Fairy Tales at the British Library – a Family Adventure through Enchanted Stories

Katy
0:11

Hi, I'm Katy.

Ali
0:12

Hi, I'm Ali. And welcome to Mostly Book Talk. In this episode, we talk to Alison Bailey and Laura Walker, who are curators of the British Library's Fairy Tale Exhibition, which is on until August 23rd.

Katy
0:25

A really up-to-date episode. Find out all about the exhibition and why you should go and see it.

Ali
0:34

We are delighted to welcome Alison Bailey and Laura Walker, who are the lead curators of the British Library's Fairy Tales exhibition, which is an interactive exhibition all about fairy tales. There are enchanted lands, magical creatures, iconic characters, and timeless tales, and they're brought to life through books, costumes, puppets, pop-ups, artwork, and illustrations. So welcome.

Alison
1:00

Thanks very much.

Ali
1:01

And I think our first question is what was the idea behind the exhibit?

Laura
1:07

At the British Library, we have done a couple of family-friendly exhibitions before, including Paddington and Story Explorers, which is now open in Leeds. But we really wanted to build on the success of these and create a much kind of larger scale exhibition aimed at families and also to really promote the learning activities that our colleagues in those teams work on at the library. We also kind of love the stories. There's so many wonderful collection items across the library that we would like to include. And then it's also a celebration of storytelling. I think those are the kind of main reasons why we wanted to go with fairy tales.

Katy
1:41

And what was the process of curating it? How do you put together an exhibit like that? You decide what's in it and what's not in it. How did that work?

Alison
1:51

So the whole thing started about four years ago when Laura put forward the idea. And when it was taken up, it was taken up as a family-friendly exhibition. So then we started off researching the kinds of things that we have in our collections that would fit, and then the kind of things we thought we might borrow from other people. And we went to look at some other institutions and to find out how they engage a young audience. So we went to Discover in East London, we went to the Story Museum in Oxford. But then we also visited some places where we were thinking of getting loans from. For example, we went to the William Morris Gallery in the borough of Waltham Forest, and we went to Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle. So we started off thinking about the kind of things we wanted to put in it, and then we started trying to think about the storyline and how we'd express that, how we'd narrow it down, particularly for our intended audience. I don't know if Laura would like to carry on talking about what we did.

Laura
2:46

Yeah, so we we looked at the storyline. We wanted to make it very child-friendly and interactive as well, so that the exhibition is more like a journey. So you start off in a cottage and look at kind of the history of storytelling more generally, and then you move into the woods where we look at characters and then go to the palace where you explore magic and to the land of far away where you encounter animals, and then we end in an enchanted library where you see how fairy tales have been reimagined and reinvented in lots of different ways. So after deciding on the storyline, we then looked at the kind of interpretation, the labels and the panels and the text, as well as the design and how to make that work for the audience, and also integrating the objects into it so it becomes the world rather than just your normal exhibition.

Ali
3:31

And you said that you went to lots of different places as well to see what else and other things you might borrow. But did you start firmly with the books in your own collection?

Alison
3:40

It's lovely to be able to showcase some of the things from our collections that don't normally get a look in, as you might say, or that people don't get to see. So we wanted to include manuscripts, which is obviously the bit that Laura works in, and printed books, which is the bit I work in, but we also wanted to include things like a musical score, a map, stamps, artwork, photographs, and to try and show the breadth of the library's collection. But yes, I guess we start with our collection, maybe work out how we can illustrate things and then try and work out where there might be gaps, where we want to have contrasts, different sorts of material. For example, some of our loans are things like a painted paddle from Wadston Manor, lent by the Rothschild Trust, and that gives a different sort of dimension to the exhibition.

Katy
4:22

And you described how you go through the different sort of worlds or stages of the exhibition. It's very visual. How was that put together? I think you worked with a scenery painter, is that right?

Laura
4:34

Yes, that's right. So it was the first time that the library had worked with a theatrical designer Tom Piper, and he worked in conjunction with Alan Farley, who did the 3D design, and they created this wonderful world, which is somewhat aptly sprung from the pages of a book where you'll see trees growing out of books, giant books, and using the text and fairy tales. And it's been wonderful. It's all been hand-painted. A lot of it was done beforehand, and then the painters came in and finished everything on site. And you can see even the bottoms of the cases where there's roots growing or kind of city bits next to the hearth, and it's really integrated the cases and the collections in this wonderful fairy tale world.

