Here’s what’s been keeping me busy for the past three months: a reissue of Dag Hammarskjöld’s 1961 Oxford lecture, ‘The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact’.
On 30 May 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld gave a lecture in Oxford about the international civil service. Now, 60 years later, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (DHF) has reissued the lecture with Hammarskjöld’s original footnotes, a new introduction and a note on the text.
I managed both the planning and delivery of the project, which involved extensive background research in the Kungliga biblioteket National Library of Sweden‘s Dag Hammarskjöld Collection and a complete reformatting of the text of the original Oxford University Press version.
One of the many surprises of the archival research phase was receiving a package of information from Oxford University Press, including details of the process leading up to the publication of the original chapbook version.
I also produced blog post that barely hints at the wealth of information I uncovered about Hammarskjöld’s trip to England, and a two-and-a-half-minute video courtesy of Different Films, which you can watch below.
I’m not sure which of these activities has involved the most work, but if I had to pick the one that has proven the most rewarding I’d say the video has it all.
From conception to treatment, selection of media and sequencing, it’s probably the only video about a publication I’ve ever been involved in but I am certain it won’t be the last.
While the history of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Oxford lecture could fill a book, my blog post explores the untold stories behind three known versions of the text.
One day I will write that book.
