Eliza Haywood in Sydney, 1934

On the weekend I made an astonishing discovery: I am not the first person in Australia to have an interest in Eliza Haywood. Amazing, I know; check it out:



Below I have transcribed the article I discovered: Gerald Dillon, “'The Female Spectator': Mrs. Eliza Heywood's Periodical” Australian Woman’s Mirror, vol.10, no.15 (6 March 1934): 8, 59 (here). The illustrations—seeming prepared for this essay—are signed "CON" (elsewhere in the Mirror the name is expanded to "R. W. CON"—but I am still not able to identify them).



From the spelling of Haywood's name (Heywood, rather than Haywood) it is fairly clear that the source of Dillon's text was The Female Spectator. Being selections from Mrs. Eliza Heywood's periodical (1744-1746). ed. Mary Priestley, illustrated by Constance Rowlands (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1929), but his selection of anecdotes also makes this likely, since he does not mention anything that is not in the Priestley edition.



However, the reason that I suspected that Dillon's text was the Priestley edition is that there were very few eighteenth century copies of Haywood's Female Spectator in Australia in 1934 (other than my own copies, there are still only three). In 1934 the only complete, eighteenth century copy was almost certainly that in the University of Melbourne library. Monash acquired their copy at some point after the university was founded in 1958; while the only copy in Sydney—an odd-volume of the 5th edition—first appears on "NUCOM 2" (the "Second Cumulative supplement" of Australia's "National Union Catalogue of Monographs," 1977)—not NUCOM 1 (1976)—so it was probably acquired in the 1970s.

Not only were there no eighteenth century copies of Haywood's Female Spectator in Sydney in 1934, there appear to have been no copies of the Priestley edition in any institutional library either: and there still are none! It seems likely that Dillon was relying on his own copy, so—from my point of view—he had an excellent libary.

I am not sure whether Dillon realised just how pitiful a cultural backwater Sydney is and was, but I am sure he felt that he was doing his bit to both entertain and improve his readers with the series of roughly fifty bookish essays he wrote for Bert F. Hoy, editor of the Australian Woman’s Mirror, many about women or women writers such as Joanna Southcott, Ouida, Angella Burdett, Sidney Webb and Katherine Mansfield (probably his most famous essay).

I have not been able to find out as much about Dillon as I would like, but what I have found I will put into a separate post about him soon. [That post has now been completed; see here] Until then, here is his take on Eliza Haywood.

