British Newspaper Archive

Although the November 2011 press release for the British Newspaper Archive focussed on the nineteenth-century content, the collection covers many regional newspapers with runs from the eighteenth century.

A search for "news" gets hits from the twenty journals up to 1800 (the five with an * are from pre-1750)

Aberdeen Journal
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette
Birmingham Gazette*
Bristol Mercury
Caledonian Mercury*
Chelmsford Chronicle
Derby Mercury*
Hampshire Chronicle
Hereford Journal
Ipswich Journal*
Kentish Gazette
Leeds Intelligencer
Manchester Mercury
Newcastle Courant*
Norfolk Chronicle
Northampton Mercury
Oxford Journal
Reading Mercury
Sherborne Mercury
Sussex Advertiser

There is a long review of the archive here, so I won't waste time on a lengthy explanation of how the archive works etc. And since I have only been able to do a small number of searches, I don't have the experience to undertake a longer review anyway. However, I have had a look at the Archive and from the searches I have been able to do I am keen to have better access.

Since Monash does not have access to the Archive (yet!) I registered and was given enough free points to see the results of a few searches. Doing this gives you thirty points. And since it costs five points to look at (and download) a page: I was able to look at six of the hits from my searches. For reasons I'll explain in a moment, this was not enough, so I registered using a second email address for another thirty points.

The few searches I was able to do for authors and titles enabled me to find advertisements for works in regional papers that will be useful for my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, my Checklist Database of Eighteenth-Century Erotica, and for a handful of articles I am working on.

A few examples of what I found will show how similar (and similarly useful) the Archive is compared to the Burney database, ECCO etc.

The London advertisements for Haywood's Female Spectator indicated an increasingly-wide circle of distribution. The earliest advertisements for individual Books mention only Thomas Gardner as publisher with the statement "and sold by all Booksellers in Town and Country." Later advertisements add R. Dodsley, J. Robinson, M. Cooper and Mrs. Dodd to this general statement ("all Booksellers in Town and Country") but in the end the advertisements claimed all "Booksellers of Great-Britain and Ireland." While I reported these imprint-claims in my BibliographyI was not able to specify, as I now can, that The Female Spectator was advertised in the Newcastle Courant of 9 August 1746 as being available from Jer. Roe in Derby and J. White in Newcastle. Undoubtedly, further searches will turn up even more sellers.

Another interesting find concerns Haywood's obituary, which was published in The Whitehall Evening Post on 26 February 1756, and was repeated in The Public Advertiser (27 February), London Evening-Post (28 February) and The Scots Magazine 18 (February 1756). Now, it seems, it was also printed in the Derby Mercury on 27 February and the Leeds Intelligencer on 2 March. I am not sure how typical this reporting of obits was, so I am not sure what—if anything—this tells us about Haywood's reputation outside of London.

But to return to the Archive: These are the three issues that stopped me doing a wider/more detailed search:

[1] searches do not always identify the exact page a passage appears on: only the section it is in (like "News" or "Advertisements"; and if that section runs over multiple pages your "hit" may be on any one of three or four pages). But, if you download your "find" you only get to download the page you are looking at—not the section. So, you have to find the right page before downloading your "hit"—otherwise you might download, say, page 3, when your hit is on page 4. (I didn't realise this at first, because many of my first hits were on a single page.)

[2] it is often difficult (and in some cases impossible) to find the passage you are searching for (your hit) because there is no (or limited) "hit-term highlighting". In one case I spent twenty minutes looking in vain for an advertisement. In desperation, when I decided to go through the entire issue of the newspaper, I discovered that I had blown my last remaining credit because—by wandering from the section the hit was supposed to be in—I had been charged another five points for what was deemed to be a new search/find. (In this case, the advertisements were on pages 1, 3 and 4: since the advertisement was not on these pages I looked at page 2—and was charged another five points to do so.)

[3] my browsers (Safari and Firefox) crashed regularly because the interface uses Flash. Every time I relaunched my browser and returned to the page image I had been looking at (usually, one I was in the process of actually downloading) I would be docked another five points. (That is, you crash, your session ends, and when you return, this is deemed to be a new session and a—therefore—a new search/find.)

When I get a chance I will repeat some of these searches on a newer computer. Meanwhile I will recommend that Monash adds this database to their arsenal: like the Burney collection, ECCO, NCCO etc it is hard to see how any researcher can keep abreast with leading scholarship without access to these text-bases.

Missing Texts, June 2012

This looks like it will be a great conference: I love the theme.

