Eighteenth-Century Books in Australian Libraries, revisited

Almost twelve years ago now, I did a post on “Collecting Eighteenth Century Literature” (here). In that post, I mentioned that the “ESTC code-finder” (now here)—maintained by the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California—“provides a count of ESTC records as well as providing ESTC codes.”

This count of ESTC items—books printed in English or in English-speaking countries before 1801—can be used as a crude yardstick to compare the rare book holdings in various libraries in Australia.

Although more than a decade has passed, there is remarkably little change to the figures I provided in my 2011 post—with one notable exception. Can you pick it?

The top ten libraries remain the same, and in the same order of size:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) 7529 (up 18)
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7455 (up 3)
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4842 (up 5)
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4656 (up 596)
5. State Library of SA (SSL) 2876 (up 3)
6. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2595 (up 2)
7. University of Melbourne (VU) 2294 (up 22)
8. State Library of NSW, Rare Books (NSL-RB) 1199 (no change)
9. Private collection, SA (PC-S) 1175 (up 4)
10. State Library of NSW (NSL) 1009 (up 1)

It is still the case that roughly one third of the 304 (was 303) Australian ESTC codes are recorded as holding nothing (101 libraries), a further one third have five or fewer listings (200 libraries), only eleven percent (34 of 304) have one hundred or more works.

I know for a fact that Monash has added a lot more than five ESTC items to its collection in the last decade—I have personally seen to that!—but I also know that they have been slack with informing ESTC of these new holdings. The State Library of Victoria count has, by comparison, increased by almost six hundred items, which is likely much more in line with their actual acquisitions. (On this, they seem to be particularly active in the area of early women writers; as a recent article explains here.)

It is unclear how many institutions might have stopped updating ESTC (like Monash), rather than stopped making acquisitions (State Library of NSW?), but I suspect that Monash’s cataloguing backlog is the norm, and that VSL’s professionalism is the exception. This suggests, in turn, that the specific figures recorded here for each institution are less important that the proportions between institutions etc.

* * * * *

Looking at the 2023 data, with this in mind, a few more things strike me.

The total count for all ESTC items in all Australian libraries is 47289—95% of these are held by the thirty largest libraries, so I looked at these thirty in particular. Breaking down the figures by State and Territory:

13800 items, or 29.2%, are held in VIC
12138 items, or 25.7%, are held in NSW
8162 items, or 17.3%, are held in ACT
7579 items, or 16.0%, are held in SA
1999 items, or 4.2%, are held in QLD
567 items, or 1.2%, are held in TAS
469 items, or 1.0%, are held in WA
0 items, or 0.0% are held in NT

Since NSW is Australia’s most populous State, I wondered about the relative proportions of ESTC holdings per State and Territory. On a per capita basis (actually ESTC items per 1000 people), the leagues table is as follows:

ACT is 17.8 per 1000 people
SA is 4.1 per 1000 people
VIC is 2.1 per 1000 people
NSW is 1.5 per 1000 people
TAS is 1.0 per 1000 people
QLD is 0.4 per 1000 people
WA is 0.2 per 1000 people
NT is 0.0 per 1000 people

ACT is an anomaly here, since the National Library of Australia (in Canberra) is not really an ACT institution—but the ACT itself is an anomaly, and the National Library is physically situated in Canberra, so perhaps this does not matter. The National average is 1.7 per 1000 people, so NSW is below the National average, but the ACT is in NSW, so—again with the ACT anomaly.

As for the type of institutions holding almost all of Australia’s ESTC items:

22081 items, or 46.7%, are held by twelve Universities
17720 items, or 37.5%, are held by six National and State Libraries
1751 items, or 3.7%, are held by five Religious institutions
1175 items, or 2.5%, are held by one Private individual
961 items, or 2.0%, are held by three Courts
668 items, or 1.4%, are held by one Parliament
385 items, or 0.8%, are held by two Medical Colleges

The number of ESTC items in Religious institutions, Courts and Parliamentary libraries surprised me a little.

* * * * *

A final thought, as a collector of 18C books—most institutions in Australia are doing a woeful job. In terms of new acquisitions, the only library in Australia that is doing it right—on the evidence of the ESTC code-finder—is the State Library of Victoria. But in absolute terms, no one is.

Below are—selected more or less at random, and ignoring most of the most obvious first-tier institutions in the States—ten points of reference for Australian rare book librarians:

Newberry Library 38087
Library Company of Philadelphia 31053
University of Chicago 25093
Boston Public 21233
Cornell University 18189
Columbia University 16426
Boston Athenaeum 12816
Rice University 8529
Free Library of Philadelphia 6109
Haverford College Library 5583

The entire ESTC book stock of Australia is weak when compared to the Newberry alone—which probably has fewer duplicates, and a wider coverage than Australia as a whole. The “Friends Historical Society of Swarthmore College”—which I have never heard of—has 2573 ESTC items! This is more than either the State Library of NSW or the University of Melbourne; indeed, more than all of Queensland and Tasmania combined.

It would also seem that even I now have more ESTC items than 292 of 304 Australian libraries—more than the whole of Tasmania (or Western Australia)—despite the fact that my budget is certainly a lot smaller than that of University of NSW, the University of Western Australia, State Library of Queensland and so forth. I do not know what they are spending their money on, but it isn’t (it seems) books printed before 1801.

What A Library Should Be Like, 1924

Richard Le Gallienne's “What A Library Should Be Like: Some Suggestions For Those To Whom Books and Their Heritage Are Precious” appeared in House and Garden in December 1924 (here). Le Gallienne (1866–1947) was a prolific author and poet, contributor to The Yellow Book, and one-time lover of Oscar Wilde, who married three times, living in the US before settling in Menton (near Nice), France.

It appears that Le Gallienne had a very nice library later in life. According to Wikipedia:

During the Second World War he was prevented from returning to his Menton home and lived in Monaco for the rest of the war. His house in Menton was occupied by German troops and his library was nearly sent back to Germany as bounty. Le Gallienne appealed to a German officer in Monaco, who allowed him to return to Menton to collect his books.

Although this bibliophic advice was written by a practice-what-you-preach aesthete, it seems not to have been reprinted in almost a century, and so I have transcribed it below. The full reference is: Richard Le Gallienne, “What A Library Should Be Like,” House and Garden, vol. 46 (December 1924): 58, 110, 112.

* * * * *

WHAT A LIBRARY SHOULD BE LIKE.

Some Suggestions For Those To Whom Books and Their Heritage Are Precious

JUST as there are gardens without souls, the loveless offspring of seedsmen's catalogs and newly acquired bank accounts, so is it with libraries. Neither have any more vital relation to their owners than an ice box, as little reflect their tastes, and are almost as seldom their personal concern.
  In English country houses the word library is often merely a euphemism for a combination of gunroom and smoking room. Guns, fishing rods, and pipe racks, with a copy of the Sporting Calendar, and a few old magazines, comprise its literature. We have all met such "libraries" in novels, and have wondered how the name chanced to be given to rooms where anything is to be found except a book or a reader.
  But there are libraries which do contain books in many and expensive "sets" that, in spite of them, still more drearily belie the description. These are even less often visited by friendly humanity, and their serried rows of uniform, morocco-bound volumes, frigidly enclosed behind glass doors, gleam lonely and uninviting as cabinets of minerals in a museum. Such libraries, we have been told, are bought by the yard like wall papers, irrespective of their literary contents, and have even less character than the other furnishings of the house, of which they form a regulation part. Obviously, these are not the libraries with which we have here to do.
  By a library we mean, of course, a cherished collection of books, and the room in which those books are sympathetically housed, a room that has taken on an unmistakable bookish character from their presence.

