My motivation for attempting this test is that I have now reached my long-term collecting goal of “beating” the British Library at collecting works by Eliza Haywood.
“Beating” in this context carries none of the usual implications of winning. It is not like this was a race—if it were, my competition would have to have some inkling, which they don’t, that a race had started (a race in which they enjoyed an almost three century head start, and overwhelming institutional advantages); and “winning” would have to involve having an objectively-speaking superior collection, which I don’t have even now, and never will have. As I have probably mentioned before, a significant number of Haywood’s early works have not circulated in the private collecting market for at least a century; many for longer, so I will never have the opportunity to buy them, even if I could afford them, were they to come up for sale.
Since 1997, my competitive measure has been—instead—how many times does the library appear as a holding location in my database of library holdings, which was the foundation of my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. When finalised in 2004, the totals for the top ten libraries were: British Library (168); Oxford University—inclusive of the Bodleian (115); Yale University—i.e., all libraries (91); Harvard University—ditto (84); Cambridge University—ditto (81), Newberry Library (75), Huntington Library and University of Illinois (60), University of Pennsylvania (45). As I noted in my Bibliography, these top ten libraries contain as many Haywood items (779) as the 310 smallest libraries combined.
Over the last two decades my personal library count has gradually risen past all 320 of the instructions, whose holdings were included in my Bibliography. Obviously, at first, I was galloping past libraries. I passed fourteen by simply going from four to five Haywood items; and another fourteen by going from five to six. It didn’t take long for me to surpass the combined libraries of Melbourne, and then Australia. The gap between libraries all the way up to Yale (at 91) was narrow enough that I pretty consistently had new collecting targets to focus on. After all, the Bodleian, at 96, was only five more items beyond Yale, and then it was only six more to add All Souls College to the Bodleian, and so on, up to 115. But the fifty-three items needed to get from Oxford University (on 115) to the British Library (on 168) was a long haul, with few milestones on the way.
Now that I a have reached 169, I am happy to acknowledge that, the British Library almost-certainly still has more than I do; having likely acquired more Haywood items since 2004. In fact, I am sure they have, since I sold them (what was then the only known copy of) a Swedish translation of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. There were also likely to have been copies at the British Library I missed including, for one reason or another. So, I am assuming that, if I were to re-do my 1997 / 2004 audit, I would find that I have been chasing an after-image of the British Library holdings for the last two decades, and that their present holdings are more like 175 or 180.
While it is possible that I may eventually pass the then-actual, present day count of the British Library, it has been getting harder and harder to find anything I don’t already have multiple copies of, so it may never happen. It is just as well then, that I am now increasingly focussed on the provenance and reading marks left behind by past readers, and am at least as excited by a dog-eared duplicate as I am by a clean copy of something I don’t already have.
Fortuitously, therefore, my very pretty, British Library-beating item no. 169, arrived with a number of dog-eared duplicate volumes. This means that I passed by the biggest institutional collection in style, with a mix of items they would both willingly, and unwillingly allow into their collection.
And so, rather than give an account in this post of the eighteen Haywood items I acquired this year, or the seventeen the year before, and so on back to my last “Collecting Haywood” post in January 2022 (for 2021 (here), and rather than share an image of the very nice set of La Belle Assemblée that took me from 168 to 169 Haywood items, I thought I’d share a few images of the duplicate volumes I acquired at the same time, which are at least as wretched as either my Frankenbook or the battered odd-volume of the German translation of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46) (here), which reminded me of the “lone soldiers we see so often in films, the ones who stumble out of the mud and smoke of battle, with clothes torn, hair awry, smeared in muck, bandaged, limping, looking at the corpses on all sides with glassy eyes, only to collapse from exhaustion in front of the camera.”
Below is the title-page of an odd-volume from Haywood’s La Belle Assemblée, 5th ed. (1743), a representative of my eighth set of this edition. The worn and stained front board and the front free endpaper of this copy were sticky-taped together, but were separated from the rest of the volume, which has had all the plates torn out (including the frontispiece), and had lost chunks of more than a few page-edges as a result of rough page-turning.
Below are the title-pages of two non-consecutive odd-volumes from Haywood’s La Belle Assemblée, 6th ed. (1749), representatives of my seventh set of this edition. Putting aside the provenance information they contain, the first volume has no boards, and contains annotations and underlining in pencil (mostly), while the third volume retains its boards, but lacks the textual annotations and underlining. Both volumes are heavily worn, but complete, with discoloured, dog-eared and torn pages, and bifolia splitting at the spine. Both volumes also contain some amateur water-colouring to one headpiece and at least two engraved plates each.
Since these three disreputable volumes contained some intriguing provenance information, and I had some free time when they arrived, I have been able to recover quite a bit of their histories, and so I will post those histories, and some better photographs once I have access to Photoshop again.
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