By Amara Thornton

This past month I've put three linked posts on Ure Routes relating to my continuing research in the documents in filing cabinets that comprise the Museum archives.  
 
The first post was an initial description of the main contents of the Museum archive, which included a list of archaeologists (of various nationalities) who are represented among the files.  You can read "Ure Museum Archives: An Initial Description" here. 
 
The second post contextualises one part of the archive – the notebooks and correspondence relating to excavations at Rhitsona, Greece in 1907-8.  In date-terms, this material is among the earliest in the Museum archive. You can read "From the Archive: The Road to Mykalessos" here.
 
The third post is a biographical one, providing information about one of the people who worked on site at Rhitsona during the 1907/08 excavation.  Grace Holding was a Classics Mistress at a well-known girls' school in London, but also among one of the British women involved in archaeology in Greece.  Letters from her during this period are now held in the Ure Museum archive.  
 
Although the work that Grace Holding did at Rhitsona was published, she wouldn't be considered 'notable' enough to merit inclusion on Wikipedia (an ongoing problem that extends to much more 'notable' women). So I decided to put what I was able to find together to make a Wikipedia-like biography for her on Ure Routes.  Luckily, with the help of the Ure's Assistant Curator Jayne Holly, and the extent issues of the North London Collegiate School magazine, I was able to find out a fair amount! You can read "Grace Ernestine Holding (c. 1873-1943)" here.

By Amara Thornton
​
Directing you once more this month to Ure Routes, where you can find out more about our recently launched project "Annie's Box"!  This exciting interactive is now sitting at the Ure Museum, waiting for visitors!  Find out more about "Annie's Box" here. 

By Amara Thornton​

I put out a request on Twitter this morning with a Halloween-y twist.  Use the hashtag #excavationgothic to add to the bibliography (below) of works featuring excavation (or antiquities) in a gothic setting!
​
Thank you to all the stellar folks who have already responded! The results, so far, are as follows (chronological, by date of publication).

2nd C: Pliny the Younger, "To Sura" 

1820s
1827: Jane (Webb) Loudon, The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
 
1860s
1862: Anon, "The Mummy's Soul"
1867: Louisa May Alcott, "Lost in a Pyramid"
1868: Jane Austin, "After Three Thousand Years"
 
1880s
1882: Theophile Gautier, "The Mummy's Foot"
1885: Thomas Hardy, "A Tryst in an Ancient Earthwork"
1887: Mary Elizabeth Braddon "From a Doctor's Diary"
1889: Eva Henry, "Curse of Vasartas"
 
1890s
1890: Thomas Hardy, "Barbara at the House of Grebe"
1892: Arthur Conan Doyle, "Lot No 249"
1892: Grant Allen, "Pallinghurst Barrow"
1895: Arthur Machen, "The Novel of the Black Seal"
1898: Herbert Crotzer, "The Block of Bronze" 
1898: Arthur Conan Doyle, "Burger's Secret"
1898: E & H Heron (Hesketh Pritchard and Kate Pritchard), "The Story of Baelbrow"

1900s
1904: Charlotte Bryson Taylor, "In the Dwellings of the Wilderness"
1904: Montague Rhodes James, "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad"
1908: Algernon Blackwood, "The Nemesis of Fire"

1910s
1910: Arthur Conan Doyle, "Through the Veil"; "The Terror of Blue John Gap"
1911: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Ballad of the White Horse"
1913: Anon, "The Aldbrickham Skeleton"
1919: Francis Brett Young, "Song of the Dark Ages"
 
1920s
1921: Algernon Blackwood, "The Tarn of Sacrifice"
1921: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"
1924: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"
1924: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "Under the Pyramids"
1924/5: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "The Curse of the Golden Cross"
1925: Howard Christopher Bailey, "The Long Barrow"
1925: Montague Rhodes James, "A Warning to the Curious"
1928: Edward Frederic Benson "The Temple"
1929: Eleanor Scott, "The Cure"
1929: Eleanor Scott, "Celui-la"