OUR library may be in the house or outside it, in a garden or in a woodland, by a stream among the rocks. It may be high up in a city garret, or it may be the warm heart of a palace. If one has a garden, there is no happier place for our library. "A library in a garden!" exclaims Mr. Edmund Gosse in one of his essays, "The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man!"
  The association of trees and books is, indeed, as old as the very derivations of the words "book" and "library," which are almost identical. Is not the word "book" derived from the Anglo-Saxon and German words for the beech tree (boce and buche) because the ancient Saxons and Germans did their first writing on beechen boards! And similarly the Latin word "liber" meant the inner bark of a tree used for writing on, before it meant "book," and gave us "library." When we reflect that the paper on which our books are printed is made from wood pulp, it will be seen that we arc still, in a sense, writing on the bark of trees, and the thought is worth playing with for a fanciful moment. The leaves of our books and the leaves on our garden trees should, therefore, feel at home together, being both made of the same mysterious substance, and when we bring our books into the garden it is but bringing them back to their green birthplace. And anyone who has built a library in a garden knows how at home indeed they are there. How the peace of both embrace and supplement each other, and, as we sit with our library door open on quiet summer afternoons, or on early mornings with the delicate sunlight playing tenderly like visible music on the nut-brown bindings, "while to and fro the room go the soft airs," the very stillness rarifies our minds, and the thoughts behind the words we read seem to steal out of themselves from the page, with the dews of their first utterance yet bright upon them. The low whisperings of the trees and the quiet talk of the books seem one, in a rare equilibrium of the soul. Yes! Mr. Gosse was right. A library in a garden! The phrase does contain the whole felicity of man!

YET it does not exhaust it. There are many other modes of felicity for a man who really loves his books whose library is the organic growth of years of collecting together those books and those only which sensitively express himself, and surround him like his own soul, his memories and his dreams, externalised in a companionable embodiment. Such a book lover will often indulge himself in imagining the many various libraries he might create for himself, like so many bookish castles in Spain. Sometimes he may dream of the libraries of great book lovers of the past. For example, if he is an omnivorous bibliomaniac, and never can have enough books about him, he may recall with envy the huge collection of Richard Heber, that "fiercest and strongest of all the bibliomaniacs," to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated the sixth canto of Marmion. Heber is credited with owning at least 150,000 volumes, and for those as crazy as he the romantic thing about his "library" was that it was not all in one place. Eight houses were needed to hold it, all in different places, some in England, and some in ancient cities of Europe. Never was such a book glutton, a "hellus librorum." But think of the romantic adventure of pilgrimaging from one of his eight libraries to the other, the perpetual novelty of visiting and re-visiting his various Castles in Spain.



  However, I doubt whether the reader is with me in this rhapsody. Probably his dream of a library is something more sensible and static, and I dare say Montaigne's library in his old Gascon tower would be more to his taste. Indeed, who has not dreamed of that, and, well as it is known to us, it will be pertinent, and indeed practical, to quote something of his description: "'Tis in the third Story of a Tower of which the Ground-Room is my Chapel, the second Story an Apartment with a withdrawing Room and Closet, where I often lie to be more retired. Above it is a great Wardrobe, which formerly was the most useless part of the House. In that library I pass away most of the Days of my Life, and most of the Hours of the Day. In the Night I am never there. There is within it a Cabinet handsome and neat enough, with a very convenient Fire-place for the Winter, and Windows that afford a great deal of light, and very pleasant Prospects. … The Figure of my Study is round, and has no more flat Wall than what is taken up by my Table and Chairs; so that the remaining parts of the Circle present me a View of all my Books at once, set upon five Degrees of Shelves-round about me. It has three noble and free Prospects, and is sixteen Paces Diameter." Montaigne continues that only from fear of that "Trouble that frights me from all [page 111] Business," he had refrained from building on either side, "a Gallery of an hundred Paces long and twelve broad," because "every Place of Retirement requires a Walk." If we add those galleries for him in our imagination, can one conceive a library more after one's own heart! Here once more in another form is Mr. Gosse's "whole felicity of man." Perhaps some reader of this essay may have the whim—and the money—to reconstruct this old library in Montaigne's tower, not forgetting to complete it with the galleries.
  Wherever our library be situated, in a garden, in an ancestral tower, in some quaint old town with gables and belfries, or in a modern American city, the first condition of its being a real library, with the true library atmosphere, where the books can really breathe and live for us, instead of being merely stored, is that the room should not be stiff and formal. It should not be a square room, or a room we can see all at once. The one defect, to my mind, in Montaigne's library, though he himself esteemed it an advantage, was that he could see all his books at once.



  In this respect a library should be like a garden. The garden we can see all at once is not a garden but merely an horticultural exhibit. It has no surprises. And a library, similarly, should have room for surprises. It should be rambling in shape, or made to appear so. The [page 112] letter T, or better still, the letter I, with broad top and bottom, is a good ground plan. It should have two stone fireplaces, so disposed that one can only be seen at a time, roomy and hospitable, with deep angles, and there should be many alcoves, and nooks and corners, some with low windows and wide window seats. It should either be a room with low ceilings, and massive rafters of black oak, or it should be high, with galleries and winding stairways, and hidden some where in the galleries again should be other nooks, some with windows of richly dyed cathedral glass. One or two tiny rooms, with old tapestries for portieres, might be devised, suggesting secrecy and arcane mysteries; and everything, indeed, should be done to tempt the presiding genius of libraries, the nymph Quits, to make her abode there. Here and there should be bowls of roses, early violets, or drowsy wallflowers, and in some secluded corner the still statue of a goddess should come upon us with a white surprise. An old painting or two of some great dead scholar should be enshrined in hushed recesses, Erasmus, say, or Robert Burton of "The Anatomy of Melancholy"; and whatever other such objects of the sister arts are there should be un exciting, but with a quiet thrill in them, full of "whispers and of shadows."



  As for the bookshelves, they should be open, none of your forbidding glass doors, with locks and keys, behind which the books seem cold and distant as the coffined dead. Yet here and there an old Chippendale bookcase for rarities and delicate bindings, might blend its old world elegance and quaint lozenged panes, companionably among the open shelves. As for bindings, the old books will, of course, wear their old weathered coats of ribbed time-brown leather, or time-yellowed vellum. On these the morning sun and the evening lamplight fall most lovingly; and modern books, too, are best left in their original cloth which also soon take on a certain mellowness, as their different colors add variety to the whole informal, haphazard harmony. Nor should any uniformity in the heights of the volumes be aimed at. Nothing is so monotonous and un-suggestive to the eye, and so destructive of that gregariousness of all sorts and conditions of writers that counts for so much in the companionability of a library. "Sets" we must have, but these can be so disposed amid the general pattern as to give it firmness, without destroying its wayward charm.
  There is no need to speak of wall papers, for no wall space will be visible, as the library will be furnished from ceiling to floor with the most satisfactory mural decorations yet invented, namely—books; and, as to general furniture, such as tables and chairs, all that need be said is that they should be solid, simple, comfortable, and distinguished, Elizabethan and Jacobean, for preference, breathing austerity and reverie. And there should be Renaissance cabinet and writing desks with secret drawers. Which reminds me that one of those tiny hidden rooms above referred to should be accessible only by a sliding panel, the spring of which should be known only to the master of the library. And the library, too, should be provided with what one might call a postern, masked by shelves opening inward at a touch, and communicating with a private staircase, by which the master could escape intrusion at a moment's notice; for in a sense a library should be a fortress, a fortress of the soul, ready to repel attack by all enemies of quietude and dreams.
  For the essence of a library is solitude—solitude in the society of the choicest spirits of Time and Eternity. No idle creatures of a day should have entrance there.

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

[UPDATED 9 August 2021]

Oracles and the renaissance

Recently, my scholar-cousin found a roll of film in a canister marked: "Spedding. Berlin." Since he and I thought this might be 24 long-lost happy-snaps from a trip to Berlin, I asked him to send the film to me unopened, and asap.

As it happens, I should have asked him to look at it more closely first because, not only was it not a long-lost film of happy-snaps, the film was not from Berlin. Instead, it was a microfilm I had ordered for him from the British Library back in 1995, when I was in London.

It seems that, at that time, he needed to chase up a reference to an obscure Latin work, which contained a list of -mancy words. Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliographia antiqvaria, sive introdvctio in notitiam scriptorvm qvi antiqvitates hebraicas, graecas, romanas et christianas scriptis illvstrarvnt (1713), CAPUT XII, §2. "De divinationibus, Vatibus, miraculis, Magia, juramentis et votis, scriptores." [oracles, soothsayers, magic, oaths and vows, writing].

