CCHS Seminar series with Katie Meheux - DATE CHANGED -

Due to strike action this talk has now been postponed by a week - however venue and time are unchanged.

Books and libraries form a vital aspect of cultural heritage. Many historic books and manuscripts are physical objects of great beauty and value, agents of cultural memory and symbols of power, identity, learning and ‘progress’. But there is also a dark side to rare books; they can be ‘troublesome’, gruesome and disturbing, uncomfortable symbols of discredited ideas and ideologies. Their continued existence challenges our comfortable certainties, our creations of history and heritage and stir up old hatreds and fears. 

How can librarians manage dissonant, disturbing books? Do we hide them? Destroy them? Or learn from them, even if the knowledge we gain might not be as comfortable? This talk aims to examine these questions using historically-collected Nazi Archaeology books from the Institute of Archaeology Library collections, looking at the purpose, production and movement of these books in Nazi-dominated Europe and their ‘afterlife’ in the post-war world, particularly the Institute of Archaeology, assessing the varying, often surprising responses  and attitudes to them. For books have their own destinies, independent of what we may wish or intend. 

Photo: 2019 © 'Die Vorgeshichte der Germanen' book by Katie Meheux