Last term and this term it has been a great pleasure to welcome old members and other financial supporters of the College to our regular Benefactors’ Lunches. In addition to being enjoyable social occasions, they are an important way of recognising the vital contribution that our donors make to enriching and sustaining College life.

Some benefactions are recognised in concretely tangible ways: the glass panel listing major donors, the names on seats in the auditorium, and plaques outside doors in the Levine Building, in the Sutro Room, and on the back of the chairs on the terrace, for example. In earlier centuries they were also acknowledged and celebrated artistically, through Benefactors’ Books, which are among the most beautiful items in our archive.

If you look at entries from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, you find wonderful inscriptions setting out the name and background of each donor, along with the size of their gift, accompanied by an ornamental rendering of the first letter of the donor’s name in an illustrated square. So, for example, in the entry for Jacobus Cocks in 1699 we find the letter J (actually I at the time) standing in front of a peacock. There are five entries on the same page; in each case the lettering is accompanied by a bird or animal.

Move forward a decade and the illustration and ornamentation become even more elaborate. Animals are still a favourite, alongside buildings, human figures and the like. The names of almost all the calligraphers and illustrators are lost, although we do have an invoice from a Robert Stratford, who supplied us with artwork some decades later in 1770. He was paid £9, then the equivalent of 90 days’ pay for a skilled tradesman, to produce 72 entries “including 10 of them very long ones”.

When Clare first showed me these pages, I was struck immediately by their similarity to the work of a present-day artist and signwriter whom I very much admire, Archie Proudfoot, who works from a studio in Seven Sisters in London. Inspired by a book he found in a North Norfolk bookshop, Archie has produced an “alphabet of association” in homage to Renaissance artists such as Dürer and Holbein, with references to Greek myths and biblical scenes, as well as some simpler themes, for example F is for fish.

I have a couple of his original alphabet prints at our house in Cornwall: N for Narcissus gazing at his reflection and J for St Jerome in his study. Psychologists may make what they will of those choices. I also have a 7x4 compilation of all the letters, plus an ampersand and title square, in a single print, which is in my study in the Lodgings. They hold the same fascination for me as the Benefactors’ illustrations. As he has written of the compilation: “The result of that compulsive desire to make a satisfying grid is this print of the full alphabet. I think it really brings to life the playful concept of the initial idea as a whole, with a whole series of windows into little worlds for you to look into and decipher their meaning.”

Details of these and his other work can be found at https://www.archieproudfoot.com/