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5 Jun 2009 10:19:17
Fairytales could come true if you get along
to the University of Bedfordshire this month.
The University’s Bedford campus is hosting a one-day event on children’s books called the Hockliffe Conference on Tuesday, 16 June (9.45am-5pm).
It is centred on the Hockliffe Collection, an archive of nearly 1,000 children's books from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection was donated to what was then Bedford Training College in 1927 by the son of local bookshop owner Frederick Hockliffe.
The conference organiser is Dr Clare Walsh, senior lecturer in English at the University of Bedfordshire.
She said: “It’s a very rare collection with books from the 18th to 20th centuries. It’s a collection of children’s books in a multimedia age and the conference will ask the question as to whether books are still relevant nowadays.
“The event shows we are contributing to the local community and it is in honour of the bookshop which was part of Bedford High Street until the late 1960s.”
The conference’s keynote speaker is Dr Matthew Grenby from the University of Newcastle who was involved in the project to digitise the rarest books in the collection in 2001-02.
In addition to Dr Grenby, 14 other academics, mainly from universities throughout the UK but also one flying in from Australia, will be giving papers in a series of two parallel workshops. One is mainly concentrating on the history of publishing for children, and the other on the work of individual writers and genres from the Victorian era to the present day.
It costs £20 for full delegates, £10 for postgraduate students as well as secondary school and undergraduate students and is free to University staff, students and alumni.
Photo: University of Bedfordshire students Natasha Gleeson and Jonathon Henkes get their hands on one of the children’s books in the Hockliffe Collection.
Latest news» 2009» June» Hockliffe Collection showcased at Bedford campus
