Manufacturing Obscenity: Thomas Love Peac*ck

When I was shopping around for cheap copies of the The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, the following copy was recommended to me on eBay:

Note the highlighted name: Thomas Love Peacock has here been censored into obscenity as "Thomas Love Peac*ck"—a type of asterism or ellipsis that was common in eighteenth century print (and is still common on social media today), which was used in order to avoid (further) censorship (††)

Obviously, this name-change was the result of a database-wide change of all instances of "cock" to "c*ck"—since it also caught The White Peac*ck by D. H. Lawrence, and a book published by "Peac*ck Books" ( Shakespeare Superscribe); i.e., an author, a title, and a publisher—but it made me curious. I have mentioned before (here) that some inexperienced booksellers, unfamiliar with the Early Modern long esse, have been known to catalogue copies of Belle Assemblée as "Belle Affemblée"—and, by doing so, make their copies of "Belle Affemblée" invisible to searches for Belle Assemblée. (As a result, I sometimes search for Miss Besty Thoughtless as Mifs Betfy Thoughtlefs and The Invisible Spy as The Invifible Spy—which makes me feel like an idiot, especially since, so far, I have not found any!)

Seeing this asterised Peacock, I wondered whether there may be a treasure trove of works—or even just a single treasure—that had eluded my prior searches by virtue of being catalogued under "Thomas Love Peac*ck" instead of Thomas Love Peacock. When I conducted a search for "Peac*ck" I discovered yes, there were quite a few books catalogue this way, but no treasures, and not much of interest to me. However, I also discovered that all the booksellers (NB the plural here) who used this censorship method seem to be the many heads of a single bookselling Hydra, masquerading as competitors.

As you can see here:

the same book is being listed on eBay by, seemingly, different booksellers—booksellers on different continents no less. (This is not a stock photo BTW—which are usually labelled as such—and the descriptions do match the condition of the books in the photos. Rather, this is the same book being listed under multiple business names on eBay.) Hunting around for more pairs like this, I found four censorious booksellers.

* * * * *

The four booksellers selling books by "Thomas Love Peac*ck" on eBay are all enterprises run by Mubin and Raza Ahmed’s "Wrap Ltd."—a "printed matter," "waste and scrap paper" import/export business with an annual turnover of £6.5M ("or more"). Mubin and Taskeen Ahmed are listed as Directors of Wrap (and Shahida Ahmed as Company Secretary of Wrap) here.

On eBay, Mubin Ahmed’s baham_books (Joined 11 Aug, 2011; 11.3M [!!] items sold) duplicates Awesomebooksusa (Joined 27 Mar. 2009; 399K items sold), Raza Ahmed’s InfiniteBooks (400K items sold; Joined Dec. 2012), and The_Book_Fountain (Joined May 2013; 574K items sold). The Ahmeds may have more phantom / phoenix businesses. In this last instance, you need to match the VAT number for the business [GB 724498118] against those listed under baham_books and Awesomebooksusa [GB 724498118]. As I say, I only found these four by looking for duplicate "Peac*ck" volumes, a wider search may identify more fake competitors.

There is not a lot about Messers Ahmed online, but eBay spruiked Awesome Books and "Mubin Ahmed, 36 from Reading" in a 2020 Press Release (here), using the following quotation:

" We started our business, AwesomeBooks, after realising that many books from charity shops end up going to waste due to the sheer volume of donations they receive. We spotted an opportunity to start a business selling second-hand books, while also giving charities well-needed funds to take stock off their hands. AwesomeBooks has grown immensely over the last 17 years, and we now ship 6,000 books per day through our eBay store. From small beginnings, our turnover is now expected to reach £25m this year. Lockdown meant that sales of our books went through the roof. It seems like our customers used their spare time to read their 'bucket list books' and find sources of entertainment for children."