Although there was a copy of this book in Australia, that copy was at the University of Melbourne, one thousand kilometers away from Sydney (where he lived at the time). Also, the University of Melbourne was not set up for copying as easily or cheaply as the British Library—where I was busy at work on my Haywood bibliography.

So, rather than him taking a long road-trip to check the reference, or pay a small fortune for photographs to be taken of each page, I paid £3.53 for a duplicate microfilm at the British Library. When the microfilm arrived, I obviously rationalised the many microfilms I had accumulated for my research, and sent him his film in a spare canister.

So, mystery solved. But it struck me that this vignette of antipodean scholarly industry was worth relating, if only to compare it to the ease with which we can chase up a reference to an obscure** Latin work today. Totally unsurprisingly, this obscure Latin work has been freely available online since 2017 via Google Books.

And, because [1] it is freely available online, and [2] there is little demand for obscure Latin scholarship, you can buy an even earlier edition than held anywhere in Australia for USD75.00. I am not sure what this 1708 edition (below) might have been priced at in 1995, but my guess is between five and ten times as much as it is now.

Of course, [1] is directly related to [2]: there are now almost no libraries seeking to establish a collection of such scholarly depth that they are filling Rare Books collections with obscure Latin scholarship, in the way that the University of Melbourne once did.

When the classical heritage of the West was returned to us via the East, it prompted a renaissance—two of them actually: one in the Twelfth century and one two or three centuries later, which we call either the Renaissance or the Italian Renaissance.

It seems to me that the boggling scholarly riches readily available to us in the twenty-first century should be prompting a third renaissance in the Humanities. The time that scholars previously wasted in overcoming the tyranny of distance (via travel and cumbersome copying) can now be spent in pushing forward research: much further and faster than was possible in the twentieth century.

Perhaps this third renaissance is underway. If so, evidence for a twenty-first century renaissance is no easier to find than Fabricius's Bibliographia antiqvaria was in 1995.

**Although Wikipedia tells us that Fabricius was a celebrated bibliographer and collector of manuscripts, who is credited with compiling 128 books, there are very few references to Fabricius' "De divinationibus" online, before or after 1995.

Put a pin in it, bookmarks in the 18C

There are a number of places online where various people have discussed the origin and meaning of the phrase to "put a pin in it." English Language and Usage Stack Exchange has a useful thread on this (here); a lot less useful is the one on Quora (here); the one on Urban Dictionary is as silly as you'd expect (here), and there are lots of similar fun, click-baity sites.

According to Urban Dictionary and The BS Dictionary: Uncovering the Origins and True Meanings of Business Speak (here): "The leading theory for where put a pin in it comes from is World War II, when soldiers were encouraged to put a pin back into an active hand grenade so it wouldn't go off. However, we have no credible sources to back that up."

What I love about this gloss is that the "BS" in the title (The BS Dictionary) is intended to suggest both "B[usiness] S[peak] Dictionary" and "B[ull] S[hit] Dictionary"—implying that "Business Speak" is Bull Shit (hilarious)—and that Bob and Tim's dictionary uncovers "the Origins and True Meanings" of said Business Speak / Bull Shit. In reality, the gloss itself is BS: "The leading theory for where put a pin in it comes from" is not from hand grenades and World War II, this is simply the first answer Bob and Tim discovered in precisely 1.4 seconds of Googling time (which led them to Urban Dictionary). So, rather than being a glossary to Business BS, The BS Dictionary is a Business glossary comprised of BS (also hilarious).

As for "put[ting] a pin in" something, most of the explanations offered for the origin of this term are based on thumb-tacks / drawing pins, which "conjures an image of somebody attaching a flyer or a notice to a cork board," "pin[ning] fabric in position before sewing it" in place or setting up pins in a pattern to create "bobbin lace" and stopping stitches you have finished from coming undone. Other suggestions relate to "pinning together pages of a book" or using "pins to mark edits in [a] manuscript"—something Jane Austen is credited with doing, apparently.

My own suggestion is rather more directly related to the meaning of the phrase, which is to "note carefully" or "bear in mind" (as glossed by Jonathon Green's excellent Dictionary of Slang, here): using a sewing pin as a bookmark.

* * * * *

As you can see in the photos above and below, sewing pins were used as bookmarks in the eighteenth century. In this copy of Ab.16.8a2 La Belle Assemblée, 4th ed. (Dublin, 1740), vol.1, a pin has been inserted between two pages in such a way as not to fall out when the book is opened. That is, the tip of the pin has been pushed into the fold between pages 142 and 143, then downwards parralel with the spine, so that it becomes lodged in the paper, glue and binding, with only a short section of the shaft visible when the book is opened.

By inserting the pin in this way, the reader has marked the opening much more securely than is possible with the sort of loose bookmarks I typically use: a piece of paper or cardboard, that tends to fall out when the book is not kept firmly closed.

I noticed quite a few of these sewing-pin bookmarks, inserted in the same way, when I was physically examining hundreds of eighteenth-century copies of works by Haywood, for my 2004 Bibliography. Unfortunately, I did not make a note of which specific copies contained these pin-bookmarks, but I did examine the pins closely enough to be sure that they were definitely contemporary, hand-made silvered brass or steel sewing pins.

How did I know this? Well, at first I didn't, but seventeenth and eighteenth century pins have a very distinct look since, as is explained here: the pin itself [is] made of brass wire, [and] the heads were made separately of brass wound around the top of the pin." Pin-making machines were invented in the early nineteenth century (as Wikipedia notes [in a rather pathetic entry on pins]). These eighteenth-century pins look quite different from any pin I'd handled before, so I started looking into it.

Since my interest in any eighteenth-century reader records has only increased over the years—any evidence of reading really—it was with great satisfaction that I discovered that a contemporary reader of my copy of La Belle Assemblée had "put a pin in it"—"note carefully" so as to "bear in mind" the text.

Of course, despite it's very sharp point, a pin does not have much precision when marking text in the way we see here; less than a modern printed cardboard bookmark, since printed bookmarks typically have a front and a back, a top and a bottom, allowing you to indicate the top or bottom or a specific page. A pin is also more cumbersome than a pencil or ink pen for marking a passage. Moreover, if you were to attempt to mark a line, paragraph or single page, by threading it into and out of a leaf parallel to the outer margin of the relevant text, the pin would inadvertently mark text on both sides of the leaf, since the pin would be visible on both sides of the leaf—though the side of the leaf with the pin head might be the equivalent of the front of a bookmark.

On the positive side, although a pin-threaded-page may be difficult to find again, requiring the reader to fan through the whole book until the page with the pin it was found, it would be easier to find a pinned page than a page with a line of ink or a pencil mark on it. But if you were to attempt to mark—as some readers do—dozens of passages, you would have difficulty closing a book stuffed with so many pins, and it would be an expensive way of marking the text. Since pins were handmade, they were more expensive that the machine-made pins that followed.

So, why use a pin rather than a pencil or ink pen, if it is more cumbersome, costly and less exact? My guess is that a pin was simply close at hand—very close. I suspect that our pin-wielding memorialist used a pin because she was (singularly or, more likely, in company) engaged in multi-tasking: either alternatively or (to the extent possible) simultaneously engaged in both reading and sewing. Also, one of the first recipes that Eliza Haywood included in her Present for a Servant-Maid (1743) was "How to get Spots of Ink out of Linen" (here)—a reminder that ink and linen were a bad combination, and that handling ink and any material while sewing was a bad idea. It was far easier and safer to use a pin than to risk having to soak the linen "all Night in Vinegar and Salt, the next Day rub the Spots well with it, as if you were washing in Water, then put fresh Vinegar and Salt, and let it lie another Night, and the next Day rub it again."

As well as being easier and safer to use a pin, rather than ink, it is also cheaper and less damaging to the book, since the pin can be re-used / moved and—when used as here—leaves only a tiny and discreet hole. The fact that the pin remains in place in my copy of La Belle Assemblée could be interpreted to mean that it was deployed as a long-term marker, like ink or pencil, but it seems much more likely that it was only ever intended to be a temporary place-holder and that this pin remains in place simply because it was forgotten.

