The Night Library with artwork by Martin Parker
- Submitting institution
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University of East London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 30
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Oundle Stonewood Press.
- ISBN
- 978-1-910413-08-1
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This poetry sequence, inspired by The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel as well as by library manuals, investigates and celebrates libraries. The book is a collaborative piece with the artist Martin Parker.
The book (like Manguel’s) is a long poetry sequence consisting of 17 poems. Nine of these are imaginative leaps into library life, several of them directly based on Manguel’s writing; others are based on specific libraries, such as ‘The beautiful library’, based on the library of the Italian poet Leopardi at Recanati. These nine poems are interspersed with eight others that respond to textbooks for librarians: works by Victorian and Edwardian librarians reflecting on their craft, such as James Duff Brown’s Manual of Library Economy, inform several poems. Other poems explore cataloguing systems (Dewey and later versions), comment on the print industry, and reflect critically on Borges’s labyrinth. The sequence illuminates the place of the library in both civic and imaginative life.
In order to investigate the potential of co-creation, Robinson worked with the text as a work in progress, with artist Parker contributing his drawings to work already drafted but open to reworking. This was further explored in a workshop at Mansfield public library as part of a local festival in 2016. Handmade books were hidden in the children’s library where people could hunt for them and come to see the authors and either write the next page of the story or add a picture.
Read at the Inspire Poetry Festival in Southwell, 2016.
Workshop held at Mansfield Public Library, 2016.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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