Sunday, 25 January 2026
Burns Night, 2026
To celebrate Robert Burns and his poetry, I thought I would post an image from my copy of the Poems of Robert Burns, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Co., 1801).
As you can see above, this is the engraving illustrating "Tam O'Shanter". The heading is "TAM O' SHANTER. | A TALE."; the attributions below the illustration read: "Drawn by A. Carse - Vol. II. page 103. – Engd by R. Scott"; and the text further below reads:
Till first ae caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason a thegither,
An 'roar'd out, "Weel done, Cutty sark!"
While this 1801 edition is far from being a first, or even really an early edition, I believe that it was the first edition to contain an illustration for "Tam O'Shanter" (and—more importatly—the first to depict Burns' witch).
For reasons that would probably keep a therapist entertained for hours (if I had one), I have a pretty extensive collection of objects decorated with representations of said witch, either dancing amid the ruins or in persuit of Tam. While being the first has an appeal all of its own, this crude illustration by Alexander Carse is particularly charming. If I remember to mark Burns Night again next year, I will post some images of one of these objects.
Tuesday, 20 January 2026
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.
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 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.
Friday, 9 January 2026
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.
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.
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