Towards a History of the Phi Collection, 1882-1945

Journal article

Conceived in 1882 as a literary ‘Siberia’ in which ‘improper books’ could be kept out of the hands of impressionable undergraduates, in the first decades of the twentieth-century the Bodleian’s ‘Φ’ (Phi) collection served as an ark within which avant-garde writing could weather the storms of obscenity prosecutions and Customs seizures. Despite having held in its time approximately 2,100 obscene and libellous works, the Phi collection has never been the subject of sustained critical scrutiny, nor does it feature in any of the major published histories of the Bodleian. The present article is intended to offer a detailed, though by no means definitive, account of the origins, contents, and development of the Bodleian’s restricted collection from its establishment in the late-nineteenth-century to the completion of its most substantial restructuring in the middle of the twentieth. While necessarily provisional, this account of the collection’s origins and development is intended not only to offer a snapshot of a hitherto undocumented facet of the Bodleian’s institutional life, but to indicate the extensive opportunities that the Phi collection affords for future research into the transmission and reception of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts. In doing so it offers the possibility not only to chart the mechanisms through which obscene works were acquired and made available to readers by the Bodleian, but to analyse the conditions under which the category of obscenity itself was being constructed and contested in Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries.

Authors: Houston, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bodleian Library
• Journal: Bodleian Library Record
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 179-194
• Publication date: 2015-10-01
• ISSN: 0067-9488
• Language: English
• Keywords: Censorship; Obscenity; Bodleian; Article; Book History; Library History; SBTMR; Modernism