* * * * *

In terms of moral alignment, using a pin as a bookmark might identify the reader a being somewhere between "true neutral" and "chaotic neutral" (alignments which cover bookmarking behaviour ranging from using a visiting card or bus ticket, through to using weird 3D objects to mark your place: pen, glasses, seed pods and [unused] condoms**) rather than lawful, neutral or chaotic evil (a continuum of place-holding and memorialising from dog-earing pages, highlighting passages, to tearing out pages you like and glueing them to the wall††). Generally-speaking, this sort of chaotic evil bookmarking is frowned upon, but from the perspective of someone writing a book on eighteenth century readers, it is actually quite welcome.

* * * * *

To return to our phrase, it may be that "putting a pin in it" was once quite common, though evidence may be lacking for a variety of plausible reasons: the preference for pristine (unread) copies in the book trade and among librarians dooming genuinely "used" books; an historical librarianish disapproval and neat-freakery, which erased the evidence of reading from the few examples that made their way into institutional collections, i.e., due to librarians removing any pins present so that they can't rust or otherwise mark the pages; or the pins may have been removed by collectors interested in the curly-headed pins themselves. I have certainly collected a few historical pins for this reason, if not in this way.

Whatever the reason for pinned pasages being uncommon today, it would certainly be consistent with the period in which the phrase arose (early 18C; earlier than recorded in Green's Dictionary, to judge from the quotes provided on Stack Exchange) and with the meaning of the phrase (to "note carefully" or "bear in mind"), for "to put a pin in it" to pin a passage as we see here. Also in favour of my interpretation is that my book may be considered primary evidence: where is the equvalent evidence for the alternative interpretations?!

* * * * *

**One of the few eighteenth-century condoms known to survive—one held by the British Museum—was found in a book in the Brish Library's Private Case, marking a passage where condoms were being discussed. An image of this condom appears in the exhibition catalogue London 1753 (2003), 144, No.3.20.

††Mary and Charles Lamb decorated the walls of their (rented) garret in Temple Lane, by cutting engraved illustrations out of their books and gluing them to the walls. Mary described the process in a letter of 2 November 1814:

"My brother and I almost covered the walls in prints, for which purpose he cut out every print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask my leave to strip a fresh poor author … There was such pasting, such consultation upon these portraits, and where the series of pictures from Ovid, Milton and Shakespeare would show to most advantage, and in what obscure corners authors of humble rank should be allowed to tell their stories … To conclude this long story about nothing, the poor despised garret is now called the print room, and is become our most familiar sitting-room" (here).

More Female Spectators

A few years ago I mentioned (here) that "When I set out, without much premeditation, to collect Haywood taxonomically, I had not thought that I would end up with so many 'duplicates'." (My post was prompted by the arrival of my seventh set of the “Second” edition of The Female Spectator (1748).) While this was certainly true of most of Haywood's works—even at the start—there are two items I would have excluded from this blanket statement: the first, octavo, editions of both The Female Spectator and La Belle Assemblée. Today I am going to talk about the first of these.

I provided the reason I might have wanted duplicates of the first edition(s) of The Female Spectator in my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), 438:

It ought to be noted that to distinguish the different editions of each Book has proved to be a very difficult task … Since the bookbinder was instructed to ‘cancel [remove] every title except the general one’, few of the surviving sets contain any of the original part-titles. Since first, second and third printings are often so similar as to be almost indistinguishable except from their part-titles, and no ready method exists to identify the edition of books with cancelled [part] titles, only those sets with part-titles intact or with second edition general titles have been identified by cataloguers as containing reprinted Books. No library with these rare survivals has multiple copies of the part-published editions of The Female Spectator and so it has not been possible to compare different editions of each Book.

One of the consequences of the fact that "no single public or private library has approached completeness in gathering together the works of Haywood" (16), was that almost no library had more than a single copy of any of her works. (Spoiler alert: except mine.)



In the case of the first edition(s) of The Female Spectator, only the British Library and the Bodleian have more than a single set, and in both cases the second set is incomplete (i.e., L [94.c.12–15; 629.e.4, -v.1,4] and O [8vo Y 64–66 Jur, -v.4; G. Pamph. 1856 (14), bk.1 only]), and none of the 24 individual "Books" that make up The Female Spectator are reprints in either case.

As a consequence, when I was preparing my Bibliography, I had to compile entries for each Book based on a comparison of the Monash and Melbourne University mixed sets with a microfilm copy of the Harvard set (which has almost all of the part-titles for first edition Books) combined with with a handful of photocopies posted to me by the University of Kansas and the Riverside Library at the University of California (which both have most of the known part-titles for reprinted Books).

I concluded my headnote to The Female Spectator with a warning:

It is quite unlikely that every edition of every Book has been identified [here] and so it is not clear how many Books were reprinted. The fact that no copy is known to have survived with uncancelled part-titles for Books 10–24 and that no differences have been discovered among copies of these later Books in the few copies examined does not prove that no later Books were reprinted. It may be that reprints of the later Books have not survived uncancelled by mere chance and that the absence of any comprehensive Haywood collection has hindered the identification of differences that may exist among widely scattered copies of earlier Books.

Obviously, since "the absence of any comprehensive Haywood collection ha[d] hindered the identification of differences that may exist among widely scattered copies of earlier Books", one of the things I hoped to achieve by collecting Haywood taxonomically, was to improve the entry for the individual Books that make up the first, octavo, editions of The Female Spectator, by collecting multiple copies.



Fifteen years later, as you can see above, I now have four copies of the octavo editions: three complete sets (two of mixed issues; all with part-titles), of the "First" octavo edition, and one odd volume (the first volume only, no part titles) of the second octavo edition.

As a result of my collecting, I now have copies of 27 of the 34 individual Books that I described in 2004, plus four more that I have since identified (Ab.60.0.1A, Ab.60.0.5A, Ab.60.0.11A, Ab.60.0.32A). I also have part-titles for 26 of these 38 entries. Combining my own copies with those I have local access to, there are now only three Books inaccessible to me: Ab.60.0.15, Ab.60.0.17, Ab.60.0.19, all only known to exist in the Riverside Library copy.

It is not clear whether the high price of my latest copy—the “Cornwell House” set, sold at the Martin Orskey sale in June—is a factor of it having come up at a prominent London auction, or the increased interest in Haywood. Although it is contrary to my interest for it to be the latter, it would be nice to think that one of Haywood's most important works was beginning to be more highly valued. If so, my chances of adding any further copies to my collection are very low. This Cornwell House set cost me almost fifteen times as much as either of the two previous sets, an extravagance I couldn't afford to repeat.

However, now that I have four copies of the first volume it is easy to show the advantage of having multiple copies of the same work. Note that, in the photo below, each copy is open to the last page of Book 1, and that the facing page is either the part title for Book 2, or the first page of text for Book 2. There are three editions of Book 1, all of which are illustrated here.



The two copies on the left are identical (Book 1 ends on page 68, both have the same tailpiece). These are both copies of Ab.60.0.1. While both copies of Book 1 on the right end, instead, on page 70, the settings are different from each other (the final line is longer bottom right), and a different tailpiece is used on each. The top one is Ab.60.0.1A, the bottom Ab.60.0.2.

As the above image suggests, it is almost impossible to overstate how valuable to be able to compare multiple copies in this way. Which is why it is so important for serious research libraries to collect authors in depth. Although a number of research libraries have been collecting eighteenth-century women writers with some enthusiasm, they appear to be collecting for breadth, not depth—as is indicated by the fact that it is still the case that there is no institutional library with even two full sets of Haywood's Female Spectator.

The myth of a Vatican porn collection

The myth of a vast Vatican collection of erotica or pornography was established sixty years ago, by Ralph Ginzburg.

In his Unhurried View of Erotica (1958), after one hundred pages of broad-brush history, Ginzburg turns to the question of “the whereabouts of the world’s … great collections of erotica”—public and private—which he ranks, according to the size of the collection.

At the top of Ginzburg’s list is the Vatican library, with “25,000 volumes and some 100,000 prints” of erotica, a collection of “hush-hush volumes” significantly larger than that in the Private Case of the British Museum Library (which he estimates to be 20,000 volumes—it is actually more like 2000), and the Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale (2,500 volumes).

