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.)

The Pain of a Bibliophile

At the moment, I am reading Hwang Bo-Reum's Every Day I Read, trs. Shanna Tan (2025)—a "warm and reflective collection of essays about reading, language and life." (Some Amazon reviews here.) The essays are all very short. And, although they strike me as quite uneven in quality, I like reading essays in general, and I have been particularly enjoying this (to me) outsider perspective on a topic I am deeply-familiar with.

For fairly-obvious reasons, I was amused by this passage in Chapter 45 (178–79):

  When I first learnt that the famed Japanese bibliophile Takashi Tachibana had a 'Cat Building' that housed more than 200,000 books, I was in awe. I can't afford a building, but I would love a spacious reading room lined with bookcases. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could find any book I wanted in my own home?
  But after reading several books written by bibliophiles, I realised that maybe that isn't the life for me. I love buying books, but bibliophiles take book-buying to the extreme.
  In The Pain of a Bibliophile (what a title!), it’s said that around half or maybe more of bibliophiles buy books every day, and because of that, they barely have space to walk in their own house. It takes about 10,000 books to open a secondhand bookshop, and Japanese author Takeshi Okazaki keeps about 20,000 or 30,000 books at home. One of the bibliophiles interviewed in the book estimated owning about 30,000 books, but when the actual count turned out to be 130,000, they chuckled shamefacedly.
  Despite owning a whole lot more books, the author claims that 500 is the ideal number of books to have at home. A true-blue bibliophile should have a sizeable collection, yet have the flexibility to adjust it according to one's changing preferences. The author quotes a literary scholar saying, More isn't better. I imagined a room filled with several hundred of my favourite books displayed neatly, with their spines visible. From then on, I stopped having the ridiculous idea to fill every inch of my house with books.

Wanting to know more about The Pain of a Bibliophile, I turned to the endnotes, and was disappointed to find the following (on p .221):

1 Translated from the Korean edition: 아즈마 가나코, (역) 박승희, 궁극의 미니멀라이프 (즐거운상상, 2016).

I haven't the remotest idea how to read Korean. I can't even break these lines of symbols into words, let alone work out which bit was the title and how to key this title into a search engine. I don’t know why the publisher didn't gloss each Korean title using something like the official "Revised Romanization" method. (Using this method, Hwang's Every Day I Read or 매일 읽겠습니다 can be Romanised as Maeil ikgetseumnida.) Better still would have been to give the name of the original work that was translated. If they had done this, it would have saved me a lot of wasted time, trying to identify The Pain of a Bibliophile—which, as Hwang says—has such a tantalising title.

* * * * *

Since I had no idea how to transcribe the Korean title, I used Hwang's translated title. I asked Google to identify a "Korean book, the title of which translates literally as 'the pain of the bibliophile'." Google search referred me to Hwang's previous book:

Based on the search results, it appears you may be referring to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, a popular Korean "healing fiction" novel that heavily features themes of bibliophilia, comforting reads, and self-discovery through literature.

Since Google search failed, I tried Google AI, which informed me that

The Korean book you are referring to is likely 애서가의 고통 (Aeseogaui Gotong), which is the Korean translation of the German book "Die Leiden des Bibliophilen" (literally "The Sufferings of the Bibliophile") by Wolfgang Hermann.

Google AI provided other useful facts about Hermann's Die Leiden des Bibliophilen; namely:

It explores the obsessive habits and inherent struggles of those who love books too much, such as:
  The overwhelming physical weight of a growing collection.
  The anxiety of having a "To Be Read" (TBR) pile that never shrinks.
  The psychological burden of finding shelf space and the "pain" of potentially losing or damaging a beloved book

Particularly astute readers may have already realised that this is complete hogwash, but I innocently searched for English translations of this work and, when that got me nowhere, for information about the author. This is when I discovered (on Wikipedia) that Wolfgang Hermann was "a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933."

Returning to Google AI's (entirely hallucinated) account of this book, I am not sure what "psychological burden" Herr Herrmann might have suffered as a result of "potentially losing or damaging a beloved book"; nor do I know whether this librarian cheered on the Nazi book-burning only to alleviate anxieties he experienced over the mass of good books he would be unable to read or shelve.

Still, it did strike me as unlikely that Herr Hermann would have would have penned a book on Die Leiden des Bibliophilen. And, since he died at the end of WW2, I doubted that Herr Hermann would have had much time to write a book on the subject of his bibliophilic sorrows. Since it was even less likely that he had anything to say about late twentieth-century Japanese book collectors, Tachibana's 'Cat Building' etc., I belatedly concluded that this was a pretty wild AI hallucination.

* * * * *

After a number of less-entertaining hallucinations—I got caught up in side-quests based on Hwang's reference to Tachibana Takashi and his four-story Cat Building.

Eventually, I gave in and went to the trouble of photographing the endnote, uploading the photo to my computer, screen capping the entry, and using Google Translate to transcribe and translate it.

