Shelley's Baby Rattle, Homer's Iliad, and Jane Austen Juvenilia in New Treasured Exhibition

The Bodleian Libraries’ exhibition Treasured which opens today features a range of the most fascinating books, manuscripts and items in its collections, including works by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and JRR Tolkien.

Running through October 26 at the Weston Library in Oxford, it focuses on the meaning of value and what makes something a treasure, from age, rarity, and beauty, to something more personal.

Highlights include:

• one of the final wireless transmissions sent during the search for the Titanic
• photographs documenting LGBTQ life in India leading up to the decriminalisation of homosexuality
• items from playwright Alan Bennett’s mantlepiece including his Lisa Simpson figurine
• a copy of Homer’s Iliad dating back to 2nd century Egypt and discovered beneath the head of a buried woman
• a red coral baby rattle once owned by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• a book brought in by an Assyrian Christian refugee, later identified as a rare 10th-11th century work by Isaac the Syrian of Nineveh scholars had long been attempting to track down
• the earliest surviving printed advertisement in the English language, from the 15th century, known as The Caxton Advertisement
• 15th-16th century Persian astrological charts that informed the Gregorian Calendar
• Jane Austen juvenilia
• a draft notebook of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

To coincide with Treasured, the Bodleian Libraries is also hosting Collecting Ireland’s History: Libraries and the Recovery of Lost Records in the Transept of Blackwell Hall. The display explores how libraries have helped to reconstruct Ireland’s lost documentary heritage after the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland, which destroyed seven centuries of history.