Saturday 10 October 2020
This year’s AGM will take place on Saturday 10 October beginning at 2.00 pm and will be held by Zoom videoconference. The business meeting, which will cover only essential business, should be brief and will be followed by a presentation.
Our guest speaker will be Professor Ewan Clayton MBE.
Title: “A few millennia ago …”
The history of writing is a rich and compelling one and I shall trace some of the
key developments and show examples of how people, with boundless ingenuity, devised ways to communicate through the written word. This long story of writing was the subject of a large and varied exhibition at the British Library over the summer of 2019 called Making Your Mark, for which I edited and contributed to the accompanying book and acted as consultant as the exhibition was devised and put together. The creation of that exhibition was in itself a story as you may imagine. I will tell some tales of ‘behind the scenes’ events and happenings as the planning took shape, exhibits were researched and curated, and how persuasion and promises resulted in some of the world’s finest manuscripts and objects with writing on them being gathered together to sit side- by-side in London.