As a result of doing this, I can now offer [1] the above pictures of "La maison du chat noir chez TACHIBANA" ["Tachibana's Black Cat House"] (exterior, interior, and plan) and [2] a translation and gloss, below, of Hwang's endnote):

Translated from the Korean edition: Kanako Azuma, (Translator) Seung-hee Park, Ultimate Minimal Life (Jeulgeoun Sangsang, 2016).

  궁극의 미니멀라이프 [Gunggeuk-ui Minimallaipeu]
  아즈마 가나코 [Kanako Azuma]
  박승희 [Seung-hee Park]
  즐거운상상 [Jeulgeoun Sangsang]

Further Googling revealed that Gunggeuk-ui Minimallaipeu is a translation of Kanako Azuma's Motanai Kurashi: Oheya Mo Kokoro Mo Sukkirisuru [A minimalist lifestyle: A clearer space and a more refreshed mind] (2006), which has not been translated into English. (And is no longer available in Japanese—although the old Amazon listing survives here.)

* * * * *

The first part of Azuma's book title—To live without waste—refers to a Japanese practice (Mottainai), which is rooted in Buddhist ideas that everything has a spirit (Tsukumogami). The phrase—which might be playfully translated as "the way without waste"—combines Kura (暮: to live/spend time) with Mottai (勿体: the dignity, essence, or proper form of an object) and Nai (無し: without, no, or not).

There is a lot to admire about the Mottainai Kurashi philosophy, which is based on a deep respect for both nature and objects, particularly older objects that are believed to acquire a soul and become self-aware after long periods of use. Although it is rooted in Edo-period frugality, Mottainai Kurashi has inspired a contemporary neo-Scandinavian, eco-friendly minimalism (i.e., minimizing the purchase of unnecessary items), which has recently inspired a multitude of books on Japanese minimalism.

I suspect that some of those attracted to the idea of Japanese minimalism (and the prospect of achieving a "more refreshed mind" via "a clearer space") do not fully-understand the emphasis on avoiding the acquisition of unnecessary items, rather than merely disposing of unnecessary items.

Japanese folklore is full of warnings about thoughtlessly disposing of objects, since spirits (yokai) can "embody the frustration of being discarded, causing mischief or haunting owners who treated them poorly." I.e., you will not achieve a "more refreshed mind" by thoughtlessly disposing of objects—instead, you are likely to incur the wrath of a host of yokai. You have a responsibility to every object: to value, care for and mend objects—to appreciate what you have.

* * * * *

Although I have a deep respect for my many books, particularly older books, and I am in no danger of being haunted as a result of thoughtlessly discarding any of them, I have no illusions that I am practicing Mottainai Kurashi. Perhaps for this reason, I was particularly amused to discover that Kanako has written many books on the subject of minimalism (is not the proliferation of her books … problematic?) as I was by the fact that Hwang bookends her reference to Motanai Kurashi: Oheya Mo Kokoro Mo Sukkirisuru with an explanation that she "pushed out ten boxes of books" from her library in two days after deciding to "trim [her] collection to 500 books." It seems that all three of us have something yet to learn about the Mottainai Kurashi philosophy.

Finally, I have to say that I was immensely disappointed to learn that The Pain of a Bibliophile was a pean to minimalism. And I was incredulous to discover that no book with this title has ever been published. (No such title appears on WorldCat.) In fact, I was so disappointed and incredulous that I am tempted to remedy this state of affairs by writing my own book under this title.

No sooner did I have this thought that Google AI leapt forth, like Achillies in battle, to suggest an outline for this putative title. Not to be outdone, ChatGPT responded by penning this description of the imagined book:

Patrick Spedding's The Pain of a Bibliophile (2026) reads like a wry, affectionate exploration of a reader's most relatable struggles—those peculiar tensions that arise from loving books a little too much. Framed as both cultural observation and personal reflection, the book examines the paradox at the heart of bibliophilia: that the very source of joy can also be a source of constant, if often humorous, distress.

The author begins with the most visible burden—space. Shelves overflow, then multiply, until books migrate into teetering stacks across floors, chairs, and hidden corners. This physical sprawl becomes a symbol of a deeper excess: the ever-growing "to-be-read" pile, which looms not as a promise, but as a quiet, persistent anxiety. Each new acquisition, however thrilling, adds to an unspoken awareness that no lifetime may be long enough.

From there, the narrative turns to the financial habits of devoted readers, capturing the near-compulsive pull of bookstores and the curious ability to justify "just one more" purchase. This is paired with a contrasting fragility: the acute heartbreak of physical damage—a cracked spine or stained page—treated with a seriousness that borders on the ceremonial.

Time, too, emerges as an adversary. The bibliophile, the book suggests, is perpetually outpaced by their own ambitions, forced to choose between unread volumes while often juggling several at once. This indecision becomes its own quiet torment, as starting a new book can feel like a small betrayal of the others waiting.