It is unclear how Ginzburg arrived at this crazy estimate, but most of his figures are inflated. Rather than “25,000 volumes,” the Vatican actually held only fifty-one items in 1936. This figure is the exact number of items recorded by Alfred Rose, compiler of the Registrum Librorum Eroticorum (1936), during his personal investigation of the Vatican’s collection in August 1934.

To put this pip-squeak collection into context, Rose lists over five thousand titles in the Register of Erotic Books. None of the items in the Vatican collection are particularly important—and almost all of them are in Latin, held in a collection of books on the culture of classical antiquity. The only book in English is Hodder Westropp and C. Wake’s Ancient Symbol Worship. Influence of the Phallic idea in the Religions of Antiquity, 2nd ed. (1875). Not exactly a classic of erotic literature.

No writer before Ginzburg appears to have claimed that the Vatican has such a large collection of erotic books, and so I it seems likely that Ginzburg is, in fact, responsible for the myth that the world’s “foremost collection of erotica is in The Vatican Library.”

Prior to Ginzburg, the only scholar to discuss the Vatican collection, commented that the “Enfer” at the Bibliothèque Nationale may have been modelled on a “similar institution [at] the Vatican Library” (Alec Craig, Above all Liberties (1942), 145). The comparison is a little misleading since the Vatican’s collection is limited to blasphemous or heterodox works, whereas those in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s “Enfer” are often indecent, obscene, or pornographic.

After Ginzburg, however, the absurd conspiracy theory, that the Vatican has a “vast,” “comprehensive,” or even “complete” collection of pornography has been endlessly repeated—and endlessly debunked. There are many examples of the ignorant repetition of this myth, which indicate the continuing influence of Ginzburg.

In the 1990s, Julie Peakman revealed the basic misunderstanding that supports Ginzburg’s claim, by conflating the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the bibliography (published by the Vatican) of books that Catholics were prohibited from owning or reading—with the collection that the Vatican itself held.

(This is like assuming that, just because I compile a bibliography of every work by Eliza Haywood, that I own copies of all of these works. If only that were true! Excuse me while I make a list of the world’s largest diamonds!)

Anyway, Peakman states: “The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, allegedly with the largest collection of books (around 25,000 volumes and 100,000 prints) is ‘forbidden’ to Catholics, and not open to the general public” (Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books (2003), 195).

In the early 2000s, David Isaacson elaborated on this misunderstanding when he cautioned that “only libraries with a special purpose like the Vatican Library’s famous collection of prohibited books, or the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research Library at Indiana University, have the need for comprehensive collections of pornography” (Isaacson, in Selecting Materials for Library Collections (2004), 6).”

My favourite example of this mad conspiracy theory comes from a “Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture” at Amherst College—seemingly, one of the top Liberal Arts colleges in America—in a 2005 essay on censorship. In a lovely example of alliterative, hyperbolic over-reach, of grandiloquent ignorance, Prof. Ilan Stavans, refers (here), without irony, to the Vatican’s “very vast holdings on erotica, blasphemy, and freemasonry, among other risqué topics.” Nice.

As I pointed out in my Foxcroft lecture, recently published (and from which the above is an excerpt of sorts), the edition of Westropp and Wake’s Ancient Symbol Worship—held by the Vatican—is also held by the State Library of Victoria. There are also three copies of the first edition of this book in libraries throughout Australia, and there are over twenty more copies available on ABE.

What this means is that, for as little as USD14.50, you can have a Private Case collection that equals the Vatican’s “very vast holdings on erotica” in English.

* * * * *

Readers will find a link to a YouTube video of my 2016 Foxcroft lecture here. To buy a copy of the (short) book that I based on this lecture, published by the Ancora Press in 2018 in an edition of one hundred copies, contact Kay Craddock - Antiquarian Bookseller.

Private Case items not on ECCO

While reviewing Patrick Kearney’s two bibliographies of the British Library’s Private Case holdings—his Private Case (1981), which lists items now in the Private Case, and his Supplement (2016), which lists items known to have once been in it—it occurred to me that I could use the data he provides to see whether the Private Case holdings continue to be systematically withheld from ECCO.

I have been curious concerning the presence of Private Case items on ECCO for a while. In my 2011 article “‘The New Machine’: Discovering the limits of ECCO” I mentioned that little of the Private Case material was on ECCO and that the material that had been included at the time of writing had only recently been added (ibid., 441). The main evidence I had to go on was that no Private Case items appear in the first eight thousand reels of the Eighteenth Century microfilm series (the basis of ECCO), and few had appeared thereafter (ibid., 451–52n37). (The first one appears to have been Thomas Stretser's New Description of Merryland, 4th ed. (1741); ESTC: t139065, which appeared on reel 8284 in 1986.)

I recently updated all the information in my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood about items on the Eighteenth Century microfilm series for a forthcoming essay (“The availability of Haywood’s works, editing and issues of bibliography”). And I have also now updated my Checklist of Eighteenth-Century Erotica, using the information from Kearney. I used the updated information about the Haywood corpus as a benchmark for the eighteenth-century works in English either in, or previously in, the Private Case.

My (long) experience using ECCO suggests that Haywood is pretty representative of British Library holdings in general: i.e., that close to three-quarters of all Haywood items on ECCO are sourced from the British Library, and almost everything at the British Library is on ECCO. These proportions seem to be true generally of British Library holdings on ESTC and ECCO.

As I explain below, when I compared the British Library’s holdings of Haywood items with past and present Private Case items, I discovered that, while a similar percentage of Haywood items are on ESTC as are, or were, in the Private Case, it is still the case that, whereas 95% of all Haywood items held in the British Library are on ECCO, less than half of all material that is or was in the Private Case has now been reproduced on ECCO.

That there is little difference between the presence on ECCO of items presently in, versus those once in, the Private Case, suggests that items are not being withheld from ECCO due to access restrictions on the Private Case pressmark. I doubt very much that the material once or now in the Private Case is in significantly worse condition that the many heavily-worn Haywood items I have examined. Consequently, it would seem that the previous and present Private Case items are only being withheld because of the nature of their contents; i.e., because they are works of erotica.

* * * * *

Of the 149 eighteenth-century works in English, recorded by Kearney as being, or having been, held in the British Library’s Private Case, ten are not recorded on ESTC at all (6.7%), a dozen more are not listed as holdings in the relevant ESTC entry (15%), a further forty-nine that are on ESTC, are not reproduced on ECCO and another eleven, which are on ECCO, reproduce copies other than that in the Private Case. Of the seventy-eight items on ECCO (52%), thirty-four are definitely, and thirty-three are probably, sourced from the British Library (45%); “probably” because these items are not identifiable on ECCO by visible pressmarks.

Looking just at the fifty-four eighteenth-century works in English presently in the British Library’s Private Case, three are not recorded on ESTC at all (5.6%), twenty-five that are on ESTC are not reproduced on ECCO (46%) and another four, which are on ECCO, reproduce copies other than that in the Private Case. Of the twenty-nine items on ECCO (54%), seventeen are definitely, and eight are probably, sourced from the British Library.

The data I have on Haywood items is not in a form that facilitates detailed comparison. However, fifteen of the 273 eighteenth-century works in English, which I record in my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, are not recorded on ESTC at all (5.5%); and of the 180 Haywood items that are reproduced on ECCO, 128 (or 71%) are sourced from the British Library. Fifty-two Haywood items on ECCO are sourced from other libraries (29%), but in only seven of these cases does the British Library also hold the item concerned (5%).

What this means is that a similar percentage of either present (5.6%), or present and previous, Private Case items (6.7%), than Haywood items (5.5%), are missing from ESTC completely; a somewhat lower percentage of present and previous (45%), or present Private Case items (54%), that Haywood items (66%) are on ECCO; but a hugely-higher percentage of either present (54%), or present and previous, Private Case (55%), than Haywood items (5%), which are held by the British Library, are not on ECCO. An item once in, or presently in, the Private Case is over ten times as likely to not appear on ECCO, as a Haywood item.