Katy
5:16

It's an exhibition that's works at two levels. It's very interactive and it's very child-friendly, but there's also a lot in it for adults as well. How did you get that balance? I was actually there an evening when it was almost all adults, but I can imagine that there will be times when during the day where there are just lots of children really running around. How did you get that balance that it works for both?

Alison
5:40

So we try to choose things that maybe weren't first editions or the kind of things that you might choose just for an adult audience. We try to choose when we are looking at maybe some of the older Western European fairy tales, we try to choose examples where they have an interesting frontispiece or some kind of image of people telling stories or else including lots of the characters. We've aimed the interpretation roughly at the age of six to eight. So the labels are designed for people age six to eight, and they're quite low down. And we also have some story labels that tell some of the stories that maybe are slightly less familiar. And we also, I don't know if you read any of our panels, but some of them are rhyming panels. So parts of the interpretation were aimed at children of a certain age or to make them more family friendly. But we always included a lot of material that we hoped would appeal to an audience across the age spectrum, really. So we've got to things like those kind of gift books by Dulac and Rackham and that kind of thing. But we've tried to make the labels and the description of them appropriate to the family audience that we think are coming.

Katy
6:40

And you've got the interactive elements as well, haven't you? You've got the mirror mirror on the wall that responds to you and has a trip-trap bridge. And I'm trying to remember what else. So you can sit down with Goldilocks, can't you? Or watch Goldilocks coming. How did you come up with those?

Laura
6:54

We had a lot of fun thinking about all the different interactives and not all of the ideas came to fruition. It's the first time there's been a slide in a British Library exhibition, so that's a first, and that has been incredibly popular. It's been wonderful watching the kids have fun.

Katy
7:09

Did that require a lot of health and safety assessments?

Laura
7:12

Yes, I think our exhibition team have learned a lot of new skills after working on this. So I think it's been good in a variety of different ways. I think the interactors really engage both children and adults because on the adults only evenings where people have come around, adults have had equally as much fun kind of talking to the genie or going across the troll bridge as the kids have had as well. So I think it's that sense of nostalgia as well with the exhibition that storytelling is so much a family activity and it's something that's great to do with parents or grandparents, and it takes you back to your childhood and the books that you were read, and that's what we wanted to achieve in the exhibition, that people can rediscover these stories again together and as well as find out new ones because we have a lot of wonderful contemporary illustrators that we've borrowed work from in the exhibition as well. And you've got the C Bebies chair, haven't you? So you've been having people tell stories in that. Yes, we have partners with CBB's, and there was an episode with Claire Foy that came out with Stop, That's Not My Story by Symmetry Halls and illustrated by Erica Mesa. We've got the graphics from that story on the wall behind the chair as well. It's part of a kind of more general seating area where at the end we've got quite a few books that feature in the exhibition, as well as I should print copies and braille copies of books as well that people at the end can sit down and enjoy and just read together, which is again a really beautiful thing to see. Families just sitting down and reading and enjoying their time together in the exhibition.

Ali
8:34

It was interesting because it is a very touchy-feely exhibition, and there doesn't feel like there's a rush to get through. There feels like there's space to have another go on the troll bridge or have another little word with the genie before you move on to the next bit. And I wondered, is there anything extra precious in there that was a struggle to put in with the fact that it's a focus on families?

Alison
8:56

I think Laura might want to mention a particular manuscript, so I'm going to let her do that.

Laura
9:01

Yes, our star manuscript that I wanted to include isn't actually a fairy tale. And it is in the last section with the reading area, which where we look at how different stories have inspired fairy tales and how they have similar traits and themes in them. So this is the original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground, which is the handwritten copy by Lewis Carroll. So he wrote that basically after he'd told the story to Alice Little, and then he presented this copy to her, and it's got his own illustrations, and it's opened at a page with this beautiful illustration of Alice and the White Rabbit, which is really special. Because Alice wakes up at the end, it's not technically a fairy tale, but it does have a lot of the kind of magical animals and shrinking and growing and all of that wonderful things that are often known in fairy tales.

