Location: Bank Street Arts, 32-40 Bank Street, Sheffield, S1 2DS

An auditory and visual exhibition for Off the Shelf Festival of Words Sheffield. A response to the voices, images and books collected by the oral history group Reading Sheffield during their investigations into the reading experiences of a group of Sheffield residents who grew up in the years between 1920 and 1960.

This work is about books, their readers and a particular time in history. Old books have a unique quality, traces of a life lived reside in the thumbed pages and coffee stains. The fluctuating choices of typeface and illustration fixes them to a particular time. Over and over again in the audio recordings collected by the Reading Sheffield team arose the role of the library, a palace of words, a place of peace and quiet, a store of knowledge, a step into a new future.

For information on Reading Sheffield see www.readingsheffield.co.uk