1930s
1931: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"
1933: Robert E. Howard, The Cairn on the Headland" 
1934: Elliott O'Donnell, "The Mummy Worshippers"
1934/35: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "Shadow Out of Time"
1935: Clark Ashton Smith, "The Last Hieroglyph"
1935: Joseph O'Neill, "Land Under England"
1938: Thomas P. Kelley, "I Found Cleopatra"
1938: Edgar Hoffman Price, "The Woman in the Case"
1938: Dorothy Kathleen Broster, "The Pavement"
 
1940s
1945: Alfred Leslie Rowse, "The Stone that Liked Company"
1949: Nigel Kneale, "Minuke"
 
1950s
1951: Sarban (John William Wall), "Ringstones"
1951: Sarban (John William Wall), "Capra"
1951: Margery Lawrence, The Rent in the Veil
1952: Rose Macaulay, "Whitewash"
 
1970s
1971: Ramsey Campbell, "The End of a Summer's Day"
1971: Daphne Du Maurier, "Not After Midnight"
1975: Rosemary Timperley, "The Bandaged Man"

1980s
1989: Anne Rice, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned
 
1990s
1996: Joyce Carol Oates, "The Temple"
1996: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
 
2010s
2010: Rosalie M. Parker, "The Old Knowledge"
2013: Adam Roberts, "Tollund"
2013: Roger Luckhurst, "The Thing of Wrath"
2014: Robert Sharp, "The Good Shabti" 
2014: Lesley Glaister, Little Egypt

By Amara Thornton

This month's blog is on Ure Routes, as last week we installed a new exhibition at the Ure Museum, "Allen Seaby's Archaeology for Children".  The genesis of the display goes back to my first few months at Reading. I met Laura Carnelos, who was then cataloguing collections in the Typography Department. She drew my attention to some material she was working on that was relevant to archaeological publishing. One of them is the archive of artist Allen Seaby.*  
 
Seaby was a Professor of Fine Art at Reading in the early 20th Century, but he also wrote books on archaeology for children.  Laura had in the course of cataloguing come across an unpublished manuscript, "Leon of Massalia", a story set in ancient Greece.  
 
Of course, this intrigued me because of the books for children I wrote about in Archaeologists in Print.  It led me to look more into Seaby's works, and the ways in which he presented archaeology and archaeological discoveries for younger readers.  A few months later, we were installing the exhibition! 

 It took on a new form at rather the last minute, with a unexpected and very generous loan of lots of relevant sketches and preliminary drawings from Allen Seaby's grandson, the artist Robert Gillmor, to whom we are extremely grateful. 
 
With installation imminent, Ure Museum curator Professor Amy Smith and I sat down and talked through Seaby's life, and the materials we had gathered on loan from Robert Gillmor, the Typography Department and the Children's Collection (part of Special Collections). The concept ended up falling rather naturally into chronological phases when mapped against Seaby's life; these became "Chapters", mimicking a book, as I drafted the handlist.  

​You can read more about Seaby at "Allen Seaby and Archaeology" and by visiting the exhibition at the Ure Museum, on until 21 February! Use the hashtag #SeabysArchaeology to tell us what you think of the display.
 
*The other is the Isotype collection.

By Amara Thornton

This month's post is a guest post for Girton College's "Glimpses of Girton" blog.  It concerns one of the College's former students (and later Director of Studies in Archaeology, Anthropology and Classics) Norah Jolliffe.  I came across her in relation to a now defunct "Romano-British Museum" at the University of Reading – Jolliffe had been its curator between 1927 and 1934, while she was Lecturer in Classics at the University.  Luckily her papers are preserved at Girton College, and I visited earlier this year to have a look.
 
I think Jolliffe is a fascinating woman and I look forward to finding out more about her.  But you can read what I know so far in "Norah Jolliffe: Curator, Excavator, Teacher".
 
And for more on the "Romano-British Museum", check out "On Museum Beginnings" and "A Wartime Interdisciplinary Vision" on my Reading blog, Ure Routes!

By Amara Thornton

This month's post is over on "Beckett, Books and Biscuits", the blog for Special Collections at the University of Reading.  I've been spending some time diving into a wonderful archive held there, the papers of Adam & Charles Black, publishers.  A. & C. Black (for short) published both fiction and non-fiction, but I'm particularly interested in their non-fiction publishing efforts.  Among this group can be counted a number of popular archaeology books written by Rev. James Baikie, and illustrated by his wife Constance Newman (Turner-Smith) Baikie.  
 
