Coda: At the Museum

Summary

We live in an age of leaflets – and so apparently do our allies and our enemies on the continent and overseas. Most of us do not trouble to preserve such ephemeral documents, but our University Library is an enthusiastic snapper up of such unconsidered trifles. It already possesses a very large collection dealing with Cambridge, started by John Willis Clark, included in his bequest to the University. This collection has been arranged in chronological order, indexed and bound, and is kept up to date. But the Library authorities are particularly anxious to obtain as large a collection as possible of the ephemeral literature of the War, whether it concerns Cambridge or not. Such flying pieces as those which are dropped from aeroplanes or posted on hoardings would be particularly welcome. And let nobody imagine that any printed piece is too trivial for acceptance. It has been abundantly proved that a collection of daily literature of any country is of the greatest value to the historian in after years. All communications should be addressed – The Librarian, University Library, Cambridge.

On 30 January 1915, a few months into the war, readers opened their weekly issue of the Cambridge Magazine to a request by the university's librarian, Francis Jenkinson. Titled ‘For the Historian of the Future’, Jenkinson's short note asked readers to submit their war ephemera for preservation in the library's War Reserve Collection. No printed piece of paper would be too trivial for inclusion: Christmas cards, letters, regimental orders, pamphlets, Flugblätter, posters, postcards, trench journals, newspapers, even paper balloons used for distributing propaganda leaflets behind German lines. While the request came rather early in the conflict, in a sense it arrived already too late: Jenkinson regretted not having probed the refugees he met in the first weeks of war for printed materials from Belgium. Similar initiatives on the continent had also been guided by the memory of loss (never systematically collected, most ephemera of the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, had vanished by 1914). With future historians in mind, Cambridge's librarian began collecting with a vengeance, receiving packages from places as far-flung as Gibraltar (a copy of the Peninsular Post, ‘with its Spanish supplement, which the few English residents in Spain are bringing out as a local counterblast’), Sumatra (enemy propaganda) and Shanghai (a local Chinese periodical entitled The War).