Ye Foolish Book Collector

Above and below are four versions of an image I generated using Google's free AI tool—i.e., via the Google browser. It used Nano Bannana to generate the images. My initial prompt was "Create an image in the style of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dance of Death series, for the type of book collector depicted in Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff."

I refined the image by asking it to remove the top banner; then "[1] Remove the fools cap from the skeleton reaching for the book; [2] add a simple constellation symbol to the blank pages on book at bottom right (above the banner), such as those found in Hygini, Poeticon Astronomicon"

Of the four images, I like the most the second one above, and this last one below—which is closest to what I had in mind.

Although I was delighted with the images, I was most impressed by the persistence (?)—how well Nano Bannana maintained the integrity of the original image, while modifying small details. This is a huge improvement on what image generators could do only twelve months ago.

OCR Redux

In my 2011 essay on the difficulties of searching OCR text-bases like ECCO ("'The New Machine': Discovering the Limits of ECCO; here), I gave, as an example, the opening sentence of Haywood's Female Spectator as rendered by Google Books and the Internet Archive. The two OCR-captured texts averaged over 150 typos per 2000 characters, a high enough error rate to render parts of the text completely unintelligible.

(I actually first did this test in 2004, at which point I encountered 33 errors in a passage 432 characters in length in a passage from Ab.60.7 The Female Spectator, 5th ed. (1755). I.e., OCR messed up 1 in 13 characters, nixing twenty words. The result didn't change between my first attempt at this and when I sat down to write my article, so this is the result I reported in 2011.)

While the Google Books passage had 33 errors among 432 characters, the Internet Archive had 35 in 430, allowing for differences in punctuation of the originals. The total of 68 errors among 862 characters equates to 157 typos per 2,000 characters. Here is the Google Books:

T is very much, by the choice we make of fubjects for our entertainment, that theiefined tall*' diftiuguifhes itfelt" from the vulgar and more grofs
: reading it univerfaily allowed to be one of the mofr. improving, as well at agreeable amufemerits; but then to render it fo,. one fhould, among the number of books which ar« perpetually ifluing from the prefs, endeavour to lingle out fuch as promife to be moft conducive to tho(e ends.

Since 2011, I have occasionally revisited this crude OCR test, to see how much OCR has improved. In January 2020, the same Google Books passage had only ten errors, or approximately 1 in every 43 characters—a significant improvement over 2011. Not only had the error rate for individual characters reduced by two-thirds, only three words contained errors compared to the total of twenty in 2011. Here is the 2011 text:

T is very much, by the choic* we make of subjects for our entertainment, that the icrlned tail*' distinguishes itself from the vulgar and more gross : reading it universally allowed to be one of the most improving, as well as agreeable amusements ; but then to render it so,, one should, among the number of books which art perpetually issuing from the press, endeavour to single out such as promise to be most conducive to those ends.

The error rate in May 2026 is, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, even lower. The same passage in two different editions (there are more editions of The Female Spectator online now than there were in 2011 or 2020) is only seven errors, six of which are long esses. Here is Ab.60.5 The Female Spectator, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (1748) here

T is very much, by the choice we make of fubjects for our entertainment, that the refined taste distinguishes itself from the vulgar and more gross: Reading is universally allowed to be one of the most improving, as well as agreeable amusements; but then to render it so, one should, among the number of Books which are perpetually iffuing from the prefs, endeavour to fingle out such as promife to be moft conducive to those ends.

Ab.60.7 The Female Spectator, 5th ed., vol. 1 (1755) here has exactly the same error rate, but the set of long esses misrendedred differs slightly. Intriguingly, a later edition, with what I took to be generally clearer type, has a lower error rate but more nixed words. Ab.60.9 The Female Spectator, 7th ed., vol. 1 (1771) being:

XCXX59XT is very much by the choice we make of subjects for our entertainI ment, that the refined taste diftin#guishes itself from the vulgar and more gross. Reading is universally allowed to be one of the most improving as well as agreeable ametements; but then to render it so, one should, among the number of books which are perpetually ifluing from the press, endeavour to fingle out such as promise to be most conducive to those ends.

