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Collecting Haywood, 2019
2019 was a better year for Haywood collecting than I was expecting. I did have better years with a lot less money about a decade back but, as I mentioned in last year's year-in-review post (here), the...
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My 2020 Siesta
Normally, after such a long break between posts I'd feel the need for a proportionately long explanation for my silence. Instead, I'll just say "Covid" and start tidying up this mess by updating some...
View ArticleEliza Haywood Criticism Online
I previously maintained the list below of free, online Eliza Haywood criticism on the same page as my list of 18C and 19C editions of the works by Eliza Haywood (here). Since both lists have grown...
View ArticleCollecting Haywood, 2020
2020 was a woeful year in so many ways, so it should be no surprise that so few Haywood items appeared on the market.At first, it appeared that millions were likely to be stuck at home, out of work and...
View ArticleThe Lender’s Library, 1907
I found "The Lender’s Library" printed in Perth Boy’s School Magazine, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2 May 1913): 5b. Google tells me that over thirty years later the poem was reprinted as “The Lender’s Litany,” in...
View ArticleLibraries: The First Cut Is The Deepest
In 1887, Augustine Birrell explained that “Libraries are not made; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money” but “After your first two...
View ArticleF. H. Johnstone (b.1867), Old Mancunian, scholar, soldier, school master, poet
Below is a brief biography of F. H. Johnstone, which I have compiled, in order to learn something more of the then-Western Australian, occasional poet responsible for both the pleasant “The Lender’s...
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The Horblit Bibliographical Collation Computer of 1964
According to his Wikipedia entry, Harrison David Horblit (1912–88)—"philanthropist and collector of books, manuscripts, and photographs"—"designed a 'Bibliographical Collation Computer', a 128 x 245mm...
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Haywood and Dryden: The humblest lover, when he lowest lies
In Book 9 of Haywood's Female Spectator appears the following passage:"Many Women have been deceived by this Shew of Obsequiousness in those who have afterward become their Tyrants, not remembering...
View ArticleBetsy Thoughtless, the first really domestic novel?
In The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, in illustration of the manners and morals of the age (1871), William Forsyth offered a detailed account of Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss...
View ArticleCompositor: Fleuron 2.0
In March of 2017, I mentioned Fleuron: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Printers' Ornaments as a “new and enticing method for identifying” items printed by Thomas Gardner. (I also mentioned my three...
View ArticleFrances Zabel, pioneering bookseller, book reviewer, journalist
Mrs Frances Zabel (1868–1933) was the copyright holder (and, I assume, publisher) of the poem in my January post: “The Lender’s Library” (here). Curious about the poem, I found myself quickly becoming...
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2001AD, give or take two decades
My previous post (here) on both my first library, and the great cull that followed my first year at University, is a sort-of necessary introduction to the following, 2020 year-in-collecting story.As I...
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Ron Abbey on the Cornerstones of Civilisation
In July 1968, Eve and Ron Abbey founded Abbey's Bookshop, a business which continues to this day at 131 York Street, Sydney (here). Ron owned several other bookstores, most of which I remember: a...
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Slip cancellation in 1980
As Sarah Werner and Mitch Fraas observe (in a Folger library blog post, here) "Pasting in slips of paper to correct errors was not unusual practice in the hand-press period." Sarah went on to give a...
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Put a pin in it, bookmarks in the 18C
There are a number of places online where various people have discussed the origin and meaning of the phrase to "put a pin in it." English Language and Usage Stack Exchange has a useful thread on this...
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Oracles and the renaissance
Recently, my scholar-cousin found a roll of film in a canister marked: "Spedding. Berlin." Since he and I thought this might be 24 long-lost happy-snaps from a trip to Berlin, I asked him to send the...
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Marginal Notes, Now Published
Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins, edited by Patrick Spedding, Paul Tankard and Mia Goodwin (London: Palgrave, 2021)—the latest volume in the New Directions in Book History...
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Gossip in a Library, redux
The last time I mentioned Edmund Gosse and his puningly-titled essay collection, Gossip in a Library (1891; see here), I was rather hard on both the writer and his essay ("What Ann Lang Read").Since I...
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Chapbook Illustration and the History of Dr. Faustus
Thanks to Giles Bergel et al., bibliographers of the (very) long eighteenth-century have a valuable new widget for image-matching woodblocks. The widget was developed by Bergel et al. to search of...
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