* * * * *

As someone who has both given a lot of books to charity, and bought a lot of books from charities, I have mixed feelings about discovering that they are handing over these donations by the truckload to a business that has turned Messers Ahmed et al. into Millionaires. I am sure the charities would argue that it is better than them going into landfill, and that they at least get something this way, instead of having to pay something (in tipping fees) for these books. Also, if it were not for AwesomeBooks et al., there would be fewer books and less competition online—and so, higher prices for books. The counter argument is that the charities ought to either pass on their donations, at modest prices, to their local communities, to the benefit of those local communities, or be much more open about wholesaling to eBay vendors.

It does strike me, moreover, that very few of the books listed by AwesomeBooks / Awesomebooksusa / BahamBooks / InfiniteBooks / The Book Fountain are paperbacks. A search for John Wyndham did not turn up a single paperback on InfiniteBooks; and while Awesomebooksusa and The Book Fountain had a few, these were overwhelmingly new books or very recent editions. So, it seems that paperbacks are almost all still going to landfill—or being pulped. Since "Wrap Ltd. " do import/export both "printed matter" and "waste and scrap paper" it may be that they are pulping a myriad of John Wyndham paperbacks, which might explain why said paperbacks are now almost impossible to find.

In any event, the quote from Mubin Ahmed does help explain why I rarely see an older or more interesting books at most op-shops—whether hardcovers or paperbacks, an Everyman or an older Penguin, to say nothing of a Loeb classical text—even after I have given such books to them. I assumed / hoped these were being distributed to other stores, or going to a central warehouse for vetting / sorting, but it seems that all the better books may be simply going to the local equivalents of Messers Ahmed instead, while most of the paperbacks are being pulped.

* * * * *

(††) Late last year I wrote an essay on the history of omission markers in the eighteenth century, and the terminology used to describe them (dashes, ellipsis and asterism), returning to a subject I had first touched on (albeit, only in passing) in two 2011 essays ("Fanny Hill and the Myth of Metonomy, " and "The New Machine, Discovering the Limits of ECCO"). I have long been fascinated by the practice of dashing, and have collected enough material for multiple essays on the subject, as well as an (as yet unrealised) research project. As a result, I probably tried stuffing too much into my latest essay, and needed to put it aside for a while, so that I could return to it with a pruning hook. Messers Ahmed’s asterism strikes me as a particularly good example of the continuing practice, since it is both completely ineffective as a form of censorship (where no censorship was called for in the first place), and draws attention to what it fails to censor.

Collecting Haywood, 2025

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while—and I haven’t posted an end-of-year round-up of Haywood collecting for four years—but I thought I might test my blogging gears with a post on my Haywood collecting at the end of 2025.

My motivation for attempting this test is that I have now reached my long-term collecting goal of “beating” the British Library at collecting works by Eliza Haywood.

“Beating” in this context carries none of the usual implications of winning. It is not like this was a race—if it were, my competition would have to have some inkling, which they don’t, that a race had started (a race in which they enjoyed an almost three century head start, and overwhelming institutional advantages); and “winning” would have to involve having an objectively-speaking superior collection, which I don’t have even now, and never will have. As I have probably mentioned before, a significant number of Haywood’s early works have not circulated in the private collecting market for at least a century; many for longer, so I will never have the opportunity to buy them, even if I could afford them, were they to come up for sale.

Since 1997, my competitive measure has been—instead—how many times does the library appear as a holding location in my database of library holdings, which was the foundation of my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. When finalised in 2004, the totals for the top ten libraries were: British Library (168); Oxford University—inclusive of the Bodleian (115); Yale University—i.e., all libraries (91); Harvard University—ditto (84); Cambridge University—ditto (81), Newberry Library (75), Huntington Library and University of Illinois (60), University of Pennsylvania (45). As I noted in my Bibliography, these top ten libraries contain as many Haywood items (779) as the 310 smallest libraries combined.

Over the last two decades my personal library count has gradually risen past all 320 of the instructions, whose holdings were included in my Bibliography. Obviously, at first, I was galloping past libraries. I passed fourteen by simply going from four to five Haywood items; and another fourteen by going from five to six. It didn’t take long for me to surpass the combined libraries of Melbourne, and then Australia. The gap between libraries all the way up to Yale (at 91) was narrow enough that I pretty consistently had new collecting targets to focus on. After all, the Bodleian, at 96, was only five more items beyond Yale, and then it was only six more to add All Souls College to the Bodleian, and so on, up to 115. But the fifty-three items needed to get from Oxford University (on 115) to the British Library (on 168) was a long haul, with few milestones on the way.