Alison
9:46

In my opinion, it's well.

Katy
9:48

I love seeing that. That was amazing. So the highlights for me were I loved the mini mock-up book of the uh postman, the Alan Ahlberg, Alan Janet. And just seeing that, it was a really tiny little version, wasn't it, that they'd done to show the idea. And I really loved that. And I loved you have Lauren Charles, one of her sort of dioramas, I'm not sure that's the right word, is it? But from The Princess and the P, where she did these kind of paper cut 3D models, didn't she, to photograph for all of the illustrations in that? And and I was really excited to see that. That's one of my favourite books uh that I remember reading loads of times to my kids. And that also with The Princess and the Pea where you can see whether you can feel the pea. I enjoyed that interactive bit.

Alison
10:38

Um so one of the things we try to do is put things together. So the story of the three bears was originally a story of three bachelor bears, and the intruder was an older woman, not a young girl. So we've got a copy of something from 1837 that tells that story next to that little the dummy book that Janet Olberg created to show how the Jolly Postman would work. If so, you can you could open up, for example, in our case, you could open up the letter the Goldilocks wrote to the bears apologizing for eating the porridge, and then we showed the published version of the letter as it finally appeared. So that's 40 years old this year. So that was first published in 86.

Katy
11:20

And I do think that from an adult point of view, going round, there is that thing of nostalgia. It's all of those books that you've either read yourself as a child or you've read to your own children, or if you're a teacher, probably you've seen through various generations of children, and there's there are just some real highlights. But then there are also things that you've never seen before, which were really good to see as well. What was your favourite, Ali?

Ali
11:44

I really like that diorama as well, because it was just so detailed and the light on it, it's just in a little tiny box, and actually you could just lurk there for a little while to look at all of it whilst people managed to get around you. So that was just beautiful. But I do like a genie and a lamp. So I was quite pleased with that bit as well. And I think I spent years of my life reading the troll, the story of the troll bridge to various children, and so the trip trapping of that as well was great. Yeah, we had different versions of that that I used to go round in cycles of reading to my kids, and they all involved slightly different voices. Like you had the actual trolls and finger puppets. There was a lot of interaction. I think I've still got them somewhere.

Katy
12:26

The other one that was lovely to see was the, and I've forgotten the author's name, which is terrible, the three little bulls and the big bad pig. Helen Oxenbury, I know, is the illustrator.

Alison
12:36

the author's called Eugene Trivisas. Is that right? Yeah.

Katy
12:41

Yes, that sounds right. But I love that book, and I I think it's a really great example of a picture book that's not scared to use really big words and to really challenge lots of different ideas in there. It's uh an interesting retelling of a fairy tale. It's not just simply replacing the pigs with the wolf and swapping roles, and and the illustrations are amazing. Do you have favourites? Do you have a favourite thing that's in there?

Alison
13:10

I have lots. That's the trouble. I know you can't really say that, but very near to that Helen Oxenbury illustration, we have a pop-up because we've got quite a lot of pop-ups and movables. I don't know if we said that already, but that's to try and engage children. And sometimes we use them to tell the whole story. So we've got a carousel that tells the whole story of Little Red Riding Hood. So if you don't know the story of Little Red Ridinghood, you could walk round and find out what's going on. But anyway, when it comes to the three little pigs, that's by uh Wojtek Kubasta, who's a kind of very famous sort of pop-up creator, really. And that's next to that lovely illustration by Helen Oxenbury. So sometimes we've tried to show in lots of different places the way that fairy tales were illustrated and imagined over the years and how they've been reimagined more recently.

Katy
13:52

I was intrigued by that. It was a really uh beautiful, this the whole concept of it was really lovely. Laura, did you have a favourite? If you had to, I know it's like trying to ask you your favourite child, but it is.

