LPS in the e-mail newsletter of the British Library

MartinGiles

Early last year (2024), the British Library asked a tame freelance writer to call me to interview me over the ‘phone; their purpose was to prepare a brief profile for inclusion in their Knowledge Matters blog. The idea was that I am an example of a user of the Library who utilises a broad range of their materials, although in the profile they left out all the science bits, the music, and a lot besides. Not unreasonably. The British Library is the literary arm of the British Museum.

Nothing much happened next: the Library had suffered a disastrous ransomware cyberattack and has had far more important things to rebuild. But last week, the Library’s e-mail newsletter The Library in 2025 came out, featuring me as its second item (after a plug for their current exhibitions) with a link to the blog.

In a photoshoot, they caught me holding stamp design artwork by Roger Vigurs (in the Library’s collection) for Liberia’s 1984 31¢ pygmy hippo, Scott #1012. (If you are brave enough to zoom in, you may also see that my shirt is subtly covered in hippos, too.)



The writer’s distillation of a long phone call into a few short points is a bit of a mixture of scatter-gun and garblehood. But you may see that the Liberian Philatelic Society (and Liberian philately) is given a prominent mention, as it was also in the e-newsletter to all of the Library’s members and subscribers. It is free publicity, anyway.

Here is a link:
https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2025/01/pursuing-hippos-through-the-stamp-collections.html?utm_campaign=1912868_January_OneBL_20250131&utm_medium=email&utm_source=The British Library&dm_i=5JXV,14ZZ8,6XZPT,5AC1A,1

mikwizzy

Martin , brilliant and well done

mikwizzy

Martin

in case you can squeeze this into your Encyclopedia here's a connection between Scottish haggis (recently consumed in great quantities here for Burns night celebrations) and the pygmy hippo (which DOESN'T feature in the ingredients I'd better say!)

https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/animals/animal-inhabitants/pygmy-hippo/haggis

MartinGiles

Mik – thanks for that. We missed Burns Night because we were in Texas, where of course haggis (pudding, not pachyderm) is illegal. You may remember that President Bush the younger was once at a G8 summit at Gleneagles and was asked by the press whether he was going to eat haggis. W’s exact and entire response was: “Haggis. Yes. I’ve been briefed on that. No.”

I have notes for a little history of Edinburgh Zoo’s generations of pygmy hippos back to the 1990s. A favourite is the story of Darren McGarry, who started washing pygmy hippos as a YTS trainee, has had a finger bitten off by one, and as Head of Animals had to nurse one at home (the mother had mastitis) and share his bath. (Not at the same time.) He said, “After she knocked over the Christmas tree for the tenth time, I thought, ‘Right, it’s time for you to go back up the road’.”

That ties into the conspiracy theory that the Scots have invented time travel—hence the use of the phrase, “Well, that will be me away up the road, then.”

As for young Haggis, I did see an ode (not an address as such) in The National, with lines including: “A wee hippo, small an’ sweet, / Wi’ stubby legs an’ muddy feet. / Haggis is the name, ye ken, / A jolly soul, a tiny gem, / Born beneath the Scottish sky, / Wi’ eyes that gleam an’ make ye sigh.”