Now that I a have reached 169, I am happy to acknowledge that, the British Library almost-certainly still has more than I do; having likely acquired more Haywood items since 2004. In fact, I am sure they have, since I sold them (what was then the only known copy of) a Swedish translation of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. There were also likely to have been copies at the British Library I missed including, for one reason or another. So, I am assuming that, if I were to re-do my 1997 / 2004 audit, I would find that I have been chasing an after-image of the British Library holdings for the last two decades, and that their present holdings are more like 175 or 180.

While it is possible that I may eventually pass the then-actual, present day count of the British Library, it has been getting harder and harder to find anything I don’t already have multiple copies of, so it may never happen. It is just as well then, that I am now increasingly focussed on the provenance and reading marks left behind by past readers, and am at least as excited by a dog-eared duplicate as I am by a clean copy of something I don’t already have.

Fortuitously, therefore, my very pretty, British Library-beating item no. 169, arrived with a number of dog-eared duplicate volumes. This means that I passed by the biggest institutional collection in style, with a mix of items they would both willingly, and unwillingly allow into their collection.

And so, rather than give an account in this post of the eighteen Haywood items I acquired this year, or the seventeen the year before, and so on back to my last “Collecting Haywood” post in January 2022 (for 2021 (here), and rather than share an image of the very nice set of La Belle Assemblée that took me from 168 to 169 Haywood items, I thought I’d share a few images of the duplicate volumes I acquired at the same time, which are at least as wretched as either my Frankenbook or the battered odd-volume of the German translation of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46) (here), which reminded me of the “lone soldiers we see so often in films, the ones who stumble out of the mud and smoke of battle, with clothes torn, hair awry, smeared in muck, bandaged, limping, looking at the corpses on all sides with glassy eyes, only to collapse from exhaustion in front of the camera.”

Below is the title-page of an odd-volume from Haywood’s La Belle Assemblée, 5th ed. (1743), a representative of my eighth set of this edition. The worn and stained front board and the front free endpaper of this copy were sticky-taped together, but were separated from the rest of the volume, which has had all the plates torn out (including the frontispiece), and had lost chunks of more than a few page-edges as a result of rough page-turning.

Below are the title-pages of two non-consecutive odd-volumes from Haywood’s La Belle Assemblée, 6th ed. (1749), representatives of my seventh set of this edition. Putting aside the provenance information they contain, the first volume has no boards, and contains annotations and underlining in pencil (mostly), while the third volume retains its boards, but lacks the textual annotations and underlining. Both volumes are heavily worn, but complete, with discoloured, dog-eared and torn pages, and bifolia splitting at the spine. Both volumes also contain some amateur water-colouring to one headpiece and at least two engraved plates each.

Since these three disreputable volumes contained some intriguing provenance information, and I had some free time when they arrived, I have been able to recover quite a bit of their histories, and so I will post those histories, and some better photographs once I have access to Photoshop again.

Judge Rochfort exlibris bookplate, ca. 1760

A biblioclast cut this early eighteenth century Judge Rochfort exlibris bookplate from a copy of James Foster, Sermons on the following subjects, viz. …, 3rd ed. (1736) [ESTC: n24146 (recording 15 copies); here]. I know this because, the bookplate was, and still is, fixed to the back of the titlepage, as you can see:

Bookplates are usually attached to front (fixed) endpaper, not to the title leaf; most likely, there was already a bookplate on the front endpaper, when Rochfort went to add his plate, so it was placed on the verso of the title leaf instead (more on this below).