The worst of the bunch is a copy of the 1775 pirate edition on the Internet Archive, having 33 errors—almost unchanged since 2011—only some being long esses: Ab.60.10b The Female Spectator, vol. 1 (Glasgow, 1775) here

IT is very much- by the choice we make of." fubjr&s for our entertainment, that the refined t:ut: uifimguilhes itfclf from the vulgar and more'grofs. Reading is univerfally allowed" to be one of the molt improving as well as agreeable amutements; but. then to render it fo, one fhould, among the number of books which are perpetually iffuing from the prefs, endeavour to finglc out fuch as promife to be moll conducive to thofe ends.

My conclusion from the above is that the Internet Archive has some work to do and that the Captcha / Turing test should probably be based on the ability to "diftinguish," or "fingle" out "fuch" words as distinguish, single out and such.

George Frisbie Whicher, 1889–1954, a bio-bibliography

George Frisbie Whicher, whose Columbia University thesis on Eliza Haywood was foundational to Haywood studies (i.e., The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915)), has long been an enigma to me. Although his Columbia thesis was so important to Haywood studies, it seems that he never revisited the subject. At all. In forty-one years of academic life. In the circumstances, a meme something like this seems appropriate:

I have made multiple attempts in the past to peer into Whicher’s life, but never got very far. My most recent attempt was in January of 2018. Improvements in AI have vastly simplified this task, as has Anna’s Archive, so I have finally finished the following brief biography and bibliography.

* * * * *

George Frisbie Whicher (1889–1954) was the son of Lillian Hope and George Meason Whicher (1860–1937), a noted classics professor and poet. GMW seems to have been (appropriately) peripatetic: moving from Hastings College, Nebraska (1883–88), to Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn Heights, New York (1892–1900), then to Hunter College, Manhattan, New York (ca. 1900–1924), and finally—after GFW completed his own studies—to the Classical School in Rome (1921).

George Frisbie Whicher received his B.A. in 1910 from Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he taught from 1915 to 1954, having received his PhD from Columbia in 1913, and having been an instructor in English at the University of Illinois from 1913 to 1915. As noted, his Columbia thesis was foundational to Haywood studies, but his most influential work may have been This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (1938), which is credited with establishing Dickinson as a major figure in American literature. Whicher’s other notable works include: The Goliard Poets (1949), a collection of translations of medieval Latin songs and satires, Walden Revisited (1945), a centennial tribute to Henry David Thoreau, and Poetry and Civilization (1955); a posthumously published collection of his essays, edited by his wife. It is this collection which provides the basis of the bibliography below.

Whicher was married to Professor Harriet Fox Whicher (1890–1966) of Mount Holyoke. Born Harriet Fox, she earned her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College and went on to have a distinguished academic career as a Professor of English in the English Department at Mount Holyoke. It seems that George and Harriet were close friends of the novelist Willa Cather (1873–1947).

The son of George and Harriet, Stephen Emerson Whicher (1915–61) was an influential American literary critic, biographer, and professor, best known as one of the leading scholars on Ralph Waldo Emerson. SEW earned degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University. He taught at Swarthmore College for a decade (1947–57) before becoming a Professor of English at Cornell University in 1957. His tenure there was short; SEW committed suicide at the age of 46—having been "upset by the prospect of continued world tension" (according to the NYT article, here)—leaving behind his mother Harriet, "his wife, Elizabeth, and four children, Susan, Nancy, Stephen and John." It is probably relevant that SEW served in the Navy during WW2 and received two combat stars during his service, so it is certainly possible he had something like PTSD.

An obituary for GWF: James Woodress and Robert P. Falk. "In Memoriam: George Frisbie Whicher, 1889-1954." American Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1954): 255–56, starts: "The American Literature Group lost one of its most distinguished members when George Frisbie Whicher of Amherst College died on March 7. Few men have brought more honor to their profession through their lives and their writings than George Whicher did in his forty-one years of academic life."

* * * * *

A Bibliography of the works of George Frisbie Whicher

Books [5]
—The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915).
—This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938).
—Alas, All's Vanity, or, A Leaf from the First American Edition of Several Poems by Anne Bradstreet (New York: Collectors' Bookshop, 1942). ¶ a biblioclastic "leaf book"; contains a leaf from Anne Bradstreet's Several Poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight (Boston, 1678) [ESTC: R22624; Wing B4166].
—Walden Revisited: A Centennial Tribute to Henry David Thoreau (Chicago: Packard and Co., 1945).
—Mornings at 8:50: Brief Evocations of the Past for a College Audience (Northampton, MA: The Hampshire Bookshop, 1950).