* * * * *

“The Female Spectator”
MRS. ELIZA HEYWOOD'S PERIODICAL
By GERALD DILLON

THE FEMALE SPECTATOR was the first periodical to be produced by a woman, and may therefore be regarded as the inspiration from which are derived the whole regiment of women’s papers to-day.
  Mrs. Eliza Heywood was founder and first and last editor. She was also its entire staff. The paper came out as a monthly in 1744 and enjoyed an existence of two short years. It was one of the many imitations of the type of journalism produced by Steele and Addison in THE SPECTATOR, but Mrs. Heywood’s periodical was written of course from and for the feminine viewpoint.
  Mrs. Heywood was what might be called a woman of the world. Her husband left no footprints on the sands of time. Of him it is known only that he deserted his wife, who was then left to shift both for herself and her two children.
  She went on the stage for a brief period, but subsequently became a “writing woman.” She produced some enthusiastic novels, re-wrote some plays, mothered a few pamphlets, and was a publisher for a span. She was born about 1693 and died in 1756.
  Rumor has it that Mrs. Heywood was what the period called “a flighty woman,” if she was not actually “fast”—though there is nothing at all in the tone and temper of her paper even to hint at that; nor is there anything in THE FEMALE SPECTATOR bearing even a slight resemblance to woman’s journalism as we know it to-day.
  The paper printed no serial. It never boasted of a “bright” article. There was nothing of “interest” about Lady Thingumitite or the Queen’s pet cat. No household hints. No medical advice.
  There were stories (of sorts) and some feeble murmurings about Nature study and natural philosophy.
  Mrs. Heywood, however, knew the value and importance of sexual themes in relation to light reading. The stories all had a moral—the moral being “’tis better to look before you leap” in the matter of love, and the stories all carried dreadful emphasis on the terrible ubiquity of the ensnaring male.
  I have said that THE FEMALE SPECTATOR was composed of a staff of one. In the first number we are introduced to two assistants, Mira and Euphrosine, but I think this trinity was a piece of camouflage on the part of Mrs. Heywood, and that in reality their existence was due to an editorial compromise with truth.
  Mrs. Heywood was a believer evidently in the type of male which Hollywood has now perfected.
  We notice one article on “Peace, a Promoter of Finikins,” in which attention is drawn to the prevalence of somewhat effeminate men. Indeed, Mrs. Heywood goes so far as to publish a page from the account book of a bankrupt beauty specialist showing an amount of £38/9/6 due to her from “a gentleman now in the army.”
  This gentleman had been supplied with a variety of “beautifying” things, including lip-salve, carmine, powder, jessamin butter for the hair, cold cream, perfumed mouth water, a toothbrush, and a riding mask to prevent sunburn!
  Mrs. Heywood hoped that “frequent campaigns” would wear this effeminacy off.
  As a specimen of short story we have “Amaranthus, his Passion for Aminta.”
  The gentleman with the long name was of course an army officer. He was ordered to Germany. He took leave of Aminta with vows of eternal remembrance, but in spite of the fact that he vowed also to marry Aminta on his return he did not do so. In fact, he forgot all about her at the earliest possible moment.
  When he came back (after a severe battle in which he was wounded) he explained to Aminta that he was “convinced a tender intercourse with the ladies took up too much of a soldier’s mind” … and he preferred to be a good soldier. So Aminta retired to “a lone county house” and lived in single unhappiness for the rest of her life.
  Then there is the story of “Erminia, How Ruined,” who went to a masquerade (a masked ball). She also ended in a lone country house.
  These stories are only a part of the monthly features. The paper evidently had some out side contributors, and of the sterner sex, too. In April, 1745, we notice “Philo-Naturae,” who lived apparently in the Inner Temple, contributing a long letter of the “museum” type, covering such matter as “Worms, Somewhat Wonderful,” and “Butterflies, How Engendered.”
  In one article Mrs. Heywood discourses on “flying machines” and “the impossibility of their use.” She says:
  I have indeed heard some people foolish enough to maintain that there would come a time in which the ingenuity of man will invent machines to carry him through the air with the same ease as we now cross the seas; which, they cry, seemed doubtless as impracticable at first as this does at present. … Mrs. Heywood, however, knew better. She says God taught Noah how to build the Ark, and if God had wished man to fly He would obviously have shown him how.
  Though the “bodyline” controversy was then in the womb of time Mrs. Heywood was apparently an appreciator of the value of sport for the sake of sport. She says: “To hurl the tennis ball or play a match at cricket are certainly robust and manly exercises” … and deplores the introduction of monetary considerations into these activities. Evidently cricket and tennis in 1745 were—as now—not what they were!
  Eliza was the original Dorothy Dix. In November, 1745, “Bellamonte” writes to her for guidance in the choice between three suitors.
  A is tall, graceful, of honorable family and “well fixed”; has no vice, but is evidently not an ardent lover. When he should be telling her that he can’t live without her he is talking about Admiral Balchen, and the loss he was to the nation.
  B is a lover; in fact he is more like a pet poodle from the description. He is well off, too, but too agreeable, too accommodating, too slave-like.
  C is gay, witty, genteel, handsome and addresses to a charm.” Good voice, musical, and generally is a sort of pocket encyclopedia—but not so well off. “Bellamonte” suspects that C is a bit “too full of himself.” What should she do?
  The answer is rather involved, but it amounts to this: Take A; his serious turn of mind will probably make him a death-do-us-part husband.
  I do not know how the ladies regarded THE FEMALE SPECTATOR—perhaps as rather a naughty journal to be hidden from Mamma—but I am sure that to a great many who led sheltered lives it was a window on the world.
  That world was full of exciting possibilities, a world in which youth, at least occasionally, had its fling. A world that is no better than it ought to be, because it was peopled apparently by vigilant parents of highly respectable daughters who matched their united wits against a host of bold seducers, and in the resulting contests there was both give and take…



[UPDATED 29 August 2021]

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]

Chapbook Illustration and the History of Dr. Faustus

Thanks to Giles Bergel et al., bibliographers of the (very) long eighteenth-century have a valuable new widget for image-matching woodblocks. The widget was developed by Bergel et al. to search of woodblock illustrations in Scottish chapbooks held in the National Library of Scotland.

Importantly, said widget—"NLS Chapbooks"—has an external search function, allowing you to "Search using your own image" (see here) in much the same way you can conduct image searches using Google Images (here) etc.