MISSING TEXTS
Birkbeck, University of London, Saturday 2 June 2012

The Material Texts Network at Birkbeck convenes and encourages innovative work on the materiality of texts. We invite 300-word proposals, from scholars working in any period and discipline, on the theme of ‘Missing Texts’. Papers might consider

* Texts or works that have been erased, over-painted, defaced, cancelled, or destroyed
* Missing works that exist only through photographs or other archival traces
* Texts or works that are better known through photographs, and are themselves rarely on display
* How do we know a text is missing? How do archives record missing texts? If a missing text must leave a trace to be felt as missing, are texts ever really missing?
* Texts or works overlooked for ideological, or other, reasons, in catalogues, inventories, & canons
* The role of missing texts in literary works
* The fetishisation of the ‘missing’ ur-text in textual studies and editorial procedures
* Pages torn from books, lost quires, blanks, unfilled miniatures, incomplete jottings on fly-leaves
* Letters, in which only one side of the correspondence is preserved
* The use by authors of the topos of the lost text, the text-in-the-making, the text-never-finished ("all this will be properly explained in our forthcoming masterpiece …")
* What happens when we find a long-missing text or work? How do we identify and read it?
* How do scholars address the loss of archives when writing, for example, histories of African and Asian nations where there are more Western texts than local ones? What kind of scholarship develops around these gaps?
* How do missing texts relate to redactions?
* Why do texts go missing in archives? What are the historical moments of great archival loss (for example, the archives destroyed in the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon, or the losses in German libraries during the World War II)
* Are texts more likely to go missing in particular media (manuscript more than print? Print more than digital?)
* Can a text ever go missing in the digital world?

Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20 minute paper) and a brief CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Gill Partington

* * * * *

Adam Smyth is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which examines hitherto neglected forms of life-writing (almanac annotations; parish registers; commonplace books; financial records) in which individuals constructed accounts of their lives. Research for this book was funded by the British Academy; a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship; and a Long Term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.

CFP: Revealing The Reader. A Symposium

Recent developments in the history of the book demonstrate that an interest in the material history of print culture inevitably leads us to the question of readers. How well can we understand the past, present and future of print culture without examining the uses to which it is put by its audience? This question serves not only to remind us of the primacy of the economic relationship between readers, writers and publishers, but draws our attention to the variety of cultural, social, political, and interpersonal roles that reading has played and continues to play.

The "Revealing The Reader" symposium at Monash's Centre for the Book, aims to bring together scholars with a common interest in contemporary and historical reading practices with the aim of showcasing current research in this rapidly expanding field, and providing a forum for discussion and debate on the state of reading research.

Paper proposals may address topics such as:

• Case studies of reading practices and reading communities
• The relationships between reading communities, publishers, authors etc.
• The relationships between reading communities and genre
• Methodologies for researching readers and their practices
• The material trace of reading
• Historical and contemporary evidence of reading
• Locations of reading
• The relationship between individual readers and reading communities
• Histories of reading
• Technologies of reading
• The role of existing and emerging technologies in revealing readers

This list is not exhaustive, and the conveners welcome submissions from researchers whose work investigates reading practices and readers from the perspective of the sociology of literature, book history, literary studies, mixed methods research, reader response theory, history, cultural studies, and the study of material culture. Submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers are particularly welcome.

Keynote speakers:
• Danielle Fuller (University of Birmingham): a chief investigator in the Beyond The Book research project into mass reading events.
• Susan Martin (La Trobe University): co-author of Sensational Melbourne: Reading, Sensation Fiction and Lady Audley's Secret in the Victorian Metropolis.
• Julie Rak (University of Alberta): author of a forthcoming study on the memoir boom in North America.

Please email 300-word proposals for 20 minute papers, and 50-word presenter bio-notes by Friday 27 April 2012 to conference organisers Anna Poletti and Patrick Spedding. Pre-constituted panel proposals welcome. Please include the conference title in the subject heading of your email.

The symposium will follow a one day masterclass, led by Danielle Fuller, on Thursday 28 June at the Wheeler Centre Melbourne as part of the "Readers and Reception" Masterclass series, presented by the National Centre for the Australian Studies, School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies. Information on the Masterclass series is available from Jinna.Tay@monash.edu or Louise.Poland@monash.edu.

The Adobe Caslon Apocalypse

I have been using Adobe Caslon Expert constantly since I bought it—at great expense—on 26 June 1995. I used it first on my "Fat Mac"—the Macintosh 512—then my PowerBook 145 and then my iMacG5.