Laura
14:03

No, it is, as Alison's said, there's so many to choose from. I think I really loved the Mervyn Peak artwork, his version of The Brothers Grimm, the title page showing the lots of different characters in a very kind of fluorescent, sinister world is beautiful. I also, before curating the exhibition, didn't really know much about Maven Dornoy, and then her story of the white cat, which is a very small, it's not quite as small as Arthumbelina, but it's probably the second smallest thing in the exhibition. A hand-painted covered picture of a very small cat wearing a veil, and the story is just quite sweet, quite traumatic as well, about this queen who's turned into a cat by evil fairies, and then she is locked away in a hidden castle, and a prince has to come and complete three tasks, and she helps him achieve that, and in doing so, she transforms back. But it's just interesting that her stories were you know critiquing the kind of limited agency of women in the 17th century, and she was to do that in her stories, which was I find quite interesting when a lot of the kind of morals messages can be a little bit questionable and something we have. We've been trying to, for our audience, subtly kind of question and redress with yeah, some more contemporary versions. But it's yeah, it's wonderful to see that that people were using these stories at the time to raise awareness of issues and problems.

Katy
15:18

Yeah. And what's the response been to the exhibit? When did it start? It's been on a couple of months now, hasn't it?

Alison
15:25

Yeah, so it started on the March the 27th and it runs until August the 23rd. And if you want to find out more information about it, you can look at bl.uk. What's been nice has been the thing that you said, that there are people of all different ages coming and everyone's enjoying it, basically. So that's been great as far as I'm concerned. It's been really lovely to see people of all different ages enjoying it. It's been popular, I think.

Katy
15:49

Yeah. Do you hang around just to see how people are going through the exhibit and say you can file that away when you do the next one?

Laura
15:58

Yes, definitely. I mean, it has been really interesting seeing the different age groups as well, because we have a lot of um school groups that go around. And when you're in there with a school group, you know about it. It's amazing because they just stampede. We've been watching them go around and they do a lap first and then they come back through and then they can concentrate on kind of individual bits and pieces without having missed out anything. Whereas I think adults tend to be much more focused, going around in a kind of order. And so it has been really wonderful. And I think even just when you have a group of adults in there, it's there's been more kind of laughter and a general different feeling to your normal kind of quite serious exhibition space that it has felt more fun and people don't have to whisper and creep round that there's other people to change up.

Katy
16:37

Yeah, I did think that when I went round, I thought if I would been with my children when they were younger, they would have been going backwards and forwards and would have done it. They'd wanted to see what everything was, and then they would have wanted to go back and redo stuff and look at it again and just make sure they hadn't missed anything. I also just want to mention that you have some sensory packs, don't you? So just do you want to just say a bit about that in terms of making it accessible to all?

Laura
17:03

We have sensory backpacks which are available um at the ticket desk when you come in. Just please ask about those. Um the exhibition itself, we've tried to include um different sensory um interactors as we go through. There are the kind of digital ones, but there's also things like um building blocks um in the castle, and there's the smells um in the potions table. So there's different ways for people to interact with the exhibition. Um, there are relaxed openings on some mornings with details of which are on the website. Um, so we have been also working um with the RIB um in producing um tactile images of some of the um objects, the um illustrations, um, so that um they can be interactive in that way. Um and as I said earlier, that we do have um large print and braille um books at the end, and there is a braille map at the beginning that you can ask for and like large print um guide as well. Um again, an interesting learning curve for us for how to make these as accessible as possible. And for things like where we've got the slide, um, we wanted to make sure that we have alternative activity so that if you if for whatever reason you don't want to, you can't do the slides. We've got the veil the pee um interactive next to it. So you can still tell if you're a princess or not by um seeing whether you can do that. So we try to make it as um accessible for as many people as we can.

Ali
18:22

Yeah, that's lovely. I think it's really successful. I think it's a really lovely exhibition. And now I need to go back and see the tiny cat. I do remember seeing that and thinking, because I'm a cat person and thinking about it, but I hadn't realized its significance as you positioned it. So it is very tempting to come back. So you may have some repeat visitors.

Alison
18:44

Great.

Katy
18:44

Is there anything else that we've missed that you would want to add in to encourage people to go? They can come until the 23rd of August, tickets on your website, and say to anyone who doesn't know where the British Library is, it is ideally positioned between two major stations or three major stations, King's Cross and Panacros, and Houston. So it's really easy to get to, even if you have to come into London to see it. There's something for everyone. There is something for everyone. Thank you very much. We really enjoyed it. We wanted to share it to make sure that people didn't find out about it after they couldn't go anymore, which would be annoying.