Works edited, with Introductions [8]
—George Borrow, Lavengro, ed. George F. Whicher (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
—W. G. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst, ed. George F. Whicher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946).
—Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Selected Essays, Intro. by George F. Whicher (Chicago: Packard and Co., 1947).
—Horace, Selected Poems of Horace (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co. Inc., 1947).
—The Transcendentalist Revolt against Materialism, ed. George F. Whicher (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1949). Problems in American Civilization Series.
—Poetry of the New England Renaissance, 1790-1890, ed. and Intro. George F. Whicher (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1950).
—Virgil, Translated into English Verse by John Dryden, Intro. George F. Whicher, ill. Bruno Bramanti (New York: The Heritage Press, 1953). NEW
—William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign of 1896, ed. George F. Whicher (Boston, 1953). Problems in American Civilization Series.

Translations [2]
—On the Tibur Road: A Freshman's Horace. With George Meason Whicher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1911).
—The Goliard Poets: Medieval Songs and Satires, with verse Translations by George F. Whicher (New York: New Directions, 1949).

Contributions [22]
—"Early Essayists" and "Minor Humorists" in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et al. (New York, 1917–21).
—[Seventeen articles] in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York, 1943).
—"Chapter 34: Literature and Conflict." in The Literature of the American People, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn (New York, 1951).
—"Part IV: The Twentieth Century." in A Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. (New York, 1948).
—"Introduction," in Publius Virgilius Maro, The Georgics, trs. Jolın Dryden. With an Introduction by George F. Whicher and Illustrations by Bruno Bramanti (Verona, Italy, 1952; rpt. New York, 1953).

Articles, poems, and reviews for various periodicals [not enumerated; I will add these as I find them]
—"The Present Status of the Bibliography of English Prose Fiction between 1660 and 1800" PMLA, Vol. 36, Appendix (1921), pp. c-cvi.
¶ This essay "rehearse[s] the tale of existing bibliographies of fiction, both published [Charlotte E. Morgan (1911), Arundell Esdaile (1912)] and unpublished [Chester N. Greenough, John M. Clapp]." In it, Whicher notes that "Upon his retirement from teaching a few years ago, Mr. Clapp bequeathed his [mauscript bibliography of 18C fiction] cards to me. I have as yet done nothing to improve my inheritance" (civ) and that "In 1913 I had occasion to go through the files of three newspapers in the Burney Collection from 1720 to 1730, noting all titles of fiction with the date of the first 'This day published' advertisement." (cv) I discuss Whicher's essay and the manuscript collections he mentions in my post "Knitting for Bibliographers, by Professor Greenough" (here).
—"Shakespeare for America" [reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly, Boston (June 1931).
—"Notes on a Wordsworth Collection," The Colophon, n.s. Vol. 11 (Summer 1937): 367-80. NEW
¶ In this essay, Whicher seriously questions the authenticity of what became known as the 'Wise cancel' in Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, concluding that 'These considerations are not direct evidence that the cancel leaf in question is spurious. Only an examination of paper and type can determine that. But they are sufficient to cast grave doubts on its authenticity. Mr. Wise's account of the normal make-up of both issues of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads is regrettably far from accurate" (373).

[2026.05.13 UPDATE: added another work introduced by GFW; publisher names; GFW roles; and another item under Articles]

Gerald Dillon, A Perfect Library, 1936

Gerald Dillon (1897–[after 1952]), the Irish-Australian freelance journalist who, in 1934, wrote an article on Haywood's Female Spectator for the Australian Woman’s Mirror (see my post on this here), also wrote an article on the "perfect library"—by which he meant, the perfect public library. In a 2021 post on Dillon's journalism (here), I rashly stated that I would "soon" post that essay. Five years later is a little late for "soon"; but, here we are.

While I don't agree with all of Dillon's sentiments (and I explicitly disavow either keeping volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary on the floor, or resting your weary feet on them), it is an amusing fantasy—especially in light of recent moves to strip libraries of books, and convert them into wayfaring stops / coffee lounges.

