His songs were longer and more complex than other guitar-toting singer-songwriters a result, he says, of his love of jazz and Keats: " Endymion is the poem I love and that is 4,000 lines long, so …" Their humour was more scabrous, their explorations of love more barbed and difficult, their politics more pronounced. If he was different, then so was his music. Prior to his arrival he had led quite a life, having left home in Manchester at 15 to escape his Jehovah's Witness stepmother, he joined the RAF, feigned mental illness to get a discharge and ended up in a mental health hospital, which inspired Committed, a song from his 1967 debut album Sophisticated Beggar. They were from the start, when he fetched up in London's folk clubs in the mid-60s. Harper says he is used to people being baffled by him. "I've been on talkSPORT, too," he notes happily. The promotional campaign has taken in not just the papers and Later … with Jools Holland, but appearances on Test Match Special (Harper, a huge cricket fan, seems delighted to have met Geoffrey Boycott the day Yorkshire took a beating at the hands of his team, Lancashire) and on the BBC Breakfast sofa. ![]() Not for a new album: he last made one of those in 2000, and since then has diverted a lot of his creative energies into gardening at his home in County Cork ("Gorse and bracken are a bane," he says, "but far be it from me to be discussing botany with you now.") He's plugging a compilation, Songs of Love and Loss, a 2CD set that displays the unerring quality and startling originality of his writing. My interview forms part of a minor media blitzkrieg. His outsider status is worth reiterating now, because at 70, Harper is veering worringly close to becoming a beloved British institution. "He's a great songwriter," says his former manager Peter Jenner, "but a bit crazy." On the folk scene in the 60s, even in the hashish-scented era of hippydom, there was a consensus that Harper might be a loony. ![]() Harper thinks it might be the reason why he has always felt like "an oddball". It's not every day a songwriter tells you that it's been downhill since 9,500BC. ![]() In some ways, I lament the introduction of civilisation on such a huge scale, because it has given us a lot of room to abuse each other, which we continue to do." He sits back. There are untouchables at the bottom of society, who would not be like that if we were in small tribes, small families. They mean a lot of us cannot communicate with each other. "We can all see the downside of that," he adds darkly. Post-ice age, Neolithic revolution, the beginnings of farming, agriculture and all of that has promoted surplus and what surplus has given us is all this …" He motions around the hotel. In the feral state we would be much more secure, much more familiar with each other, much more mentally well-balanced. And these in turn bear evidence of the full catastrophe of our human compulsions, triumphs, and bereavements: courtship, marriage, war, childbirth, aspiration, friendship, and death, all in dialogue with reading and the life of the book."If humanity was still in the feral state," he says, "we wouldn't have any need for these huge conurbations that we have now, that have turned us into a different bunch all together. ![]() In these books, we find that readers left behind many traces of themselves and their interactions: inscriptions, notes, lists, poems, anecdotes, letters, flowers, locks of hair, drawings, and photographs. This exhibition offers highlights from that search. Over the past two years, here at the University of Virginia, the Book Traces team has examined over 100,000 books from Alderman and other libraries on Grounds, looking for evidence of use by their original owners. How did readers annotate, mark, and customize their books in an age when the book was king? And what are we to make of those unique volumes now? The Book Traces project is an attempt to answer those questions by looking at individual copies of 19th and early 20th-century books on the shelves of libraries.
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