Supervisors and research at NMS Stores

In addition to the talk that I gave yesterday, (phew, glad it's done) I spent this week in Edinburgh, and Rob my supervisor from Reading was hanging out at the stores with me, doing his own research on the woodblocks of Chambers's Book of Days. It was nice to have him around, not just for the company, but because he helped identify someone of the photomechanical processes used for the 2nd Edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, which he could do by looking at electrotypes.

The public talk itself was well-attended, I think more than 60 people showed up in the late afternoon. There were also plenty of questions at the end which means people were interested in what they heard. I met a member of the Chambers family after the talk and some former employees of the Chambers firm who retired over a decade ago. They said they found the early history of the firm and the historical context of maps and informational graphics development fascinating. Below are a few slides from the talk. Of interest, the bottom slide shows a map developed by Charles Joseph Minard. It shows that the American Civil caused India to become a major agricultural center. Even though India had a long established manufacturing industry, trading in raw cotton after the American Civil war became much more lucrative. Maps and graphics such as these provided a way for Victorians to organise and understand the world, and that wider influence is seen in other slides I show of maps in the second edition of Chambers's.