For fifteen years, every time I've needed to transcribe an eighteenth-century text, particularly for the bibliographical descriptions in my Eliza Haywood Bibliography, I needed the Caslon Expert suit because it is/was the only font suit that includes most of the eighteenth-century sorts which were in use, such as the long-s, si, sl, st, ss, ct ligatures etc, as well as swash caps, ornaments and so on.

I first heard about the font suit from a Monash colleague, Brian McMullin, who used it for all of his bibliographical descriptions and I, in turn, mentioned it to and persuaded other book historians and bibliographers to get a copy of the suit for their work. I assume it is quite widely used by eighteenth-century scholars and book historians. And I gather, from the fact that (a) it has no competition and (b) many journals publish accurate transcriptions and bibliographical descriptions of pre-1800 texts using the sorts unique to this font, that journals such as The Library, PBSA, Studies in Bibliography etc all use Caslon Expert, just as Script & Print does—and so must all the book historians and bibliographers, who submit papers to these journals which use these eighteenth-century sorts.

At the start of 2010, when I got my newest Mac at Monash—an intel (Core 2, i5) iMac11.3—I started having problems using Caslon Expert. Serious problems. Some sorts simply started disappearing from files generated on my old computer (in Word 2004) when they are opened on the new computer (in Word 2008). I could not see some of the sorts, or print them, even when I generated a pdf at home on my old computer and tried to print it from my new computer.

I contacted the IT support people at Monash, and they were—frankly—useless. I sent queries, and got no replies; when I followed it up and was asked to re-send the query and supply files I did so, and still got no replies; and when I followed this up and was asked to supply files in person (emailing them wasn't enough) I trundled off and supplied the files, explained the problem at great length, and still got no answer. In the end I discovered that the the staff member working on this problem was on leave, or had left, and I was invited to start again!

By this time I had been doing a bit of searching on my own and discovered that Adobe were now selling "Adobe Caslon Pro"—an expanded Caslon suit in an OpenType font. But I wasn't sure I wanted to buy the font and upgrade the version of Word I was using (which I suspected was the root of the problem) unless I was sure it was going to work and that these changes would solve my problem. So, at this point, I decided to try the collective experience of the C18-List.

In December 2010 I asked whether anyone on the list had any experience using Adobe Caslon Pro and Caslon Expert. I also asked, because I was particularly concerned about it, whether a user has to manually change each sort (in Word files using Caslon Expert) to the equivalent sort in Caslon Pro, or whether the hidden IDs of each sort allowed Word (any version!) to automatically identify the correct sort in the new font. That is, whether you can simply open your old files and "hey presto" all the sorts have been updated from Expert to Pro.

Sadly, nobody had the experience of ether font to answer. And, I gather, few really understood the problem or question. I got answers relating to Caslon (i.e., the bog standard version with no ligatures) and how to instal it, other suggesting I try Caslon Pro, since it seemed to have the ligatures I needed, or asking whether Caslon Pro had the Welsh sorts they wanted—that is, they either misunderstand or ignored the question.

Having failed so spectacularly on the C18-List I gave up on the idea of trying the EXLIBRIS or SHARP lists too and decided to call in the support of my techie friends. I had been reluctant to do this at first, because I hate asking people to do their day-job for me when they are at home, and to do this for free! But, having asked those paid to help me (and failed) and those most likely to be in a very similar situation to me (and failed), I really had no choice. And I had limited success. Actually no success, but we did determine that the only way to get an answer to the question was to try it and to do that I need to get the font and the latest version of Word and see what happens.

I also tried Monash Arts IT again, and this time managed to find someone prepared to try to get an answer. He went away and scoured the net, I ordered both Word 2011 and Caslon Pro, and had them installed. And, having experimented with the new software and fonts and having heard back from Arts IT I now have my answer. And the answer is a lot worse than I imagined possible—and I am sometimes considered to be an apocalyptic pessimist!

It is not possible to open a Word 2004 file containing Caslon Expert sorts and have it open and work using that font in Word 2011, or to open, automatically identify identical Caslon Expert/Pro sorts and effect a substitution of the same. Moreover, you cannot manually effect a Expert/Pro sort-for-sort substitution and you cannot do this with a find>replace command.

Worse still, you cannot create a document in Word 2011 which uses the extended "Glyph Complement" at all—i.e., the many eighteenth-century ligatures such as si, sl, st, ss, ct etc which you expect to have access to because they are listed by Adobe in great detail in twelve pages of sorts here—on the basis of which you spent a small fortune to buy the font.

