“A Monument more Lasting than Bronze”: The Collections of the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford

Abstract

“The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute its memoried glances and its murmers are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks … and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go.“(Mary Webb, in the preface to her novel Precious Bane, 1924)This sense of the precariousness of both the past and the present is something that most, if not all, historians must have felt at some time as they search, sometimes in vain, for relevant sources for their research. And archivists and librarians, even as they save what they can from disappearing, maybe for ever, or from the ravages of decay, know that it is perhaps only a small fraction of what should or could be saved.