There is a copy of this edition of Foster's Sermons on ECCO, but not freely available online (yet—probably), but there are copies of the first edition of 1733 (here) and the fourth edition of 1745 (here) for anyone interested in Rochfort’s reading or book-buying preferences. Below is the full title page, taken from the University of Cambridge Library copy on ECCO:

Although I have been unable to find a reference to any other Judge Rochfort bookplates in library catalogues online—or on ESTC under “Copy Specific Notes”—there is actually another book from Judge Rochfort’s library available at present on ABE (here):

The title of this book is not well represented in this ABE catalogue listing, but it is a copy of Jeremy Taylor, Eniautos. A course of sermons for all the Sundays of the year, 2nd ed. (1655) [Wing T330; ESTC: r10569 (recording 40 copies); here]. As you can see, this copy of Rochfort’s bookplate is printed in red, which is very unusual I believe.

Although there is no image of it online, this armorial bookplate features in J. H. Slater’s, “Alphabetical List of Noted Book-Plates” in his Book Plates and Their Value (London: Henry Grant, 1898), 203 (online here):

According to Slater, there are actually two Judge Rochfort bookplates, mine being “distinctly ‘Jacobean’ with elaborate mantling”—although he dates is to “about 1760” (long after the Jacobean period)—but both feature the crest and motto: “Probitas est optima politia” [honesty is the best policy].

Slater, who is styled J. Herbert Slater in the books of his I have on my shelves, was particularly well informed, so I am inclined to accept his date for the bookplate. As I noted above, the unusual positioning of the bookplate suggests that Rochfort was not the first owner of his 1736 copy of Foster’s Sermons—any more than he was the first owner of his 1655 copy of Taylor’s Eniautos on ABE.

* * * * *

As for who was Rochfort—like St John Broderick, the other stray Anglo-Irish bookplate I bought in the late 80s (and blogged about here)—he is: Judge Rochfort, of Streamstown, Co. Westmeath, Ireland; High Sheriff of Westmeath in 1736.

Judge Rochfort was related to the much-better-known Rochforts of Gaulstown (Gaulstown is only about 25kms by road from Streamstown), but the link between the two families is somewhat distant, and if the families may even have been at odds.

The Gaulstown Rochforts “were close friends of [Jonathan] Swift’s, and both George and John figure frequently in Swift’s letters and poems. John seems to have been a particular favorite: He was named by Stella one of her executors; and he was selected a member of the Lunacy Commission appointed, in 1742, to in quire into the state of Swift's mind” (Katherine Hornbeak, “Swift’s Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2 (February 1944): 183).

Swift was a regular visitor to the Rochfort family at Gaulstown House—a very famous estate, which you will find information about here) and here). “It is said that it was when Dean Swift looked across the expanse of Lough Ennell one day and saw the tiny human figures on the opposite shore of the lake that he conceived the idea of the Lilliputians featured in Gulliver’s Travels” (here).

“A number of Rochforts family served in the Irish House of Commons for constituencies in Westmeath” (here); Robert Rochfort (1652–1727), of the Rochforts of Gaulstown, “had a highly distinguished career, being Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. Robert’s grandson, also named Robert, was created 1st Earl of Belvedere in 1756. Their principal residences were Gaulstown House and, later, Belvedere House in Westmeath, of which only the latter still exists.”

Belvedere House is about 10kms from Gaulstown, but still only 25kms from Judge Rochfort in Streamstown—assuming that Judge Rochfort actually resided in Streamstown, which is by no means certain. The population of Streamstown is tiny, even today, although it is rapidly rising (increasing from 378 in 2016 to 519 in 2022; see here), and, as Arthur Sherbo notes, various members of the Rochfort family that Swift numbered among his friends were “resident in Dublin” at the time (Arthur Sherbo, “From the Westminster Magazine: Swift, Goldsmith, Garrick, et al.” Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 41 (1988), 276; here).

* * * * *

Returning to Judge Rochfort: Judge (here) was the son of Charles, son and heir of Charles Rochfort Esq. of Streamstown (ca. 1636–92; here and here), eldest son and heir of Lt.-Col. “Prime Iron” James Rochfort (ca. 1600–1652), who was court martialed and executed for killing his Major (in a duel) in Cromwell’s Army (here and here)—Lodge’s The Peerage of Ireland, vol. 3 (Dublin, 1754), 374–76 (here) provides the connections between all the otherwise disconnected references provided above.

