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The library recently welcomed Edinburgh University student Madeleine Wren for a week of work experience, where she hoped to learn about the work we do here, as well as offer her skills and assistance to us.

Madeleine spent time with our various volunteer teams, learning the craft of both manual and digital book cataloguing, the work of scanning and captioning historic images in our Photo Archive, as well as helping our conservation team clean and repair the collections. 

We also tasked Madeleine with the unenviable job of tidying up and sorting out our Children’s book collection, which had become quite cluttered and a bit disordered. She worked incredibly hard and made the area so much more usable and accessible, for which we are eternally grateful.

The children’s section after…!

The Many Rooms of the Morrab

I was told on my first morning at the library, “Many people don’t explore past the first room of the Morrab.”

 

 

In this room there are several walls of fiction; Zadie Smith and David Mitchell at eye level. People might browse these new paperbacks, might take out a title using the Browne system, but never venture further into the many rooms of the Morrab.

 

However, you might be one of the curious few who sometimes peer their head round the door of the Reading Room. Here historic books are bound side by side, their spines pocked with Dewey Decimal numbers. The light from the window illuminates golden titles; a vase of sunflowers. Green fronds wave from the garden. As the shelves totter upwards, the books grow older, their colours warm. They stack up, up, up. The ceiling is a cream-coloured mirage. If you squint, it is not a ceiling at all, it is a slight fog, one that hides the fact that the books continue upwards. Ancient tomes spelled away from the everyday visitor.

This piques your curiosity more, as you move to the room behind the Reading Room. What other eccentricities exist within the many rooms of the Morrab? Sounds from the front room dwindle. Tucked in the corner of the room that follows is a selection of Children’s books. One turns to face outward. You open it, the drawings start discoing across the page. Snowmen and swans and women in green ball gowns. The spines of these books go red, blue, pink, yellow. The books lift themselves from the shelves, rearranging. The flickering of their pages sounds like laughter. Some poor volunteer is going to have to reorganise those…

You eagerly walk on to the next room, which has ‘The Jenner Room’ written on the door. Through the open window, you can hear a mourning dove. The Cornish flag dangles from a green leafed plant. The scent of salt and the earth around a tin mine. There are murmurs of West Cornish dialect from unknown speakers. Perhaps they are piskies, who make beds for themselves between book covers. Onen hag Oll. The Art room is just beyond, where Tom Blight guards the door.

You might now be tempted to climb the stairs, and when you reach the top, be confronted by several rooms filled with light.  The first door on your left is the Natural History room. You draw an edition of ‘The Naturalist’s Library’ from the shelf above the fireplace. The paper smells like soil. Opening it roughly in the middle, you see illustrations of butterflies covering the page. They sit there, inky, until one lifts a delicate wing. One by one, the illustrations pick themselves up off the page and flutter around the room. You flick to a page about birds, and they join in. The room is a melee of wings.

Beyond the door to the Photo Archive the first thing you notice is a handful of sepia paintings. Ruddy brown sails and thatched roofs. The paintings are realist, full of detail. Cornish scenes: miners tunnelling, fisherman looping rope. The paintings seem to multiply before your very eyes. The brown scenes seep from one wall to the next. Across the ceiling and on the walls behind the books. There are hundreds of them! “Dear old Dennis!”

And what other things might you see?  A bookcase of ‘London Medical Gazettes’ filled with shadows. A silent figure creating stacks of poetry anthologies, so high they touch the ceiling. A room filled with theology books, where choir music can be softly heard. The Elizabeth Treffry room: full of blue sunlight. The Rees Room where rain pitters on the desk when nobody’s watching. Brown chairs that swivel in your direction, as if to invite you in. It is only polite to find a big book, sit in one, and read.

To never venture beyond that front room is to miss out on all these magical quirks. The volumes of unique Cornish fiction, the topaz stained glass, the sunflowers and poems scattered about. The Morrab Library is a special sort of place, so go explore!

We are so grateful to Madeleine for her wonderful ‘library tour’, for all the work she did for us, and her great company. We wish her all the best for her future adventures.

On Wednesday 28th August, we will be celebrating all things bees with the West Penwith Embroidered Bees Project and Bumblebee Conservation Trust. 

Last year, Vicks Harrison got in touch with the Library to tell us about the West Penwith Embroidered Bees Project that she founded in 2019 to highlight the plight of wild bees. 

 The project aims to raise awareness of the 270 different species of bee that live in Britain, and their varied needs, while also teaching embroidery skills, fostering connection and raising money for wildflower projects, such as Treneere Grows in Penzance. Through stitching illustrations of different bee species onto quilting pieces, Vicks hopes to connect people with our environment, and each other. 

With the help of many eager embroiderers – who have stitched a multitude of different bees in a variety of styles at home and at workshops across Penwith over the past few years – the huge, hand-stitched, art quilt has grown substantially since Vicks sent us this introductory video about the project back in 2023!

Many of the bees now stitched into the patchwork were crafted here at The Morrab Library, where Vicks now hosts regular classes. A friendly and welcoming group of bee embroiderers have been meeting here since November to embroider together and they exhibited the quilt at our Spring Fair in April.

On Wednesday 28th August, we will be hosting a ‘Bee Day’ at the Library with bee-related activities taking place throughout the day. 

From 10am – 12pm, Vicks will be leading a free embroidery workshop to guide those who would like to learn how to make a bee to be stitched into the quilt. No experience is necessary and attendees do not need to bring any fabric, thread or equipment, but any donations of materials to contribute to the piece are always welcomed. Booking is essential and please email Vicks (vickyvicks@btinternet.com) to do so. Further workshops are listed at the bottom of this blog. 

The quilt, in its present but ever-growing form, will be on display in the Natural Sciences Room for the duration of the day. It will hang alongside a display of books about bees (which Library members can borrow on the day) and poems about bees by Vivienne Tregenza. 

Vivienne has created pieces for the quilt inspired by the wildflower garden in Treneere (Penzance), a bee-friendly habitat created by Treneere Grows, which the Embroidered Bees Project hopes to help to fund. Vivienne sketched wildflowers including Agrimony, Cornflower and Poppy that grow in the garden then turned her illustrations into beautiful embroideries for the quilt. Her poems about bees will be exhibited in the Natural Sciences room alongside the quilt.

Pop in anytime between 10am – 3.30pm to see the display.

At 2pm in the Reading Room, Pip Cook SW Project Officer for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, will be giving a talk about the bumblebees we can find in Cornwall.

In Pip’s role, she is particularly focusing on the Moss carder bumblebee (Bombus muscorum), one of the rarest and most threatened bumblebee species in the UK. It is a beautiful ginger-tailed bumblebee with a short velvety coat that was once widespread in the UK and is now found mostly in small, fragmented populations. You can find out more about the talk here and email or call the library before Monday 19th August to put your name into the ballot for a ticket. Entry to this event is free but donations are welcomed to help support The Morrab Library (suggested £5). Refreshments will be provided after the talk.

Upcoming workshop dates: 

Wednesday 28th August, 10-12: a free session as part of the “Bee Day”

Tuesday 3rd September, 10-12

Tuesday 17th September, 10-12

Tuesday 15th October, 10-12