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Macmillan's New Cranford Series and Illustrated Standard Novels in Dust Jackets
In 2011, I posted images of the dust jacket of my 1896 copy of Thomas Love Peacock's Gryll Grangehere and here; that copy has now been donated to the Monash Library, as a part of my Thomas Love Peacock...
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Haywood's Distress'd Orphan — as a web comic!
Arden Powell has been inspired to adapt Eliza Haywood's The Distress'd Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse (1726) into a web comic, under the title: Madhouse. (Madhouse doesn't have an exclamation mark, but...
View ArticleEarly Reviews of Haywood's Memoirs of Utopia (1725–26)
The following note and editorial addition, concerning Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, appears in the Critical Review, 4 (November 1757): 272 (online here):To...
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Knitting for Bibliographers, by Professor Greenough
As Wikipedia explains, Chester Noyes Greenough (1874–1938) was Professor of English (from 1915) and Dean at Harvard University (1919–27). Inasmuch as he is known to bibliographers today, he is known...
View ArticleBibliomania, The Evidence Accumulates
Fortunately, “bibliomania is not a psychological disorder recognized by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, according to Mark D....
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Representing Little Merlin’s Cave, 1737 to 1741
I have a pretty limited knowledge of incunabula and post-incunabula printing, but it seems that woodblock images were often copied, re-purposed and re-used. And it seems a quite a lot of...
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Eliza Haywood’s House in the Great Piazza
My 2011 article on “Eliza Haywood at the Sign of Fame” discusses—in great detail—two advertisements I found for the April 1744 sale of “The genuine Household Goods of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, Publisher, at...
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On Dust Jackets and Literary Damnation in 1785
Below is a short, satiric and amusing account of the often-ironic fate of books and pamphlets in the late eighteenth century. (Remnant, “On Literary Damnation,” The Rambler’s Magazine, 3, no. 10...
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Catterall and Cowley in Sydney, 1835
When I was visiting Sydney during a university holiday in 1989, I bought a copy of The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, 6th ed. (London: J. M. for Henry Herringman, 1680). As the photos in this blog post...
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Genre Labels and the Rise of the Novel
I have recently been reading Leah Orr’s Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 (2017). In her book, Orr frequently references an earlier article of hers, “Genre Labels on the...
View ArticleTranslations of Les Journées Amusantes
As Séverine Genieys-Kirk explained in 2007, "in addition to the multiple Paris, Amsterdam and London" editions—in French—of Madeleine Angélique Poisson de Gomez’s Les Journées Amusantes (Paris: G....
View ArticleIllustrations in La Belle Assemblee
Eliza Haywood translated Madeleine Angélique Poisson de Gomez’s Les Journées Amusantes (Paris: G. Saugrain, Charles le Clerc, Ándre Morin, 1722–31), over a lengthy period, as the eight volumes of the...
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Reading Smoky the Cowhorse in 1947
In the photo above and below, a teenager is captured—in dramatic lighting—sprawled in an armchair reading Will James's Smoky the Cowhorse (1926), winner of the 1927 Newbery Medal. The cover art on the...
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Henry Lasher Gardner publisher’s device
I included Henry Lasher Gardner publisher’s device in an appendix to my essay: "Thomas Gardner's Ornament Stock: A Checklist" (Script and Print, vol.39, no.2 (May 2015): 111). As I noted in my article,...
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Works by Eliza Haywood online
Regular visitors to this page (my list of original editions of works by Eliza Haywood available for free online) will have noticed that the pace of additions has slowed. This is not because I am...
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Bookseller trade cards of the 18C
Sir Ambrose Heal's "Bookseller and Stationers' trade-cards of the eighteenth century" appeared in The Penrose Annual, vol. 45 (1951), 29–32. It contains one page of introductory text (which says...
View ArticleThe myth of a Vatican porn collection
The myth of a vast Vatican collection of erotica or pornography was established sixty years ago, by Ralph Ginzburg. In his Unhurried View of Erotica (1958), after one hundred pages of broad-brush...
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More Bookseller Trade Cards of the 18C
The trade-cards, trade tokens or bookplates below, are from a collection of English engraved advertisements compiled around 1758 by F. Legge of St. James’s Market preserved at Yale’s Walpole Library....
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Collecting Haywood, the last two years
I have been inspired by David Levy’s “Year in Collecting” posts (here, here and here) to write something about the Eliza Haywood books I have managed to buy in the last couple of years. I don’t usually...
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More on the Vatican Enfer
In my recent post on “The myth of a Vatican porn collection” (here), I mentioned the popular conflation of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the bibliography (published by the Vatican) of books...
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