Judge married Jane Donnellan (here), and had three daughters: Jane (here), Rebecca, who married (on 17 November 1779) Thomas Edwards, Esq. “an eminent surgeon” (here), and an un-named third daughter mentioned here.

Judge’s daughter Jane Rochfort married Rowland Rochfort (here)—a distant cousin—and had two daughters (only Harriet mentioned here, but two daughters mentioned here).

Rowland was the great, great, grandson of Lt.-Col. “Prime Iron” James Rochfort, and great grandson of Robert Rochfort (1652–1727; here; Prime Iron’s youngest son)—and wife Lady Hannah Hancock (d. 1733; here)—the friend of Swift.

Judge and his immediate family—indeed, most of the Streamstown Rochforts—have “no dates”—that I can find anyway—Robert, his ancestors, and descendants (i.e., the Gaulstown Rochforts), do. Lt.-Col. James Rochfort (d. 1652) was the father of Robert Rochfort (1652–1727), who was the father of the Rt. Hon. George Rochfort (1682–1730), who was the father of Arthur Moore Rochfort (1711–1774), M.P. for Westmeath, who was the father of Rowland Rochfort. Rowland’s father, Arthur, was the brother of Robert Rochfort, 1st Earl of Belvidere (1708–1774), aka “the wicked earl” (more on him below).

Meanwhile, the nearest dates that I can find for Judge’s immediate family are his grandfather (Charles, born ca. 1636), and the weddings of his daughters: Rebecca’s in 1779 and Jane’s (no date), but to Rowland, the brother of Lt.-Gen. George Rochfort (ca. 1739–1821).

* * * * *

I will end this ridiculously long post with a brief account of “the wicked earl” (based on the sources linked above, esp. here, here and here).

Apparently, Robert Rochfort, the 1st Earl of Belvidere, heard rumours that his young wife (Mary) had often visited—and had been having an “intrigue” with—his brother Arthur, the father of Rowland (Judge's son-in-law). According to a contemporary source: “[Arthur was] very well-bred and very well in his person and manner …[while] she is extremely handsome and has many personal accomplishments.”

As punishment, Robert had his wife locked up in the family house at Gaulstown, alone apart from her children and servants, for 31yrs. He also sued Arthur for “criminal conversation” for £2,000—a huge sum at the time; unable to pay, Arthur was thrown in a debtor’s prison where he eventually died.

Meanwhile, Mary was left so severely damaged by her long imprisonment “that she took to wandering the house and talking to portraits as if they were real people. When she was finally released after Robert’s death in 1774, Mary had become a deranged hag incapable of recognizing her own sons.”

George, the 2nd Earl of Belvedere, who freed his mother from imprisonment, demolished the Gaulstown House (where she had been imprisoned) and built a smaller house in the grounds for her. But Mary refused to stay; instead, she set sail for France, where she became a nun and lived the rest of her life as a hermit.

Given Robert’s character, if Judge allowed his daughter to marry Rowland, during the life of the wicked earl it seems very unlikely that he was at all close to Robert or the Gaulstown Rochforts—but perhaps this occurred after Robert bled to death, alone (and probably unrepentant), with his head caved in, on the grounds of his estate.

St John Broderick of the Middle Temple, 1703

This “Early Armorial” Restoration exlibris bookplate (Ginn, slide 14; see below) was created for St John Broderick of the Middle Temple, later The Honourable St John Brodrick (ca. 1685–1728), son of Alan, Baron Brodrick (ca. 1655–1728)—who outlived his son by only six months (Wikipedia pages here and here).

The short Wikipedia entry on St John Broderick characterises him as “an Anglo-Irish politician who sat in the Irish House of Commons from 1709 to 1728 and in the British House of Commons from 1721 to 1727”; since he was a parliamentarian, a few more details appear in Romney Sedgwick’s The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715–1754 (1970; online here).

Combining details from Wikipedia, Sedgwick and C. M. Tenison’s “Cork M.P’s, 1559–1800,” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, vol. 1, 2nd ser. (1895): 177 (here), the details of his life can be summarized as follows:

St. John Brodrick of Ballyanane, alias Midleton, was the eldest son, by his first wife, of Alan Brodrick, M.P., who was afterwards created Viscount Midleton. He was educated at Eton, 1698, and King’s College Cambridge, 1700, and was admitted to the Middle Temple, 1700; barrister-at-law, Ireland; Recorder of Cork, in succession to his father, 1708.