[Gerald Dillon, "A Perfect Library," The Bulletin, vol. 57, no. 2593 (16 September 1936): 2b–c [occupying one and a half a columns of "The Red Page"—and appearing in the same issue as the first "10-page Instalment of 'All That Swagger'" by Miles Franklin] (here)]

* * * * *

A Perfect Library

I read the other day of a lady, a potential frequenter of public libraries, who was actually too fearful to enter any of them without introduction, without guidance.
  I can well imagine her trying to summon up courage to enter one of the tomb-like buildings in which we harbor public books. Of course she would never get in. The whole external atmosphere is too stupendously chilling. I feel quite certain that hundreds of citizens often make pilgrimage to these ghastly-looking public libraries: and, of course, they never get any farther than the threshold— simply because these libraries do not look like places in which one could read.
  I rejoiced, to the limits of rejoicing, the other day when there came into one of these places a smallish boy who was part of a family—"looking round." I suppose books, even in a library, look just the same to a smallish boy as books anywhere else. On the outside, at any rate. So this smallish boy very intelligently essayed to have a look inside one of the books. He approached the vast shelves, took out a book, and was returning to a table to read it when he was intercepted by an attendant, who whispered, with bated breath, that it was against the rules to take books from the shelves. Then she pointed to a notice which read:—

Please Do Not Touch the Books.

  I never heard what the smallish boy said in reply. Doubtless he thought, reminiscently, of the zoo:

Please Do Not Make Faces at the Triantiwantigon,

and probably he accounted for this eccentricity at the library by deciding that maybe at feeding-time he would be allowed to look at the books to see what they contained. But I should love to know what that smallish boy really thought of our absurd adult world!
  I have often dreamed about the perfect public library, which, in the first place, always has a notice like this above the door:

PUBLIC BOOK HOUSE.
COME RIGHT INSIDE—NO CHARGE.
YOU MAY SLEEP IF YOU WISH, BUT WE WOULD RATHER NOT.
HERE YOU CAN CONTRACT LIFELONG PARTNERSHIPS.
THE HELPERS WILL INTRODUCE YOU.
THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR.

  The book attendants in this perfect public library welcome you at the entrance. In secluded nooks they seek out the lonelier patrons—of course we allow conversation in the perfect public library, because we are all so tremendously buoyant, with, the good fare provided.
  Nothing is inaccessible. The place is warm in winter and cool in summer. There are most delightful balconies on which you can sit out and read. You can get meals there too—at very reduced rates, of course. All the pens provided can be written with, and the ink is kept entirely separate from the water with which they scrub the floors. The library never shuts. You can sit there all night reading if you wish. The walls are hung with the most delightful pictures, for the perfect public library is also the perfect art gallery and the perfect museum rolled into one, but the museum atmosphere has been done away with. They have also done away with the gaol atmosphere and the public-institution atmosphere. In fact, this perfect public library is so perfect that all the folks have taken to going in there. In some parts of the library you can always happen on an interesting talk about books. There are halls there in which real Australian poets give readings of their own verse. Well-attended readings, too. And real Australian authors discuss their books at other times, and invite criticism from the audience—which is but grudgingly given, because the folks are so tremendously patriotic.
  And it was while I was dreaming this dream one night that I saw that ageing, lonely and book-eager woman come in. She had come right up in the lift, but the attendants saw that she was obviously unbookish looking and a little bit astray. At the threshold the principal book-assistant went forward and led her to the nearest armchair. Then he said in such a kindly voice: "Put your feet right up there"—motioning to some copies of the Oxford Dictionary which were lying on the floor—and then, after he had brought her a cup of tea, he said: "Well, where would you like to begin?" And she said: "Well, maybe I won’t live long enough to get through all—I mean all the literature I’m dying to read." And he replied: "Fear not, madam, from this day forward you have entered on a new lease of life."

GERALD DILLON.

Did Aunt Hetty read Eliza Haywood?

In an 1821 essay, Charles Lamb gives a brief account of a devout, somewhat-idiosyncratic maiden aunt. The essay—"My Relations"—first appeared in The London Magazine, Vol. 3 (June 1821): 611–14 (here), and has been reprinted in a myriad of editions of his Essays of Elia.

After introducing his "dear and good" aunt, Lamb describes her as given to "poring over good books, and devotional exercises" from "morning till night," and going “to church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should." All the good books named by Lamb, however, are of a "Papistical tendency"—which seems not to have concerned his aunt, or stopped her from reading them when she was warned against them.