I've written about one of Baikie's books – Wonder Tales of the Ancient World – here already.  But this new research has helped contextualise both Baikies' work significantly.  Although he wasn't an archaeologist, as I noted in Archaeologists in Print James Baikie was a prolific author of popular archaeology books – a pre-WW2 Leonard Cottrell – or, to use a more contemporary example, Tony Robinson.   Constance Baikie, an unsung illustrator today, produced in my opinion brilliant work complementing and visually enhancing her husband's text.  This took not just skill, but genius.  I'm happy to say that A. & C. Black recognised her impact, crediting and paying her accordingly.
 
There's a lot more to the A. & C. Black collection than just information on James and Constance Baikie. It's full of authors and illustrators whose work is today almost totally unknown, but there are also more famous names, as you'll see.  The Indexes to the "Letters Out" books – my main source for the post – are fascinating.  I found myself wondering about the lives of those listed.  Hopefully, more of them will be revealed.
 
You can read "Recovering Publishing Histories: The Adam and Charles Black Letterbooks" here.

By Amara Thornton

The beginning of this month was entirely taken up with preparations for a workshop held in the Museum of English Rural Life and the Ure Museum.  "Collectors, Curators, and Cataloguers: Hidden Women in Archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries" was held on 12 June. Along with it we opened a new temporary display, "Hidden Women in the Archive: Collectors, Curators and Cataloguers",  which will be up until 10 September.

​More on these delights here!

By Amara Thornton

This month's post is on Ure Routes again.  Part of my Role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum has been to start digging into the Museum's history.  Annie Ure's fascinating lecture (recorded in the 1960s) and University College Reading's Annual Reports have given me insights into some of the early displays of archaeological material at Reading.
 
A few weeks ago I had a great tour of Reading's old campus at London Road; my guides, current and former University staff, took me to many places of interest but chief among them were "The Acasias", Portland Place and the old University Gymnasium. Each location is associated with the Ure Museum's history.

​"The Acasias" was a former home of the Palmer family; George Palmer was co-founder of Huntley & Palmers biscuit empire. When University College Reading was given the building, its first floor (now used as the Staff Common Room) became its Library, where a case of Egyptian antiquities given by Hilda Petrie was first displayed.  These antiquities are now part of the Ure Museum's collections, and include a pendant of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor. 

During the First World War, local Reading resident Gertrude Louisa (Hill) Hurry donated an Etruscan artefact to University College Reading, also now held and displayed in the Ure Museum.  A few years earlier Gertrude Hurry and her husband Jamieson, a physician and the College's Medical Officer, donated money for the construction of a purpose-built Gymnasium.  My guides pointed out the carving of Discobolus (pictured here, in searing sunlight) incorporated into the Gymnasium wall. 

​By 1919, University College Reading's archaeological collections were gathered together more formally in a museum room, housed at Portland Place, an 1830s Grade II* listed building on London Road.  You can read "On Museum Beginnings" here and hear Annie discussing the Museum's history here.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Childs, W. C. 1933. Making a University. London: Dent.
 
University College Reading Gazettes Calendars and Annual Reports 1909, 1912/13, 1913/14, 1919/20.
 
Thanks to Nicola Pickering, John Grainger and Ian Burn.

By Amara Thornton

This month's post, in honour of Women's History Month (in the UK), I've written a guest post on the University of Reading Classics Department blog.  As my research into University College Reading's Annual Reports continued, I dug deeper into the history of women in the Classics Department.  My wonderful grandmother was a classicist, and I'd like to think she would've have loved this post. So this is for you, Grandma!   You can read "Women and Classics at University College Reading" here.

By Amara Thornton 
 
This month's post will be over on a new blog site, Ure Routes, created as part of my new role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading.  In the first month I've been at Reading I've been exploring the early history of the Museum and the University, and finding unexpected connections to my own history of archaeology research.  You can read "Reports from Reading" here.