Brodrick was M.P. Castlemartyr, 1709–13 (then “of Cork”); Cork City, 1713–14 (then “of the Middle Temple”); Cork County, 1715–27; and 1727 (then Right Hon. St. John Brodrick) till his death in 1728. Brodrick was M.P. also for Beeralstown, county Devon, 1721–27; a Privy Councillor, 1724.

He married Anne, daughter of Michael Hill, of Hillsborough. She died 1752, leaving five daughters, of whom Anne married James Jeffreys, and Mary married Sir J. R. Freke, M.P. (q.v.). He died s.p. and s.p.m., 21st February, 1728.

A “Sketch Pedigree exemplifying the Brodrick M.P’s” is in Tenison here and a “Pedigree of Broderick” (that includes St. John and his daughters) can be found here

* * * * *

I found only a few references to this 1703 bookplate. It seems that Broderick owned a copy of Donne's Poems (London, 1633), now at Texas Tech University, Lubbock (here, but no photograph).

There appear to be no modern photograph or scan of St John Broderick’s bookplate online, but Egerton Castle reproduced a copy of this bookplate in his English Book-plates: Ancient and Modern (1893), 60 (above; text here); and this image was used by both Linda K. Ginn, for her 2017 lecture on “Digital Bookplates: Old Technology and New Applications” [University Libraries Workshops and Presentations, 6 (pdf online here]) and Paul Magrath in his 2021 post for the ICLR [Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales] on “(L)ex Libris — the art of the legal bookplate” (here).

Regarding the Brodrick family motto: “a cuspide corona” can be translated as “from a spear, a crown” (i.e., one receives honour [a crown] for military exploits [a spear]). This motto can also be seen on the 1754 engraving above, taken from John Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland, vol. 3 (Dublin, 1754), pl. 29 (here).

* * * * *

I have no record, and no clear memory of when I acquired this bookplate—but I think I have had it and a one other anglo-Irish bookplate (which I blogged about here) for decades, probably since the late 80s. I have a pretty strong aversion to supporting “breakers”—biblioclasts who disassemble books for engravings, or sammelbands and nonce-volumes for individual works, especially plays—so I can only assume that I bought the collection of bookplates [1] not from the beaker themselves (to avoid encouraging this sort of thing) and [2] out of a desire to protect bookplates themselves.

As you can see, I have managed to protect this one so far. But it occurred to me recently, when I was going through my ephemera, that it might be even better to post images and information about some of my ephemera here. Destruction is only a bushfire away after all and the bookplates are both very attractive—as the appearance of this one in Egerton Castle’s English Book-plates suggests.

Eighteenth-Century Books in Australian Libraries, revisited

Almost twelve years ago now, I did a post on “Collecting Eighteenth Century Literature” (here). In that post, I mentioned that the “ESTC code-finder” (now here)—maintained by the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California—“provides a count of ESTC records as well as providing ESTC codes.”

This count of ESTC items—books printed in English or in English-speaking countries before 1801—can be used as a crude yardstick to compare the rare book holdings in various libraries in Australia.

Although more than a decade has passed, there is remarkably little change to the figures I provided in my 2011 post—with one notable exception. Can you pick it?

The top ten libraries remain the same, and in the same order of size:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) 7529 (up 18)
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7455 (up 3)
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4842 (up 5)
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4656 (up 596)
5. State Library of SA (SSL) 2876 (up 3)
6. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2595 (up 2)
7. University of Melbourne (VU) 2294 (up 22)
8. State Library of NSW, Rare Books (NSL-RB) 1199 (no change)
9. Private collection, SA (PC-S) 1175 (up 4)
10. State Library of NSW (NSL) 1009 (up 1)

It is still the case that roughly one third of the 304 (was 303) Australian ESTC codes are recorded as holding nothing (101 libraries), a further one third have five or fewer listings (200 libraries), only eleven percent (34 of 304) have one hundred or more works.