Interwoven throughout are moments of loss and longing: the misplaced tome, the narrowly missed rare find, the book that got away. Social life presents its own complications, as bibliophiles struggle to explain their habits—or quietly opt out of gatherings in favour of the written world.

Yet the book ultimately resists framing these experiences as true suffering. Instead, it presents them as inseparable from the pleasure itself. The weight of a book, the scent of its pages, the satisfaction of ownership and discovery—all are part of a deeply sensory and emotional relationship. In this light, the "pain" of a bibliophile is revealed not as a flaw, but as a testament to the depth of their devotion.

If I had the inclination, I could probably have an AI write this book, and publish it, so other AIs could read and review it—and write blog posts about it (**)—but I have a host of bookish yokai to care for, so I will content myself with the above AI-bait (which is, I hope, enough to have The Pain of a Bibliophile added to my list of recent publications).

(**) My version of the dead internet theory—which Wikipedia still labels as "a conspiracy theory." I wonder if PolyMarket is taking bets on how soon this label will be removed.

The Half-forgotten Books series, 1903–1907

The "Half-forgotten Books" series, edited by E. A. Baker, M.A., and published by Routledge, 1903–1907, contained at least twenty-six titles. Above and below are a few survivors, in the distinctive series binding—which is the primary focus of the only scholarship I could locate on the series. In his 2014 essay on "Neo-Victorian Book Design," Chris Louttit writes (here, on p. 122):

The Half-Forgotten Books collection … reprinted neglected works of literature from the previous two hundred years or so in affordable but handsome volumes. [It] … includes Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, but ranges more widely into the annals of forgotten Victorian popular fiction to include novels by, amongst others, George Alfred Lawrence, George Herbert Rodwell and Edmund Yates. What is most pertinent about the Half-Forgotten Books in this context, however, is the way in which the neglected texts are presented. Each volume sports the same rather unexciting cover illustration of a collection of solid-looking books; all that differentiates them is the author and title.

* * * * *

Ernest A. Baker (1869–1941; on Wikipedia here) was, as a 1911 advertisement for this series explains, the author of A Descriptive Guide to the Best Fiction, British and American (1903; on IA), a book which offers brief descriptions, plot summaries, and critical analysis on roughly 4500 fiction titles. He was also, later—and far more importantly—the author of the ten-volume opus The History of the English Novel (1924-39) and, as I only discovered recently, A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914; on IA here).

(I initially, and rather optimistically, mis-read this latter title as being a guide to fiction published in the past, rather than a guide to fiction set in the past. Now that the Guide is 112 years old, I guess both apply, but it was a bit of a mix even when new. The book is surprisingly useful and fun guide, if you want to pair books published in—say—1718, with those set in 1718. If I ever see a copy, I’ll happily snap it up, even though Eliza Haywood does not get a mention.)

Baker seems to have been Routledge's go-to guy, being a prolific series and volume editor, for a prolific series publisher. In addition to this series, he was also series and volume editor for the fifteen-volume "Library of Early Novelists" Series (1904–1907), which I am still researching, but will do a separate post on.

My interest in both series was prompted by the discovery that Baker included in each of them a handful of curious and uncommon novels, gothic novels, and novels by women writers from the long eighteenth century. I only have his edition of Matthew Lewis' The Monk, but now I want his editions of Thomas Amory, Alain-René Lesage, Aphra Behn, Ann Radcliffe and Jane Porter.

For volumes in the Library of Early Novelists series, it might take a bit of patience for me to find decent and affordable copies of the titles that I want. But I have already given up on finding any similar volumes in the "Half-forgotten Books" series: volumes such as Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple, Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest and Le Sage's Asmodeus; or, The Devil on Two Sticks. I have given up because—although (according to Louttit) the British Library seems to hold eighteen volumes—I have only been able to confirm the existence of four volumes from the entire series, i.e., with images available online, and can only find—after a pretty comprehensive search—only two copies for sale (see links below).

* * * * *

Early advertisements (to 1905) list the volumes in the "Half-forgotten Books" series in publication order, but these advertisements only list the first eighteen or nineteen volumes (see below for the uncertainty); while the longer list (from Black Sheep, in 1911) is both alphabetical (by title) and numbered. All (?) of the volumes added to the 1911 list are marked as either "In Press" (one title) or "Ready" to be published—meaning, presumably, they were not yet published.

It is not clear how many of these "Ready" volumes were actually published in this series, and whether any novels were added later. The 1911 advertisement concludes with the claim that "Subsequent volumes will be selected from the following amongst other authors" (i.e., "…the following authors, amongst others"). The list that follows this statement enumerates thirty-eight authors, has a suspicious overlap with the "Library of Early Novelists" series.

In any event, since it seems to be impossible to accurately date either the seven unpublished, "Ready" volumes in the 1911 list, or to confirm the order of all of the first nineteen volumes, so I have transcribed below the 1911 alphabetical list and retained its numbering.