Lamb here transitions to a second ironic or paradoxical trait of his aunt. Namely, that—although these "good books, and devotional exercises" were "the only books she studied"—she had, "at one period of her life … read with great satisfaction The Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman." Lamb says no more, but clearly expects the reader to identify Haywood's Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1744) as a similarly-incongruous book, and of a similarly-dangerous tendency (for his devout aunt) as Thomas a Kempis and the Roman Catholic Prayer Book.

* * * * *

While Lamb's essays are partly autobiographical, they are also deliberately fictionalised. So, while it is possible to identify this unnamed aunt, who appears in a number of essays, with his real-life Aunt Hetty (a family nickname for his father's sister: Sarah Lamb [d. February 1797]), the identification is not complete. Just as his own persona "Elia" is not entirely Charles Lamb, this "dear and good" aunt is not entirely Sarah Lamb.

Since it isn't clear exactly how much Lamb deliberately embellished his portrait of his aunt—to what extent she is a satirical composite—it is probably pointless to be concerned over the fact that I can't establish a date of birth for Aunt Hetty. I will assume that she was either born in the 1730s, or imagined to have been boorn at about that time—like her brother (see here). As such, she could only have encountered Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (MYN) long after the initial wave of the Annesley case scandal had passed.

If Aunt Hetty's reading of MYN is a pure embellishment, the fact that she was too young to have read MYN at the time of its fame (roughly, the mid-1740s) suggests that Lamb was either [1] ignorant of this chronological misalignment, or [2] indifferent about it. That is, if MYN was thrown in by Lamb for rhetorical effect—as a generations-old legal scandal—the fact that it is an imperfect fit doesn’t really matter.

Read this way, MYN is just an old-time cause célèbre—taken by Lamb more-or-less at random. The ironic humour is that this sort of scandal-novel-cum-law report is only one step removed from crim. con. reporting (i.e., the sensationalised reporting that issued from the Bawdy Courts—concerning adultery, rape and sodomy)—and so MYN is similarly inappropriate for Lamb's devout Protestant aunt as her Roman Catholic Prayer Book.

* * * * *

Although "My Relations" has been reprinted in the myriad of editions of Lamb's works mentioned, only a handful of editors have annotated or commented on this essay; and only two appear to have glossed "The Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman" aka The Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman.

Pleasingly, the most recent edition, The Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Gregory Dart, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026), 416n20 correctly identifies this as MYN, although Dart does not note Eliza Haywood’s authorship, commenting only that MYN "tells the true story of James Annesley (1715–60), the son of a spendthrift Irish lord. Over a hundred years later, R. L. Stevenson plundered Annesley's story for his eighteenth-century thriller Kidnapped (1886)."

Although Dart misses the Haywood attribution, this is still a significant improvement on the 1903 edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (here), who glossed the reference as follows:

Page 70, line 31. The Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. The full title of this work is: The Unfortunate Young Nobleman; a Tale of Sympathy, Founded on Fact. In which are depicted the Unprecedented Sufferings of an Affectionate Husband, and the Forlorn State of an amiable Mother and her Infant Child. The story tells how the unfortunate Mons. du F—, eldest son of the Baron du F— married against his father's will, and suffered in consequence many privations, including imprisonment in a convent, from which he escaped by a jump of fifty feet.

The Unfortunate Young Nobleman; a Tale of Sympathy (London: R. Harrild, [ca. 1820]) is a pretty wild suggestion, given the context of Lamb’s reference. I.e.:

These were the only books she studied [Thomas a Kempis and the Roman Catholic Prayer Book]; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman.

Lamb's "at one period of her life" suggest to me, "at a distant period of her life" or "earlier in her life"—which hardly applied, in June 1821, to a book published only the previous year.

* * * * *

I haven’t decided yet whether I will include any reference to Lamb's Aunt Hetty reading Eliza Haywood in my book on Haywood's readers. A deciding factor might have been whether or not anyone has attempted to depict Aunt Hetty—with or without MYN in hand. Unfortunately, although a few editions of The Essays of Elia are illustrated, I can find no pictures of Aunt Hetty. The nearest I could find to the image I had in mind is the wonderful illustration below by James D. Smillie of Mary Lamb.

(At least, I assume the above is intended to be a romanticised image of Mary Lamb reading. It is the frontispiece to this 1885 edition of The Essays, but—as the image is untitled—I can’t be certain it is Mary.)