I should mention that Word 2011 is a very annoying program anyway, a lot worse than Word 2008, which was worse than Word 2004—which was such a poorly-designed piece of software itself that the designers of it ought to have been executed for crimes against humanity. So it takes a long time to go through the tortuous procedure necessary to turn "on" access to extended ligature sets in Word 2011, only to discover that this does not, in fact, give you access to the extended ligature set in Caslon Pro.

(And this only after you have discovered that the reason you cannot find any of the ligatures in any of the fonts you have installed is—after much hunting through the Word Help files and online forums—because the software designers have now added this multi-step process before you can use ligatures. I am not sure why I am surprised by this. In WriteNow only a single keystroke was needed to insert small caps. Word requires you to do a lot of mouse-activated busy-work do do the same. Which is part of the reason why I resisted for so long moving all my word processing files from WriteNow 3.0 to Word 2004 once the former was discontinued.)

It appears that the Microsoft-led transition from TrueType to OpenType fonts is part of the problem (i.e., the reason why you can't use Caslon Expert well in Word 2008 and cannot use it at all in Word 2011), but it is Word 2011 that precludes access to the full OpenType font set. What this means is that, with no access to the old font and no access to the new, Word has effectively blocked all access to both extended Caslon fonts.

The only solution seems to be to indefinitely maintain a ca.2008 computer running Word 2004 with Caslon Expert, with an attached printer, for all scholarly writing that requires transcriptions and bibliographical descriptions of eighteenth-century texts.

Unfortunately, said computers will be increasingly difficult to maintain, and increasingly useless for any other activity. (I have already had to block Flash on my home computer because my Internet browsers were crashing continuously.) And it is difficult to see what use any file will be that includes bibliographical descriptions using Caslon ligatures because—presumably—the dead-end that I am referring to will stop editors from reading, viewing or editing articles that contain these sorts and journals from publishing them.

The only possible escape from this dead-end that has been suggested to me by techie friends and by ArtsIT is via InDesign—a publishing program. However, so far I have had no success getting InDesign to open long files (and one of my files is five hundred pages long), and even short files open only as single pages. So I do not know whether font-substitution is possible, but I have established that no automatic substitution will occur. So any substitution will have to be set up manually, and may have to be undertaken via mouse-activated busy-work.

If that is the case it would not be worth doing in 90% of cases and, for me, certainly not possible on the file I am most concerned about: my Bibliography, which presently contains 372,326 words or 1,852,119 characters (excluding spaces). Since I use the full range of ligatures and other sorts the "updating" of my Bibliography in this way could require over half a million separate, manual font substitutions. That is, use the mouse to highlight a sort, use the mouse to go to the font menu, to follow the drop-down menu from Caslon Expert to Caslon Pro, and to identify the font (CaslonPro Regular, CaslonPro Bold etc). And then, if the character mapping isn't identical between Expert and Pro, go looking for the new key-stroke combination that generates the required sort. Repeated hundreds of thousands of times!!

As for creating new files in InDesign instead of Word, I have also not been able to generate or edit in InDesign with the Caslon Pro font set, but perhaps it is possible. The bottom line is, however, that bad as Word is, it is at least a word-processing program and so it is moderately-well adapted to writing and laying out an essay. InDesign is not. It is a publishing program and the only reason why it has access to the extended ligature sets in Caslon Pro is because it is the sort of program you might use to design a poster, or lay out a magazine. Using it to write an article would be like using your Mercedes Sports Coupe to transport a cubic meter of dirt—on the back seat.

And so it appears that this technological change will soon render unreadable all the files I have created in fifteen years of scholarship and will seriously impede any scholarship I might want to undertake in the future. How will anyone in future do a bibliographical description of an eighteenth-century text, or do a quasi-facsimile transcription of an eighteenth-century text? (Or a seventeenth- or sixteenth-century text?)

Bibliographers will be in a worse situation than we were prior to the advent of the personal computer and word processors, since we can no longer use typewriters (with the equivalent sort-set of Caslon Expert on a specialist golf-ball typewriter head) or even pen and ink—like some barbarian refugee from the days before the typewriter! And what will the editors of The Library, PBSA, Studies in Bibliography and Script & Print do, even if they were to accept submissions in pen and ink?

So, as you can see, O readers, the Adobe Caslon apocalypse approaches! The end is nigh! Woe to you, O scholars, for Microsoft has come down to you in great wrath …

[UPDATE 24 September 2026: some typos corrected]

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.]