The list pretty accurately reproduced the published advertisement, except in my list below the author's name precedes rather than follows the book title, I have returned / re-arranged book titles to their natural order (thereby disrupting the alphabetical-by title arrangement), and I have dropped the all-caps. This means that "SUSAN HOPLEY (The Adventures of). Mrs. CROWE." becomes "Mrs. Crowe, The Adventures of Susan Hopley" etc.

1. A. R. Lesage, Asmodeus; Or, The Devil on Two Sticks
2. Captain Chamier, Ben Brace; Or, The Last of Nelson's Agamemnons
3. G. A. Lawrence, Breakspeare; Or, The Fortunes of a Free Lance
4. William Godwin, Caleb Williams [Ready]
5. R. M. Roche, Children of the Abbey
6. Thos. Cooper, Family Feud
7. C. Dickens, Memoirs of Grimaldi the Clown. With Introduction by Percy Fitzgerald and Plates by G. Cruikshank [Ready]
8. G. A. Lawrence, Guy Livingstone
9. Captain Morier, Hajji Baba in Isfahan
10. Harriet Martineau, Hour and the Man
11. Mrs. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho. With An Introduction by D. Murray Rose [Ready]
12. R. M. Bird, Nick of the Woods; Or, The Fighting Quaker
13. Mrs. Crowe, Nightside of Nature [1904; on IA]
14. G. A. Rodwell, Old London Bridge [Ready] [1904; on IA NEW]
15. Albert Smith, The Pottleton Legacy [In Press] [1904; on IA NEW]
16. Mrs. Radcliffe, Romance of The Forest
17. Samuel Lover, Rory O'More
18. Judge Haliburton, Sam Slick the Clockmaker [Ready] [1904; on IA]
19. W. H. Maxwell, Stories of Waterloo
20. Mrs. Crowe, The Adventures of Susan Hopley
21. Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw
22. Captain Chamier, Tom Bowling
23. R. Mounteney Jephson, Tom Bullkley of Lissington. With An Introduction By E. A. Baker, M.A. [Ready]
24. Amélie Rives, Virginia of Virginia
25. Emma Robinson, Whitefriars; Or, The Court of Charles II [Ready] [1903; copy listed here (sold)]
26. W. Carleton, Willy Reilly

* * * * *

Below are the thirty-eight authors, listed in 1911 as potential additions to the "Library of Early Novelists" series. I have expanded the thirty-five names that appear by surname only in this alphabetical list.

Ainsworth (i.e., William Harrison Ainsworth)
Amory (i.e., Thomas Amory)
About (i.e., Edmond About)
Aleman (i.e., Mateo Alemán)
Auerbach (i.e., Berthold Auerbach)
Banim (i.e., John Banim)
Mrs. Behn (i.e., Aphra Behn)
Carleton (i.e., William Carleton)
Craven (i.e., Pauline Craven or Mrs. Augustus Craven)
Conscience (i.e., Hendrik Conscience)
Feuillet (i.e., Octave Feuillet)
Sarah Fielding
Jessie Fothergill
Galt (i.e., John Galt)
Gleig (i.e., George Robert Gleig)
Gerstacker (i.e., Friedrich Gerstäcker)
Gerald Griffin
Gogol (i.e., Nikolai Gogol)
Mrs. Gore (i.e., Catherine Gore, or Mrs. Catherine Frances Gore)
General Hamley (i.e., General Sir Edward Hamley)
M. C. Hay (i.e., Mary Cecil Hay)
W. S. Hayward (i.e., William Stephens Hayward)
Heyse (i.e., Paul Heyse)
Holcroft (i.e., Thomas Holcroft)
Hook (i.e., Theodore Hook)
Mrs. Inchbald (i.e., Elizabeth Inchbald)
H. Kingsley (i.e., Henry Kingsley)
M. G. Lewis (i.e., Matthew Gregory Lewis)
Lever (i.e., Charles Lever)
Miss Manning (i.e., Anne Manning)
Mayo (i.e., William Starbuck Mayo)
Thos. Nash (i.e., Thomas Nashe)
Neale (i.e., W. Johnson Neale)
Mrs. Opie (i.e., Amelia Opie)
Mrs. Parr (i.e., Louisa Parr)
Praed (i.e., Winthrop Mackworth Praed)
Trollope (probably Anthony Trollope)
Yates (i.e., Edmund Yates)

* * * * *

Missing from both the twenty-six titles in the first list (whether published, "Ready" or "In Press") and the thirty-eight authors in the second, is Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality, which appeared in this 1904 advertisement, only to be replaced by no. 16 in this 1911 advertisement (in The Heptameron).

Also missing from these lists is the volme below: Thomas Miller, Gideon Giles the Roper ([n.d.]), a copy of which is for sale here (and, possibly, here).