* * * * *

I will save my data on Kearney for another time, but regarding the Haywood items on the Eighteenth Century microfilm series—and, therefore, on ECCO—128 items are British Library copies. The remaining are from the following libraries: the Bodleian (16), Houghton (9), Huntington (6), National Library of Ireland (6), Clark (5), Boston Public (4), Cambridge (3), and one each from the National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, and the Spencer Library.

Foxcroft Lecure on Private Case Collections

My 2016 Foxcroft lecture on private case collections has finally appeared on YouTube (here). I mentioned the lecture in passing here, but more details about the event at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne are now online here.

The year-long delay in appearance was caused by my heavy use of slides, which the in-house video editors at the State Library struggled with a little. After much discussion back-and-forward I asked them to post it online as it is, though there are still a few mis-matches, rather than delay posting it any longer.

Although it is always a little weird to see yourself on video, it is nice that it the lecture is finally available. In the second half of this year I will write up the presentation formal as a formal essay, which will be published by the Ancora Press at Monash University in association with the State Library. Until then, comments, corrections, hints etc. are all welcome!

* * * * *

[UPDATE 2018.12.20: To buy a copy of the (short) book that I based on this lecture, published by the Ancora Press in 2018 in an edition of one hundred copies, contact Kay Craddock - Antiquarian Bookseller.]

First Exhibition to Focus on Eliza Haywood

In 2004, in the literature-survey section of my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, I explained that

no public or private library has approached completeness in gathering together the works of Haywood. Indeed, it appears as if no library has ever made the attempt. The best Haywood collections are those held by the largest academic and public libraries, which have such collections by virtue of the fact that they have a lot of books. Consequently, no auction or library catalogue has offered a useful substitute for a Haywood bibliography or offered substantial assistance in compiling this bibliography. Also, there have been no substantial exhibitions of Haywood’s works and no substantial collections offered by booksellers and hence no accompanying catalogues to draw upon.

I am very pleased to say that this situation has changed. In a footnote to this passage I acknowledged that "Sandy Lerner has collected nineteen Haywood items since 1990 as a part of a larger project at Chawton House to promote research into the writings of English women before 1830." Though their collection is small (it just scrapes into the top thirty collections, in a tie with New York Public Library at no.29/30), the context is important. Chawton House is a collection with a purpose. Chawton House has made an attempt to collect Haywood and other women writers like her. And Chawton House does not have a collection of her books only "by virtue of the fact that they have a lot of books." It is appropriate then, that Chawton House will be the location of the first Haywood exhibition (details here), and it is a huge achievement that the collection has so quickly reached the point where they are able to host an exhibition of Haywood's works at all.

Though not credited online, the exhibition ("Naming, Shaming, Reclaiming: The ‘Incomparable’ Eliza Haywood") has been curated by Dr Kim Simpson, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chawton House Library. If you read her bio (here), you will see that Kim is interested in the contribution made to the development of fiction by anonymous and unattributed texts—texts which are rarely taught, edited or discussed by an author-obsessed academy. Given my own focus on Haywood, I must plead guilty to contributing to this unhealthy, anachronistic obsesson with authors—and I must admit to regularly having to do battle the urge to suggest any new, plausible attributions—but in my defence I would point out that I kept these unhealth urges in check and dismissed more attributions (45) than I added (2). And one that I dismissed (Ca.36 The Prude) is Kim's "particular favourite for its libertine villainess, Elisinda."

The exhibition is open for more than two months. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, so I hope that lots of people post pictures and descriptions online and that a catalogue of some sort is printed—since that too would be a first!

The Enfer on Wikipedia

When I was preparing my Foxcroft lecture I noticed that there was no entry on Wikipedia (in English) for the Enfer at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a quite poor entry (in French), but an excellent one (in German).

And so, as a prelude to creating a list of Private Case collections on Wikipedia, I decided to have a bash at translating the German entry into English. Thanks Google Translate! The new Wikipedia entry is here. If you see any errors, omissions, infelicities etc., please feel free to edit accordingly. And, since it is flagged as an orphan, please add links too!

I hope to expand on it, and the Private Case entry, later on—probably when I am writing up my Foxcroft lecture for publication in the new year.

Harvard Library Company, 1793

I have an octavo volume of Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator which, acording to a printed label in it (above), was once "The Property of Harvard Library Company, constituted January 1793." The label has a section for a price; the annotation in this area has been erased, but other annotations (below) suggest that the book was disposed of by the Harvard Library Company by 1845, since the new owner ("W.D."?) has added "Bought at Auction Feb. 17/45" and "No.58" to the fixed endpaper.

I have been unable to find a trace of the Harvard Library Company, constituted (by coincidence?) in the same month as the execution of Louis XVI, by guillotine, at the Place de la Révolution. Which is a shame, it would be nice to know more about a library founded, it seems, in imitation of The Library Company of Philadelphia sixty years earlier. If you have any information on this Library Company of Harvard, I'd love to hear from you.

A Typical Research Day

Although, for me, only one day each week is flagged as a research day—a day on which I am not expected to either teach or attend meetings—I do research at all times of the day and all days of the week. I expect my colleagues do the same. The advantage of a research day is that it does give me the opportunity to do things that require extended focus, or extended meandering. If I were a very disciplined and well-organised person, I would make use of this time to write article after article. And sometime I do get to do this, but more often than not I use my time to follow up on the interesting leads captured in files and folders that litter my computer desktop.

Thursday was typical of that second kind of day. Last week I happened upon a blog post (here) that alerted me to the fact that the University of Virginia Library has acquired a copy of the French translation of Ab.9.2 The Rash Resolve; Or, or the Untimely Discovery (1724): Emanuella, ou la découverte premature. Par Madame Élise Haywood (Paris, an IX [1800/1801]). I located only two copies of this book in 2004 (both in Europe), so it was a pleasure to add a third.

While updating the holdings listed in my Bibliography, I took the opportunity to look for more copies, which led me to a series of discoveries: the Bavarian State Library have scanned their copy of Emanuella and it is now on Google Books (here), so I added it to my list of Haywood texts online here and revised my entry in my Bibliography; I found two new listings for the translation in French literary journals, and was able to correct the date on the one I listed in 2004 (adding this and this, and correcting the details of this); and—via the latter—I found a (very short) review of the translation here), so I have posted the review and translation here and added it to my list of Haywood reviews here and in my revised Bibliography.

After all this updating I still haven't got around to mentioning what first struck me about the University of Virginia copy of Emanuella: it contains the bookplates of Paul Lacroix (1806–84) the French author and journalist (famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page here) and André Breton (1896-1966), the founder of Surrealism (also on Wikipedia here). As David Whitesell points out in his blog entry, it is fitting that Salvador Dalí designed Breton’s "arresting" bookplate.

The University of Virginia copy was (owned and) donated by the renowned "angliciste," Professor Maurice Lévy (1929-2012; also on Wikipedia here), author of, among other things, Le Roman “Gothique” Anglais, 1764–1824 (PhD. thesis, 1968), Roman et société en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle (1978) and some important articles on Mathhew Lewis. A pencil notation is visible on the photo of the endpaper posted by Whitesell, which suggests Levy paid one thousand francs (ca. A$220) for it—though when he did so is not clear.

The Levy collection is relatively small, but choice. As the collector himself explains (here), a "distinctive feature" of the French editions of (British) gothic novels—a feature "not shared by corresponding English volumes"—is that they are "individually illustrated with frontispieces by (most of them) reputed engravers." Nicole Bouché explains that "almost all" of Levy's late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century volumes are "in their original, often quite striking French bindings." That is, these French gothic novels are gorgeous: beautifully illustrated, printed and bound.

Anyone, like me, who has gone looking for a fetching illustration to use in a lecture on a gothic novel—such as Vathek, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk or Zofloya—will recognise the truth of Levy's observation: if you can't find a French edition, you may as well give up! My lectures on the gothic novel in my units "The Dark Hero" and "The Shadow of Reason" and "Reading the Past" are a hymn in praise of French engravers.

