (1854–1925) between September 1885 – August 1886, as a guide to the illustrations for the Sylvie and Bruno novels. Dodgson and Furniss had a fractious relationship, and the books took many years to complete. The final illustration would finally be published under the title ‘His soul shall be sad for the spider’ in 1893 as part of the second volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

Will Hale, Senior Rare Books Librarian & Tom Duckham, Charles Dodgson Project Archivist