In a footnote to Louttit’s essay, quoted above, the author notes that "According to the British Library Catalogue, eighteen volumes of the series were produced between 1903 and 1906” but that "advertisements I have consulted in the individual volumes give as many as twenty-five titles" (125n14).

Given the existence of volumes not listed in advertisements, and the uncertainty concerning which of the works advertised as "Ready" or "In Press" were actually published, it may be safest (for now) to say of the series only that "between twenty and thirty volumes" were published.

Finally, if and as I can confirm the existence of volumes, and imprint dates, I will update the list(s) above with links etc.

[UPDATE 10 April 2026: I have added a few extra Internet Archive links (to nos. 14, 15) and dates of publication for all copies with links]

Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win

Phillip Pullman wrote an Introduction for the 2008, Oxford University Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman starts his Introduction as follows:

A correspondent once told me a story—which I've never been able to trace, and I don't know whether it's true—about a bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire two hundred years ago or more, sitting by his fireside listening to Paradise Lost being read aloud. He's never read it himself; he doesn't know the story at all; but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool, he finds himself transfixed.
  Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims 'By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!'
  Which are my sentiments exactly.

Thinking that tracing this story to its source might be a good test for AI, I asked Google’s AI and ChatGPT. Google AI obviously had no idea, and offered up a mix of mild platitudes, plot summary and hallucinations; ChatGPT was somewhat similar, but identified Pullman as the source: it was unable to trace the story any further than Pullman. Having spent an afternoon doing what Pullman was unable to do in 2008, I now have some sympathy for Pullman, Google’s AI and ChatGPT.

Rather than recount in full, step-by-tedious-step process by which I clawed my way back through time, pre-dating one version of the story after another, I will present what I believe to be the first version of the story, and then summarise what seems to have happened to the story afterwards.

The story originates with a work of fiction, Realmah, by Sir Arthur Helps, which first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1867–68, and was published by Macmillan, in 2 volumes, in 1868.

In Chapter 5 of Realmah (which appeared in December 1867), we get the following scene:

It fell to the lot of a very saintly, good man, to have to travel with [Lord] Thurlow, who was then Attorney General. A journey to the North was a serious thing in those times, and my saintly friend dreaded the long journey, with the blustering Attorney-General, who he was sure would utter many naughty words before they arrived at York.
  They had hardly left London before the good man remarked, "We shall have a long journey, Mr. Attorney, and so I thought I would bring some books to amuse us. I daresay it is a long time since you have read Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' Shall I read some of it to you? It will remind us of our younger days." (In those days men read great works; for there were not so many books of rubbishing fiction, to which the reading energies of the present day are directed.) "Oh, by all means!" said Thurlow, "I have not read a word of Milton for years."
  The good man began to read out his Milton: presently he came to the passage where Satan exclaims, "Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven." Upon which Thurlow exclaimed, "A d—d fine fellow, and I hope he may win." My saintly friend in horror shut up his "Paradise Lost," and felt that it would be no good reading to the Attorney-General, if he was to be interrupted by such wicked expressions of sentiment.

The Lord Thurlow mentioned here is Edward Thurlow, 1st Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), was Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain for fourteen years and under four Prime Ministers (1778–83, 1783–92). In 1906, this “blustering Attorney-General” was accidently mis-identified as Lord Eldon, i.e.: John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751–1838), Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, 1801–6, 1807–27. Other changes to this story occurred in the most colourful lines attributed to Lords Thurlow / Eldon:

"A d—d fine fellow, and I hope he may win." (1867, 1869, 1871)
"D—d fine fellow! I hope he'll win!" (1878, 1884)
"A d—d fine fellow. I hope he may win." (1909)
"A damned fine fellow! I hope he will win." (1925)
"This is a fine fellow. I hope he'll win." (1933)
"A damned fine fellow. I hope he may win" (1984, 1988)

As you can see, the only stable parts here are "fine fellow"; "I hope"; and "win"—the ellipsis of "damned" making it impossible to search for, and the change from "Lord Thurlow" to "Lord Eldon" eliminating all the pre-1909 examples.

Returning to Pullman’s version of the story, it is clear that his characterisation of the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, being entertained in a post-chaise to York with a reading of Milton, as a "bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire … with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool" is very wide of the mark.

Note also that Realmah is a utopian novel, set in a made-up prehistoric empire called ‘Sheviri,’ featuring detailed accounts of its government and religion. That is—much like Haywood’s Memoirs of Utopia—it related anecdotes about real British public figures in the form of "utopian" fiction.

Since Lord Thurlow died in 1806, and had last been Lord High Chancellor in 1792, this anecdote was generations old by 1867. It is possible that it was recorded earlier than 1867, but, if so, I haven’t been able to find it—yet. Based on this very unscientific test, it seems that we are still a long way from AI agents being able to duplicate the above research effort, and so we must be even further away from them being able to exceed our research efforts. When we reach the point when AI agents can exceed us, it is likely that many of the "bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squires" of history, will be recognised as—as is the case with this one—a fiction, built upon a fiction.

