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:
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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."
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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.
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(††) 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.
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