Jenny Maidment, the University of Brighton’s Head of Library Content and Discovery Systems, attended the Centre for Design History’s October 2024 event, Material Memoirs: Telling Tales through Things. Her account reflects on her own material life story.

 

As I’ve got older, I’ve been drawn to memoir, mostly to the extraordinary stories of ordinary people. I am attracted to stories of lives that, from the outside, might seem quite mundane but, when the detail is revealed, there is something thought provoking or an experience you can relate to. I love that moment of recognition and the realisation that some experiences are universal, if you can find the right universe to explore.

As I sat and listened to artist and author Susan Sainsbury talk about her semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Undressed, I had so many of those moments of recognition. Her book charts the story of Debbie (based on Susan) from a 1960s childhood to adulthood through the clothes she wore. Susan finds the most ordinary of experiences to highlight that I don’t remember anyone else talking about in such a concise and insightful way.

Her mum, for example, favoured plain, un-colourful clothing, maintaining, ‘The aim is to blend in as much as possible.’  Even at primary school, Susan recognises where she is in the hierarchy of fashionable clothes. She’s near the bottom, just above Deirdre Dobbs who has a dress and pants made out of tablecloth fabric. At the top of her admiration was Sally, who wore mini dresses and had a walking, talking doll with matching outfits. It brought back memories of my primary school days in the 1970s wearing very unfashionable jumble sale clothes, and desperately wishing to have a pair of red clogs like Abigail, the most stylish girl in my class.

So many stories in Susan’s book made me laugh in recognition. There’s a page about the irritation of wearing long socks without decent elastic that keep needing to be pulled up while the other girls wear gorgeous lacey or flowery white socks. I’d never given it much thought because I was just so relieved to not have to wear long socks again, but the description and illustrations made me feel the injustice of being 8 years old and having no control of how you look, and of dealing with being the odd one out (there can be no blending in when you’re wearing someone else’s cast-offs).

I grew up in a house of collected and hoarded objects and rubbish. That, and a strict Christian upbringing, set me apart from everyone else I knew. I always wondered what it would be like to live an uncluttered house. Listening to author Suzanne Joinson talk about her memoir, The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things, provided an answer, and it was like moving into a strange mirror world of my childhood.

Suzanne grew up in The Divine Light Mission cult where her parents regularly ‘purged’ the family belongings.  It’s clear that to not have control over keeping treasured items is deeply unsettling for a child. She manages to keep hold of some things in an old suitcase that has a sticker saying MUSEUM on it, and she takes this with her through all her adult house moves. But when she opens it, in the present day, she realises that what she is seeking can’t be found inside.

She tells her story through objects that had significance to her at particular times in her childhood. She writes, ‘When I was a kid, I believed I could rescue us all. Perhaps I still do.’ This resonated very strongly with me, as this was the role I bestowed on myself as a child. She goes on to say. ‘I was at a car boot sale when it occurred to me that a family is a group of people living with a pile of stuff inside a house. Maybe, then, I could mend a broken family by replacing the things we had lost.’  She puts together the museum of the title as an installation in an attempt to explore the truth of her childhood.

In my 20s and 30s, I distanced myself from the overwhelming amount of stuff that my parents and brothers kept. In my 50s, I have come to accept that I am fascinated by ephemera and objects, but that I like to curate them and display them in an organised way that shows their beauty. Part of this work includes making screenprints of some of the items, for example, railway tickets for lines that no longer exist, or prize-winning poultry certificates won by my great-grandfather in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another of my collections is library themed. My dad was a librarian all his life, my mum and my brother both worked in libraries, and I am a librarian. Evidence of our working lives has accumulated, and over the past few years I’ve been seeking it out and giving it a new life as a collection. It is mostly objects that would usually have been disposed of, such as signs that are outdated, redundant library tickets, and lots of ephemera.

While managing St Peters House Library, the University of Brighton’s art and design library, I had noticed that because some of the books were quite old, they had library ownership stamps from different iterations of Brighton College of Art and the other colleges that were subsumed into Brighton Polytechnic and then the University of Brighton. I started to take photos of the different stamps with an idea to screenprint a zine with them in. The stamps led me to wonder about the history of the sites that are the predecessors of our current three University of Brighton libraries.

I love the design of library ownership stamps and how they reflect the time in which they were used. I have enlarged and printed some onto beer mats. I also acquired some library stamps by finding some that weren’t used by our libraries anymore. My favourite says, ‘Reference For Use in Library Only’. I have printed this on a T-shirt for a colleague, on a tablecloth and onto tote bags. The catalyst for assembling my collection of library objects and ephemera was an open call by the Artworkers Guild in London for members of the public to submit 40 words describing their collections and to be part of a one-day ‘table top museum’ exhibition. My pitch read:

SSH! an interactive collection of library ephemera

Ever dreamt of being a librarian circa 1960? Try your hand at stamping with vintage library stamps and marvel at obscure library ephemera complemented by screenprinted library beer mats.

I was accepted to exhibit my table top museum in October 2024 and had an amazing day talking about the objects and ephemera I’d gathered from my parents’ house, accompanied by my library beer mats and my collection of library stamps, which I invited visitors to try out. The stamps gave people a chance to pause, reflect and chat about their own memories of libraries. I hadn’t really expected this amount of interaction, and it made the exhibition a very joyful, collaborative experience.

I had worried that my museum would seem strange, but it was such a validating experience to be among a varied group of people who all understood and celebrated the power and joy of objects. I was particularly drawn to other collections on display that had stories about why the owner had gathered them. Lisa Panucci, for example, presented The Museum of Sense (My Perfumed Memories), which was her collection of perfume bottles with a label telling the viewer the significance of each of them. Bex Shaw (@bexeramic) collected and created items linked to Eyemouth, a small town in the Scottish borders area, and its 1881 fishing disaster, where her great-great uncle was one among 129 men who drowned.

It has been amazing to find a universe where people are interested in objects and their meaning. I’m very grateful to Annebella Pollen for organising the Material Memoirs event and for her ability to connect people with similar interests, and for her encouragement to pursue a project that others might not see any value in. We have plans to display some of our ephemera collections together in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing more about my library ephemera and stamps project, find me on Instagram as @bookyjen. I’d love to hear from you.

– Jenny Maidment