Until I read the posts by Whitesell and Bouché about the Levy collection, I had never heard of Levy's Images du roman noir (Paris: Éric Losfeld, 1973)—but as soon as I did, I knew I needed a copy, so I ordered one. (There appears to be only one copy in any library in Australia!) Nor was I aware of CERLI (the "Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur les Littératures de l'Imaginaire" [Centre for Studies and Research on the Literature of the Imagination (here)] until I read the Wikipedia entry (it is not mentioned in the Whitesell and Bouché posts), but I quickly found CERLI online, went straight to the bibliography page and was greeted by some very welcome headings: Fantastique; Littérature gothique; Vampires; Merveilleux; Fantasy; Science-fiction …

This site will going straight into my reader for the Dark Hero. Actually, I will have to do it next week now. Until then, I will just leave a screen-cap of the site on my desktop to remind me ...

Home Decorating and Library interior design

There is a bit in Arlo Guthrie’s Vietnam-war-era, draft-dodging-spoken-word song, "Alice's Restaurant" which comes to mind almost every time I happen across an article about home decorating with books.

I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the phsychiatrist, room 604." And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL."

So I can’t resist saying something about How to create a library in your home by Georgia Madden (“words” — i.e., written by), Jo Carmichael (styling) and Scott Hawkins (photography) on Homelife.com.au. This article on “Library interior design” doesn’t start well:

Few of us today have the luxury of a dedicated library. All too often, our beloved books are stacked in a corner or crammed onto overloaded shelves, creating messy hotspots that tend to be ignored. But when properly organised and neatly displayed, books can add a lived-in feel to your home, and give your guests insight into the real you.

Hmm … “messy hotspots”? And, really, in what world is it necessary to add a lived-in feel to your home?** Is it one in which you and your architect and stylist are so utterly devoid of character that your house always looks like a vacant hotel room or a blank interior space that builders have just departed from? Is this not an estate-agent’s trick to dress your manakin-house?

Of course not! Books can “give your guests insight into the real you”—the real you that you must carefully construct with the aid of a stylist and advice from Homelife.com.au. As Christian Lander explains in Stuff White People Like (2008):

white people need to show off the books that they have read. Just as hunters will mount the heads of their kills, white people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books. After all, what’s the point of reading a book if people don’t know you’ve read it? It’s like a tree falling in the forest. As much as white people do not want you rifling through their medicine cabinet, they are desperate for you to examine their bookshelves.

This is #138 in his book, but if you are interested and like this sort of thing you will find blog entries online for #34 Architecture, #37 Renovations, #49 Vintage and #79 Modern Furniture which are all amazingly relevant.

Passing by the horror vacui which afflicts our imagined interior decorator for a moment (covering both physical and psychological emptiness), I should mention that if you follow the link to the word “library” in this article you will discover an image depicting all of 74 books scattered across four shelves and a table. (Gallery here.)

The coffee-table book on the, err, coffee table is open. If it stays like that for more than a few hours the book will be ruined. No matter, it is serving an important purpose, vide Lander:

 But there are times when your visit to a white person’s house is not long enough for a full inspection of their bookshelves. How then can one gauge their taste? Simple, just look at the coffee table. You see, white people like to purchase very expensive, very large books that they can put on their coffee tables for other people to see and then use to make value judgments. If the coffee table book is about art, then the white person wants you to ask them about their trip to the Tate Modern. If it’s about photography, they want you to ask them about their new camera. If it’s about football or bikinis, you should politely ask to leave.

 (The book is on interior design, so perhaps this white person wants you to make a value judgment about their taste in interior design and ask about their visit to Homelife.com.au. And NB again Lander’s #142 hardwood floors, only in the book). 

Georgia Madden’s “words” of advice continue: a well-proportioned bookcase can store “a large quantity of books” (about 105 in the image above), lining a wall with bookshelves “will allow you to store a huge number of books” and “if you have an enormous amount of books, you may need to store them in several different spots”: A lot less than “large” is still, as we have seen, a library.

I could spend just as much time on the arrangement of books (we have Shakespeare’s works and To Kill a Mockingbird salted among volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed novels—good work Jo) but since one of the captions is “utilise bookends for visual appeal as well as practical” [sic] it does seem a little cruel to continue. As for the follow-up article How to make a faux bookshelf from old book spines, the less said the better.

**Someone recently stuck their head into my office to say a cheery hello, congratulating me on almost having finished unpacking (many staff members in our building had to move offices in January). Of course, I was one of the staff members who didn't move. I guess that makes my whole office a messy hotspot.

Meissner's Translation of The Invisible Spy

Until this morning August Gottlieb Meissner did not have a Wikipedia page—in English anyway. So I have created one by translating the German Wikipedia page (see here). Anyone who is able to improve on my feeble efforts, please do so.

If you look at the Wikipedia page I have created you will see why I thought it worth adding: Meissner translated Eliza Haywood's The Invisible Spy as Der Unsichtbare Kundschafter in 1791 and 1794.

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood I dated this translation to 1756, a particularly stupid—and embarrassing—goof on my part because Meissner was three at the time! To be fair to my younger self, I repeated the dating of this translation to 1756 by Wilhelm Heinsius (in 1812), Karl Goedeke (1916) and Mary Bell Price and Lawrence Marsden Price (1934), but since I give the date of birth and the date of publication on the same line I really have no excuse. As I said, embarrassing.

[1791/94 edition, vol. 1]

If we pass over the ghost of Ab.69.8 (the not-first edition), there appear to have been five editions of Der Unsichtbare Kundschafter: 1791/1794, 1795, 1800, 1812 and 1814. Of these I now have four (see image at top). The one I don't have is one of the few works I have not seen (Ab.69.12; the 1812 edition),** so I am pretty keen on finding a copy. I was only able to locate a single copy of this edition, but the same was true of the 1800 edition and—well—here it is, so I may get lucky!

[1791/94 edition, vol. 2]

When you put these four editions side by side, the most striking thing about them is their illustrations. Each edition has a vignette on the title-page to both volumes, and it is the same illustration in each edition. But each differs from the others in terms of the frontispieces.

[1800 edition, vol. 1]

The 1795 edition (Ab.69.10) has no frontispieces, while the 1791/1794, 1800 and 1814 editions (Ab.69.9, Ab.69.11 and Ab.69.13) each have frontispieces unique to themselves. I have not had a chance to scan these images properly, or to take better photos, but, as you can see, some of these illustrations are stunning!

[1800 edition, vol. 2]

I particularly like the ones in the 1814 edition from Meißner's Sämmtliche Werke (two copies of which are now available on Google Books, see the frontispieces below; on Google Books here and here; see also my updated list of Haywood Facsimile Texts and Downloadable pdfs here).

[1814 edition, vol. 1]

[1814 edition, vol. 2]

**In fact, it is a work I had to create a special category for in my Bibliography, because the librarian responsible for protecting it took his job so very seriously that he refused to divulge anything at all about it. I sent a series of emails to him, his colleagues and his superiors and then to random staff members at the university concerned. Nothing. He would promise to respond in emails copied to others, but I never got a word out of him. I believe the technical term for someone like this is a bibliotaph.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

Harvard College Library Borrowing Records

There has been a fascinating discussion on Exlibris-List this last week under the provocative title of "Happy birthday to us, we will now violate your privacy."

The original post (by Christine Karatnytsky) was prompted by a New York Public Library blog postings featuring a small selection of call slips (A History of the Library as Seen Through Notable Researchers).

Since many contributors to the Exlibris-List have written, studied or read studies based on library borrowing records the reaction to this blog post has been mixed, but largely supportive of the NYPL. Others were outraged and argued that the library had no right to retain or publish these call slips.

Personally, I am closer to Edward Levin's position: "there's a world of difference between a scholarly research project and a gratuitous 'books of the celebrities' blog post." And, while I wouldn't want to see the records destroyed, as some contributors would, this sort of populist celebrity-scholar reporting hardly justifies what is perilously close to invasion of privacy.

* * * * *

One contribution in particular caught my eye. Christian Dupont explains that the Harvard College Library charging records between 1762 and 1896 have been digitised and are now available online! This resource is a part of the Harvard collection of resources Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History (under "Using Libraries").

If you click on this link you will find 179 records for individual library account books etc. It takes a while to get the hang of the navigation software, particularly to get the images to appear large enough to read the manuscript entries (which are often cramped). But, flipping through a few volumes and leaves you will find some evidence of "light" reading among the law texts, medical dictionaries and other utilitarian books.

