Excellent news, a book on Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist, to be published in August 2019. All the books he ever owned or commented on. Lovecraft scholars have long had such a book, now in a fourth edition, and it’s often proved very useful.

Another local author found. The vales of Wever, a loco-descriptive poem (1797) by John Gisborne. Very much in the tradition of Erasmus Darwin, it describes and footnotes walks around Wootton, Norbury, and the Weaver Hills, local moors, and other places. He seems to have spent a year there and wrote this long poem in the ‘long-s’ style as a thank-you for his host. After his death his daughter published a short account of his life with diary extracts, of which there’s a poor scan at Archive.org.

Where’s the path? is a UK map service. It usefully offers dynamically-recalculated O.S. grid references, in response to the movement of a mount-pointer over O.S. maps, and places the O.S. map side-by-side with satellite photography.

There are interesting moves afoot in VR tech which may be interesting for local history researchers no longer able to go tromping ten miles up and down hills, or who can’t afford to travel, but who still want to ‘visit’ places. Lenovo Mirage Solo is a new $399 VR headset which interfaces with Google’s Daydream apps inc. a version of Google StreetView, and has been specially designed to “reduce VR motion sickness”. According to the motion-sickness prone reviewer, that’s true, at least for a 12 minute immersion.

Sadly UK over-pricing is in play, and Lenovo has them at £499 on Amazon UK. When a straight currency conversion of $399 means they should be £299.

Before you plonk down your money, though, note that PCMag has a much more critical Lenovo Mirage Solo review, which reveals a critical shortcoming…

“Google Street View VR is a disappointment. I expected a free-exploring experience that would let me navigate around streets photographed by Google’s Street View cars, seeing 360-degree shots of hundreds of streets in different cities. Instead, it offers a selection of 360-degree panoramas based on the location you enter, and that’s about it. you don’t get the full Google Street View experience in first person, like you do when you open up Google Maps on your computer and just wander around Street View.”

Still, it looks like we’re starting to see interesting steps forward in fixing the motion sickness problem while interfacing with StreetView. Give it another few years, and by 2020 we have have full-version StreetView at £399, without motion sickness.

So it looks like I’ll be sticking with the free Google Earth Pro for a few years yet, without the VR goggles. A copy of 64-bit Earth Pro running on Windows is a much better experience on a desktop than having to wrestle with Google Maps in a Web browser.

I see that Volume 3 of The Making of the West Midlands series was published at the end of April: Clash of Cultures?: The Romano-British Period in the West Midlands.

Surveys the archaeology (inc. posing the question “two regions?”); the fortresses and forts; then Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire (cropmark evidence “excluded from this volume”, it notes there). There’s also a landscape-use chapter, one on distribution of coin-finds with some heavy maths, and one that tries to join up all the ceramics evidence. The chapter on religious sites focuses on Wroxter, Coleshill, Rocester and Wall. Finally, and possibly most interestingly, “The West Midlands in the fifth and sixth centuries”, but that’s completely unavailable as a preview.

Interesting to see how everything funnelled toward Penkridge…

… and yet there’s been hardly any investigation of the site, and thus the book can only give it a short paragraph that speculates it may have been strung out along the Watling Street.

New PhD. Networks, innovation and knowledge: the North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851 (2017), now online and public. It…

“reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. … a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge”

The 1802 map.

Excellent colour engraving by Norman Stevens ARA, of the court at The Egyptian Garden, Biddulph Grange, 1982.

He’s got the correct type of pylon, rather than a pyramid, and it’s suitably dark and foreboding. Very nice. Prints seem to still be available.

I’ve found another local author, via an eBay listing for his Weaver Hills and other Poems by A. E. Dodd.

Arthur Edward Dodd (1913-) was a local poet, playwright and historian. Combining Amazon and the Writers Directory, one can list his books and plays as:

Poems from Belmont, 1955.
Three Journeys, 1958.
Flower-spun Web (play), 1960.
Dictionary of Ceramics, 1964.
Words and Music, 1964.
To Build a Bridge (play), 1965.
Weaver Hills and other Poems, 1967.
The Fifth Season, 1971.
Gold in Gun Street (play), 1973.
Peakland Roads and Trackways, 1974.
Beacon Stoop, 1985.

Peakland Roads, written with his wife, went through three editions. The third appeared in 2000, updated and expanded. It looks like it could do with an ebook edition soon, to keep it available.

His The Dictionary of Ceramics went to a third edition in 1994. There also appears to have been a Concise Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ceramics edition.

The three plays may have been linked with North Staffordshire’s annual One Act Play festival? That’s just my guess. The Weaver Hills volume of poems suggests there’s some local interest there for the Moorlands, but one would have to have access to the poetry volumes to know if he also wrote any Stoke poems or not.

He also published historical articles. I found a snippet for one, “Rousseau in England” in The Listener in 1966, and there may be more. Rousseau famously hid out in the Moorlands at one time. There was a scholarly local history paper titled “The Froghall-Uttoxeter Canal” in the North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, 1963. He also appears to have contributed articles to encyclopaedias, such as Chambers.

He was educated at Newcastle High School and seems to have served at various times with the North Staffordshire Field Club in the 1950s and 1970s. He worked as the Chief Information Officer for the B.C.R.A. (British Ceramic Research Association), from 1938-1970…

“Outlining the work of the information department of the BCRA, Dr. Dodd said that they dealt with 30-40 enquiries each week, of a varied nature” (Ceramics journal)

In Aslib Proceedings, 1961, he had an in-depth article on this work, titled “Information Work in Ceramics: the Science and Technology Section”.

Ceramics journal hoped, noting the 1970 retirement of Dr. Dodd Ph.D., M.Sc., F.R.I.C., that people would… “continue to see this spritely figure around the Potteries”, so it sounds like he ‘cut a bit of a dash’ around the city.

In retirement his address was given as Hall Lodge, Upper Ellastone.

New book. The first book on the topic of Moorlands folk-lore for many decades, The Folklore of the Staffordshire Moorlands. Not a scholarly work, but the product of two decades of boots-on-the-ground fieldwork and visits by local film-maker and teacher Byron Machin. Published March 2018.

The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire, an annotated bibliography. A new 1.3 version with many additions.

Click to picture to download the PDF.

It’s 18 pages, so should be printable as a 6″ x 9″ booklet via the Lulu USA website (UK doesn’t offer 6″ x 9″ size) etc. Or locally with booklet-printer software. If you’re a librarian, feel free to print and archive.

Captain Daniel Astle, A Prospect from Barrow Hill, dated Uttoxeter, 25th June 1777, and printed by Pearson and Robinson, Birmingham. Now Barrowhill.

A curious little pamphlet, unobtainable on Archive.org or Hathi. This is how they did blog posts, back in 1777.

The Oxford Mail has a bit more detail about one of the new Tolkien books which accompany the Oxford exhibition.

“Tolkien Treasures highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian. It focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood in the Midlands and his experience in the First World War, as well as his studies at school and at Oxford University’s Exeter College.”

Excellent, a nice tight focus. 144 pages and somewhat affordable too, at £12 retail. It’s on Amazon UK under the slightly different title “Tolkien: Treasures” and at an even better £10.50.