The Scientific Silverfish and Moth Destroyer, ca. 1928

I recently bought the volume on the right above (The Works of Théophile Gautier), which is from the same series, and in the same binding, as the volume on the left (The Complete Romances of Voltaire … Eight Volumes in One). I have had the Voltaire since 1999, and regularly use its version of Candide in my teaching, and have long wanted more versions of Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, since it is such an important and early representation of a female vampire, so I was very happy with this find.

The local bookshop that had the Gautier, had five more of these Walter Black volumes in the same soft leather bindings—Zola, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Balzac, and a Voltaire—but the prices were too high for me to buy any others, just for the sake of their matching bindings. Looking on eBay, I discovered someone else in Australia had nine volumes of this series (below), in the same bindings, for less than I paid for my Gautier (the listing is here), but I have so far resisted starting yet-another collection front.

Inside my Gautier, I found a card (above and below), which—at first glance—I took to be an abandoned bookmark. A closer look revealed that, although this may actually have been used as a bookmark, the purpose of the card was to "Scientifically Destroy" silverfish and moths.

As you can see above, the text reads:

THE SCIENTIFIC
SILVERFISH & MOTH DESTROYER.
—————
SIMPLY PLACE CARDS IN OR NEAR
ARTICLES TO BE PROTECTED.
—————
CONTENTS: 14 CARDS 1/- PER PACKET
DUGGAN'S 194 LIT. COLLINS ST. MELBOURNE, C.1.

The verso of the card has had some sort of insecticide painted onto it—you can see the brush strokes.

* * * * *

I was not surprised that I could find no record of these cards; but I was surprised that I was unable to find out anything very concrete about Duggan’s of Little Collins Street, Melbourne. This Facebook post suggests that Duggan's might have been a 1940s dry-cleaning business, which was bought out by Fletcher Jones, the Australian "clothing manufacturer and retailer" (which shut down only in January of this year; "Fletcher Jones to Close All Stores After Nearly 100 Years in Australian Retail," 17 January 2026, online here).

If Duggan's was a dry cleaner, I suspect that these cards were intended to be slipped into the pockets of freshly dry-cleaned coats and trousers, rather than books. But it seems to have done a sterling job anyway: the Gautier remains in lovely condition.

* * * * *

[UPDATE 8 April 2026: I am grateful to a very helpful, regular reader (PP), who ran a quick search on the address, 194 Little Collins Street, in the State Library of Victoria, Sands and McDougall directory series online (here). Although the State Library of Victoria series only includes directories from every fifth year, Duggan's makes no appearance. Only three types of businesses are recorded as operating from this address between 1910 and 1960. These businesses are: hairdresser: Walter Higginbotham (1910, 1915), Percy J. McGrath (1920); watchmaker and jeweller: T. A. Hansen (1925, 1930); tea rooms: Mrs H. M. Eddy (1935, 1940), Miss L. Buckland (1945, 1950), L. Halmson (1955), C. Coleman (1960).

As PP notes, "there is no record of a dry cleaning business at the address." It is possible—if Duggan's had a franchise in Melbourne—that it dates to a period between these five-year intervals, or between these settled buisness occupations, and that a search of the individual directories for this period would locate it. But it is also possible, as PP continues, that, "as with many circulating libraries and other businesses, the operators at the premises were merely a drop-off and collection point." Although my ignorance on the subject is close to comprehensive, I am going to assume that a watchmaker and jeweler would be a poor match for a dry cleaning drop-off and collection point, so my bet is on the tea-rooms of either Mrs Eddy or Miss Buckland, since the only evidence for a Duggan's dry-cleaning business (albeit in the western-districts of Victoria) dates from the 1940s.

The New Google Books Interface Sucks

I will now be using Internet Archive links, wherever possible, rather than Google Books links. Here is my "old man yelling at clouds" explanation of why (a 2002 meme that is now, probably, an indicator of age).

The new Google Books format has degraded (in my mind) their interface, with dynamic overlays that become opaque to hide basic information about an item containing a search "hit" as soon as it finishes loading, or as soon as you interact with a page in any way (mouse or keyboard strikes). Here are the three steps in pictures: page, clear overlay, opaque overlay:

NB the thin white "floating" status bar box, at lower left, shows "waiting" in the first image, "loading" in the second, and which has disappeared in the third. It still isn’t clear to me why Google Books pages sometimes turns opaque as soon as the page finishes loading, and at other times, only once you interact with the page. But it conveys no information in either scenario since, even in the latter case it becomes opaque if you try to screencap the book information (i.e., before you interact with the page in any other way). Want to see the top of a page, or a page number? Tough luck. Want to centre or enlarge a highlighted term? Lol! Everything except the overlay page, with its puny title-box, disappears.