It would take a dedicated researcher to index the books that appear in these manuscript records against a College library catalogue to shine some light on borrowings from the library in the eighteenth-century. Without such an index it would take an even more dedicated Haywood scholar, a hugely dedicated Haywood scholar, to trawl all 179 volumes on the off-chance that a student recorded their borrowing of The Female Spectator. It would be nice if some one were so dedicated, but the chances seem low.

But, if someone were to index these records—and others like them—it wouldn't just be me and other Haywood scholars lining up to pat them on the back: a generation of scholars and PhD students would benefit from it.

Collecting Eighteenth Century Literature

Over lunch yesterday I read Carl Spadoni's Collecting Eighteenth-Century English Novels in the Twenty-First Century, which was published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction in 2002 (vol. 14, no. 3). Carl gets a mention in the Acknowledgements to my Bibliography for the help he offered me during my lightning tour of North America in the summer of 1995.

He begins with an amusing anecdote about an novel by Elizabeth Blower that he was offered, which McMaster didn't have. He uses it is a way of introducing the subject of the astonishing rarity of eighteenth-century novels in general, and particularly the works of "minor" writers.

As a rare book librarian, he is particularly interested in what this means to librarians in terms of collection development: the need to move beyond high-spot collecting to preserve works which—despite microfilms, scanning projects etc—remain on the brink of annihilation. But also, the need to collect writers in depth. As a modest collector of eighteenth-century literature, particularly women writers, and one particular writer in depth (Haywood obviously), this was music to my ears!

Carl reminds his readers that McMaster's holdings in the eighteenth century "particularly with respect to novels, was, and continues to be, strong, the largest of its kind in Canada and one of the best in North America": similar to Monash in fact. The ESTC code-finder I mentioned in my last post provides a count of ESTC records as well as providing ESTC codes. A search for Australian libraries reveals that the top ten institutions (those with more than one thousand ESTC items) are:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) 7511
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7452
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4837
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4060
5. State Library of SA (SSL) 2873
6. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2597
7. University of Melbourne (VU) 2294
8. State Library of NSW, Rare Books (NSL-RB) 1199
9. Private collection, SA (PC-S) 1171
10. State Library of NSW (NSL) 1008

Of course, if you combine NSL with NSL-M etc you get a slightly different top ten:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) [combined] 7515
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7452
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4837
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4060
5. University of Melbourne [combined] 2900
6. State Library of SA (SSL) 2873
7. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2597
8. State Library of NSW (NSL) [combined] 2478
9. Private collection, SA 1171
10. University of Queensland 979

One third of the 303 Australian ESTC codes are recorded as holding nothing (!), a further one third have five or fewer listings, only about one tenth have one hundred or more works. Number 9 is a private collection in South Australia, which is certainly impressive, but it puts all institutional libraries with fewer than one thousand items in the shade (sorry QU: you're out).

* * * * *

Returning to Carl's article, although these ESTC holdings include all pre-1800 books, you can see that the Monash holdings are "strong" and one of the largest of its kind in Australia. So his reflections on collection development seem particularly apt. I will quote them as length:

As James Raven has rightly pointed out, the dominance of best-selling authors "inevitably introduces distortion into the history of the early period of the 'rise of the novel.''' Practically all discussion about collecting eighteenth-century novels focuses on the works of major authors … Competition for first editions of this kind will always be fierce … [but] a research library with an eighteenth-century collection will want to own not just first editions of major novelists but necessarily later editions as well. Scholars have learned the hard lesson that not all texts of a work are the same and even within an edition there are often textual variants. … While it may not be possible in practical terms to collect all major novelists in depth, certainly an attempt should be made to collect a few major authors in this way so that editions, issues, and reprintings of an author's works are housed in one institution.

Research libraries such as McMaster University … have a responsibility to collect these treasured resources before they disappear altogether from the antiquarian market. Under ordinary circumstances, and especially with an eye on budgetary constraints, one might be inclined to take a more measured approach to collecting eighteenth-century fiction so that one eventually acquires a collection representative of a variety of different narrative techniques … Indeed, one could push the point further by arguing that only the best novels from each sub-type should be collected … But this approach overlooks the dire fact that to a great extent we are in a race against time with diminishing resources to build collections.

Unless a library already has a core collection of good eighteenth-century novels and is prepared to add to it vigilantly on an individual basis, it would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to build a great collection of this kind. While it is certainly true that there is still an abundance of good eighteenth-century books for sale, works of fiction appear much less frequently in antiquarian catalogues in comparison to other genres of literature such as poetry and drama. Antiquarian dealers are increasingly aware of the scarcity of eighteenth-century novels. In their catalogue descriptions they not only provide commentary about the novelist and the work, they also state the number of known copies available and where they are located. Scarcity itself has driven up all prices regardless of the stature of the author or the merit of the novel.

So, any library not already in the top half-dozen in Australia for this sort of material can probably forget building a great collection, and those that are in the top half-dozen need to "add to it vigilantly" now while the relative "abundance of good eighteenth-century books" persists.

* * * * *

As a collector, what stands out for me is that, since "practically all discussion about collecting eighteenth-century novels" focused on the works of major, male authors, there was an opportunity (until 2002 and to a much more limited extent now) to build a collection on a few major authors in depth, while collecting other, minor, works "before they disappear altogether from the antiquarian market".

In the last week I have received a few catalogues and found another online that have hammered home the "Time is—time was—time's past"-message. Bauman Rare Books have a handful of Shakespeare Quartos (including a 1639 Henry IV Part 1 for $185,000). Among the items listed is a book that I put on a wants list in 1984: the $20,000 price tag suggests that "time's past" (i.e., it is time to accept that I will never be able to afford) Cornelius Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy of 1655.

Bauman's cater to high-point collectors with deep pockets. They regularly have works from the eighteenth century, but these are mostly books of historical importance, rather than high-point eighteenth-century literature. However, they do have quite a bit of high-point seventeenth-century literature. Clearly, we have not quite reached the point where eighteenth-century literature in general is rare, and the high-point items are impossibly rare, as we have for seventeenth-century literature (almost all seventeenth-century books, let alone one in decent/complete condition, are quite rare). This rarity is a necessary pre-condition for the inventive prices—$20,000 for Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy—that Bauman's specialise in. After all, they can only really get away with this such prices when they are the only dealers carrying the books they are selling

Although Bauman's do not deal much in eighteenth-century literature, others do, and the stellar prices they ask are clearly not that far away. And a perfect example of this is a set of Haywood's Invisible Spy that has been circulating among dealers for four years!

The set turned up in March 2007 at Gorringes, an auction house in Lewes, East Sussex. The estimate was £150–200; I bid £420, but it went for £700 to James Burmester; who listed it in his Catalogue 75 in July 2009 for £1750. It was bought by David Brass Rare Books, who listed it at US$8,500. It hasn't sold. After all, it isn't rare and it isn't particularly important to a Haywood collector, let alone a collector of eighteenth-century literature. Betsy Thoughtless is important, though common; Love in Excess is important and rare as hen's teeth. But Invisible Spy?

I am not sure whether the under-bidder at Gorringes was also a dealer, but I do know that the value (the price at which a copy will actually sell to a collector/library) is less than the £700 paid by James. Most likely, it is £420, the amount I offered, since I suspect I was and remain the only collector in the market. I subsequently got a copy for USD125—one 68th of the price David Brass is asking.

The importance of David Brass's inventive price is that it is an indication that major authors of the eighteenth century are beginning to attract the attention of speculative dealers. Carl's message, that "time is" for those libraries and collectors who have already made a start on eighteenth-century literature to add to their collections "vigilantly" now while they can. Once Bauman-prices rule, we can give up and start on something else.

**A final note: another way of arranging the top ten is by state: ACT (14,967), Victoria (11,797), SA (6641), NSW (2478), QLD (979). Who'd have thought that NSW was so far behind the rest of Australia?!

[UPDATE 2023.03.24—I have updated the URL for the ESTC code-finder; see here for my "Eighteenth-Century Books in Australian Libraries, revisited"]