Word Power
Company: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications Limited
Sector: Media
Impact: Corporate responsibility; Corporate identity
Sponsor: Company directors, Eric and Jessica Huntley
Timescale: July 2004 - ongoing
Project brief
Working in collaboration with London Metropolitan Archives, the regional archives for London run by the City of London Corporation, the owners of Bogle-L’Ouverture loaned their extensive publishing archive to be preserved for posterity within public sector archives. They aimed to:
- celebrate and disseminate the company’s published works and history to new cross-generational audiences
- educate and empower other communities and promote their histories
- demonstrate leadership to other community elders and friends with similar un-exploited business archive collections
- save the archives from deterioration and neglect
- free up office storage space
- generate office storage space cost-savings
Business archives used by the team
- Photographs relating to the company’s publishing and bookselling activities which include poetry readings, book launches, visits by artists and academics as well as racists attacks on the bookshop, 1960s-80s
- Artwork of published books, 1970s-90s showing publishing design history
- Book of condolence commemorating the life of Walter Rodney, 1980
- Notes by Eric Huntley on founding of the business, 1980-90s
- Correspondence between the Huntleys and international political figures, including letter from Cheddi Jagan, President of Guyana,1960s
Outcomes and business benefit
- The archives are now embedded and regularly exploited in LMA’s published education/interpretation programme, with no financial cost to Bogle-L’Ouverture.
- Annual conferences organised by the Friends of the Huntley Archives at LMA (FHALMA) keep Bogle-L’Ouverture aware of emerging new authors, promote book sales and raise company profile.
- The archives are now catalogued, providing clarity over what is held and assisting the wider brief of realising the educational and cultural potential of the collection.
- There is high research interest in the archive from a wide cross section of the community.
- Jessica Huntley was remembered at her funeral in 2013 as 'Jessica the Archivist' wth a eulogy given by Richard Wiltshire.
* ‘Black’ refers to persons with an African ancestry. ‘Caribbean’ includes all the other groups found in the region.