The thus-hidden page, displaying actual, useful information (such as book title, author, date of publication etc.), can only be reached by shutting down the overlay with mouse busy-work—there is no keyboard shortcut for this. By disregarding a warning on this page—that "Classic Google Books will [soon?] be turned off"—it is possible (for now), with yet more mouse-work, to reach the Classic Google Books interface. I’ll explain why you might want to do this shortly.

The obscured underlying page, the parent page or under-page (?), of the new interface is, admittedly, a better-organised version of the "About this book" page of the Classic Google Books interface, which was also a click-through. However, the Classic Google Books landing pages, the pages reached via search hits, were much more informative, making it possible to more-quickly shut down useless search hits.

All that remains visible on the overlay of the new interface is the first twenty characters of the title: so, "British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books: Edited 1881-1889 by R ..., Volume 52" becomes "British Museum Catal…" (as above); "The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, Volume 17" becomes "The Magazine of Am…"; and "Catalogue of the Private Library of Mr. George S. Davis" becomes "Catalogue of the Priv…"

The URLs reached via this new interface are also much longer than those in Classic Book Books. So, for instance, at their shortest (i.e., with search terms and other elements omitted), the URLs are

Old GB URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=rwJGAQAAMAAJ

New GB URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G/rwJGAQAAMAAJ

and for a specific page

Old GB URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=rwJGAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA49

New GB URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G/rwJGAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA49

It is unclear who benefits from the longer URLs: an AI crawler only needs "rwJGAQAAMAAJ" and a human gains little (in anything) from "Catalogue_of_the_Private_Library_of_Mr_G"—not least, since many browsers hide full URLs anyway, and those few that display URLs would be unable to display a full URL which has not had search terms and other elements omitted, as I have above. Personally, since I compose these posts in HTML, I find it a lot easier to read and write with the shorter, simpler Classic URLs. A Classic URL, with its 12-character ID (**), is also a lot more satisfactory for scholarship (i.e., in print), when referring to an online reproduction of a book, since it is easier for the writer and publisher to typeset/format and for the user to transcribe the URL and ID code.

So, while it is possible (for now, but it is unclear how much longer it will be possible) to click through from a Google Books search hit to the “Classic” interface, and from there, find the short URL and 12-character ID code for a book, and from that to generate a page-specific short URL, as above, doing so is now awkward and time-consuming; and since—given the warning—there is no guarantee that these short URLs will continue to work once "Classic Google Books [is] turned off," I will use the Internet Archive where I can, even for items on Google Books..

(**) Not alphanumeric: Google Books uses alphanumeric characters plus underscores, but excluding other special characters, these being "word characters" (apparently).

Book Shop, Place of Worship

I was browsing for bookshops in Blackburn (Melbourne), when I spotted this:

(you have to imagine the "record scratch" sound-effect here): Did I read that right?!

Sweet! For comparison, here is the nearest "real" bookshop

So, what is a "Place of Worship"? Well, it turns out that it is not a Christian church, Jewish synagogue, Buddhist temple, Hindu mandir or Shinto shrine, each of which have their own symbols on Google Maps, nor (according to the post here) is it a Sikh gurdwara, Jain temple, Japanese Buddhist temple, or—in all liklihood—a pagan temple. It seems that this symbol…

…first appeared on Google Maps at the same time that the star-and-crescent symbol dissapeared, to (checks notes) "promote inclusivity" and to "avoid favouring one religion over another." I am guessing that this is also reason why there is no street number for this Place of Worship, and that Google Maps has deleted all post-2008 street-view data for one end of this street.

All of which is a shame, since I'd like to see any Book Shop that could accurately be described as a Place of Worship, and I have nothing but respect for any faith that so well captures my own sentiments in relation to book shops and book shopping. I'll have to resist the urge to visit this location to see the book shop for myself, in case I end up in a Nineteen Eighty-Four / Total Recall-type situation after Google remotely deletes the relevant data from my head.

On Buying More Books Than You Can Read

The following quotation from A. Edward Newton's "The Decay of the Bookshop"—which first appeared in The Atlantic (January 1920): 48 (here), and was reprinted in Newton's A Magnificent Farce (1921), 78 (here)—has a long and interesting history:

And so it is that, not being a scholar or altogether indigent, I do not much use any library except my own. I early formed the habit of buying books, and, thank God, I have never lost it. Authors living and dead—dead, for the most part—afford me my greatest enjoyment, and it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, ‘I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish’? Whoever it was, I agree with him ….
     Too many of us who are liberal, not to say lavish, in our household expenses, seem to regard the purchase of books as an almost not-to-be-permitted extravagance. We buy piano-players and talking machines, and we mortgage our houses to get an automobile, but when it comes to a book, we exhaust every resource before parting with our money.

The answer to Newton's rhetorical question ("Who was it who said?") seems to have been William Hobart Royce (1878–1963), an American writer and bookseller who wrote under the name "Penmore"; specifically, Newton had in mind the following quotation (from 1916)

I do hold the buying of more books than one could peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching toward infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish — Penmore.