I know for a fact that Monash has added a lot more than five ESTC items to its collection in the last decade—I have personally seen to that!—but I also know that they have been slack with informing ESTC of these new holdings. The State Library of Victoria count has, by comparison, increased by almost six hundred items, which is likely much more in line with their actual acquisitions. (On this, they seem to be particularly active in the area of early women writers; as a recent article explains here.)

It is unclear how many institutions might have stopped updating ESTC (like Monash), rather than stopped making acquisitions (State Library of NSW?), but I suspect that Monash’s cataloguing backlog is the norm, and that VSL’s professionalism is the exception. This suggests, in turn, that the specific figures recorded here for each institution are less important that the proportions between institutions etc.

* * * * *

Looking at the 2023 data, with this in mind, a few more things strike me.

The total count for all ESTC items in all Australian libraries is 47289—95% of these are held by the thirty largest libraries, so I looked at these thirty in particular. Breaking down the figures by State and Territory:

13800 items, or 29.2%, are held in VIC
12138 items, or 25.7%, are held in NSW
8162 items, or 17.3%, are held in ACT
7579 items, or 16.0%, are held in SA
1999 items, or 4.2%, are held in QLD
567 items, or 1.2%, are held in TAS
469 items, or 1.0%, are held in WA
0 items, or 0.0% are held in NT

Since NSW is Australia’s most populous State, I wondered about the relative proportions of ESTC holdings per State and Territory. On a per capita basis (actually ESTC items per 1000 people), the leagues table is as follows:

ACT is 17.8 per 1000 people
SA is 4.1 per 1000 people
VIC is 2.1 per 1000 people
NSW is 1.5 per 1000 people
TAS is 1.0 per 1000 people
QLD is 0.4 per 1000 people
WA is 0.2 per 1000 people
NT is 0.0 per 1000 people

ACT is an anomaly here, since the National Library of Australia (in Canberra) is not really an ACT institution—but the ACT itself is an anomaly, and the National Library is physically situated in Canberra, so perhaps this does not matter. The National average is 1.7 per 1000 people, so NSW is below the National average, but the ACT is in NSW, so—again with the ACT anomaly.

As for the type of institutions holding almost all of Australia’s ESTC items:

22081 items, or 46.7%, are held by twelve Universities
17720 items, or 37.5%, are held by six National and State Libraries
1751 items, or 3.7%, are held by five Religious institutions
1175 items, or 2.5%, are held by one Private individual
961 items, or 2.0%, are held by three Courts
668 items, or 1.4%, are held by one Parliament
385 items, or 0.8%, are held by two Medical Colleges

The number of ESTC items in Religious institutions, Courts and Parliamentary libraries surprised me a little.

* * * * *

A final thought, as a collector of 18C books—most institutions in Australia are doing a woeful job. In terms of new acquisitions, the only library in Australia that is doing it right—on the evidence of the ESTC code-finder—is the State Library of Victoria. But in absolute terms, no one is.

Below are—selected more or less at random, and ignoring most of the most obvious first-tier institutions in the States—ten points of reference for Australian rare book librarians:

Newberry Library 38087
Library Company of Philadelphia 31053
University of Chicago 25093
Boston Public 21233
Cornell University 18189
Columbia University 16426
Boston Athenaeum 12816
Rice University 8529
Free Library of Philadelphia 6109
Haverford College Library 5583

The entire ESTC book stock of Australia is weak when compared to the Newberry alone—which probably has fewer duplicates, and a wider coverage than Australia as a whole. The “Friends Historical Society of Swarthmore College”—which I have never heard of—has 2573 ESTC items! This is more than either the State Library of NSW or the University of Melbourne; indeed, more than all of Queensland and Tasmania combined.

It would also seem that even I now have more ESTC items than 292 of 304 Australian libraries—more than the whole of Tasmania (or Western Australia)—despite the fact that my budget is certainly a lot smaller than that of University of NSW, the University of Western Australia, State Library of Queensland and so forth. I do not know what they are spending their money on, but it isn’t (it seems) books printed before 1801.