Newton's 1920 paraphrase of Penmore-Royce was expanded by Holbrook Jackson (in The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), 225) as follows:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish, an argument which some have used in defence of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

Here, Newton's words are indicated by italics. (Throughout Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania, quotations are printed in italic, instead of within quotation marks.) More than fifty years later, a version of the Jackson's quotation appeared in Otto Bettmann, in The Delights of reading: quotes, notes [and] anecdotes (1987), 49 [here]. Bettmann paraphrased Jackson, but attributed the entire paraphrase to Newton:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.
     A. Edward Newton

The passage following the ellipsis in the above quotation ("… we cherish books even if unread […]") appears to have been added Bettmann; certainly, it is not anywhere in either Newton (1920 or 1921) or Jackson (1930). Bettmann's embellished "quotation" is everywhere on the internet.

* * * * *

A 2008 blog post by Steve Dodson (here) unraveled the Newton-Jackson connection, and the lack of a source for the passage following the ellipsis. In a 2017 comment on this blog post, Dan Goldman identified "Penmore" as Newton's source, which he found in the Monthly Bulletin of the Pasadena Public Library "for October of 1915 or 1916." ( This source is viewable only as a "Snippet" to me in Australia.)

Since nearly a decade has passed since Goldman searched for the quotation, I thought I might now be able to find an earlier appearance, and therefore find the full context for the quote.

What I discovered is that the quote only appears as a "pull-quote" (a brief, attention-catching quotation used as a graphic feature): there is no "full context." I also cannot locate a primary source for the quote—but the earliest precisely-datable instance of its use that I was able to find appears to be in Educational Foundations: A Monthly Magazine of Pedagogy, vol. 27, no. 5 (January 1916), 279 [here]. The Penmore-Royce pull-quote is used as an advertisement, in the third of five advertisements for a "Book Buyer's League" that are scattered across this volume (September 1915–June 1916); the fifth advertisement (here) explains:

NOTE — Our friends are asked to remember that the publishers of Educational Foundations have exceptional facilities for filling orders for all magazines and books. The Book Buyer's League is now offering 10 per cent discount on all monthly statements to its members. Membership in the League costs but $2.00 a year and includes a subscription to this magazine.

The first bookish pull-quote (which appears on p. 275) is followed by "See Book Buyer's League announcement, this issue"; the second pull-quote (279) is followed by "Join the Book Buyer's League"; and the third pull-quote reads, in full:

I do hold the buying of more books than one could peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching toward infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish — Penmore.
     The Book Buyer's League is at your service.

Although I found references to "The Book Buyer's League" dating back to 1902 (Life, Vol 39, no. 1008 (20 February 1902), [np] here), I did not find an earlier example of this Penmore-Royce pull-quote. The Monthly Bulletin of the Pasadena Public Library example given by Goldman appears in a group of quotations, and the other examples I was able to find from 1916 were in the form of quotations too (such as this one here and this one here).

* * * * *

In 2026, it seems that it is still not possible to identify a source for Bettmann's peroration "we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance." Along with Newton's "it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read"— Bettmann's "we cherish books even if unread" is a key source for the Wikipedia entry on Tsundoku, which is a pre-WW1 era Japanese word, meaning something like "to pile up [books] with intent to read" (1995) or "piling up books and leaving them unread around your house" (2015).

While I did not find the source for Bettmann's peroration, I did find the following 1905 quote on cherishing books:

There are books we like, and books we love; books we honour, and books we cherish; books we admire upon the shelves, and books we thrust beneath our pillow when we go to sleep.

This is part of a monologue by Henry Woolford, a character in Guy Berton's novel, Art Thou The Man? (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1905), 202 (here), which echoes Francis Bacon's famous adage, from his essay "On Studies" (1598)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

The Woolford monologue is lengthy, but I liked this part of it, so I will close off this post by quoting it in full:

"I've wondered often why some books are favourite books," he said. "Of course, I know why they are, and yet there is a pleasant mystery about it all. There are many books here, and many more down in the library—great books, nearly all of them— books of the masters, histories of the great ones, symbols of thoughts that have lived through the ages undenied. And yet they have no equality in our affections. We pass by one with a glance, and seize upon another. There are books we like, and books we love; books we honour, and books we cherish; books we admire upon the shelves, and books we thrust beneath our pillow when we go to sleep. Some one has said that we have ancestors of the intellect as well as ancestors of the body, and a lineage of the spirit as clearly marked as a family tree. Here are my other ancestors—here in my favourite books. I've kept them here because I could not bear to have them banished in the library downstairs. They have watched me at my work, they have kept wakeful through the long, long nights, and they have been close when I slept. And they have been tyrants, too, for they have kept me awake oftener than they have talked me to sleep. Pleasant, precious comrades, these."

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.

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.