As I have said recently (here), that the lack of a "Search using your own image" function, is the largest (remaining) limit on the utility of Hazel Wilkinson's otherwise outstanding "Compositor" (aka Fleuron 2.0).

Knowing this—and my interest in this subject generally—David Levy kindly sent me the details of the "NLS Chapbooks" search engine and a link to a very informative video of Bergel's NLS talk "Exploring Chapbooks Printed in Scotland with Machine Vision" (here).

* * * * *

Conveniently, I had the perfect candidate to test the "NLS Chapbooks" search function: the image above that appears on a chapbook History of Dr. Faustus, which I blogged about in 2010 (here). The result of my search was extremely gratifying. As you can see, it matched the image to seven items (listed below)—one of them from my copy of the History of Dr. Faustus—before the algorithm failed.

Something that should be immediately obvious, even in the small images above, is that the block has been intentionally altered—or "diminished" as Bergel explains in his talk (starting at 35.00). A halberd, a late eighteenth century version of the pole-axe-spear-weapon, is present in five of the seven images, but is missing from the two issues of the History of Dr. Faustus.

A closer examination of the seven images reveals two much more subtle changes: a very small chip in the hat (which seems to be some sort of French military bicorn hat), that becomes progressively less small, and a very small crack adjacent to that chip, which becomes progressively larger.

Above, we see the four distinct states or forms of this block represented by the NLS images, with the changes mentioned: [1] undamaged; and [2] tiny chip to hat (1st image below); [3] small chip and second tiny crack; and [4] large chip and small crack (2nd image below). The last of these corresponds with the block's de-halberdising.

Looking just at the just the top of the hat, this progression is a bit clearer—despite the pixilation at the magnification necessary.

* * * * *

The pixilation is a clear indication of the path to further progress. The excellent work by Bergel and his team may not be reproducible by Wilkinson (using images from ECCO), because the images she is working with are at a lower resolution that the NLS images. (NLS Chapbooks download at approximately 350dpi, ECCO images at 72dpi.)

Like decent OCR, matching user-supplied images requires more detailed images to reduce the number of false positives. This suggests the utility of ECCO upgrading at least a proportion of their scans with fresh photography, to improve OCR (which they now supply) as well as this sort of image-searching functionality.

But even when working with better images, such as those in the NLS Chapbooks series, resolution sets limits in identifying the sort of progressive damage to blocks seen above. This, in turn, suggests that the optimal image resolution is probably 600dpi—which has long been the digital archive standard.

* * * * *

One final point to make about the items listed below, with NLS cataloguing links, is that the suggested date of publication for these items at NLS will have to be re-considered. Judging from the ornament damage, the earliest item (Three Scotch songs) cannot be "1850–1860?" if the History of Dr. Faustus is "1840–1850?" etc.

Also, if the History of Dr. Faustus is the final form of this block, then it should also be clear that the person depicted in this block is neither Faustus not Mephistopheles—nor anyone else from the History of Dr. Faustus for that matter. As Edward J. Cowan and Mike Paterson explain:

"It was often felt necessary to ornament the front cover with a picture , and a woodcut usually served this purpose—even if it had been used several times before, was fairly crudely executed and made only an indirect allusion (if any at all) to the content." (Folk in Print: Scotland's Chapbook Heritage, 1750-1850 (2007), 13).

* * * * *

State 1: spear; no chip
Three Scotch songs: Donald Caird. Bundle and go. The Haughs of Crumdel (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]) [L.C.2845(30)] NLA catalogue entry.

State 2: spear; tiny chip
John Falkirk's cariches: to which is added Tam Merrilees; a capital story (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1840-1850?]), E [L.C.2852.C(10)] ¶ issue with number NLA catalogue entry; E [L.C.2848(1)]. ¶ issue without number NLA catalogue entry.

State 3: spear; small chip, 2nd tiny chip
Four popular songs: viz. Glasgow fair; Oh what a parish. A beauty I did grow; and The adventures of a shilling (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]), E [L.C.2845(32)] NLA catalogue entry.

The Haughs of Crumdel: to which is added, It fell upon the Martinmas time. Wilt thou go my bonny lassie? (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]), E [L.C.2845(5)] NLA catalogue entry.

State 4: no spear; large chip, 2nd small chip
History of Dr. Faustus: shewing his wicked life and horrid death, and how he sold himself to the devil, to have power for 24 years, to do what he pleased, also many strange things done by him with the assistance of Mephostophiles. With an account how the devil came for him at the end of 24 years, and tore him to pieces (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1840–1850?]), [L.C.2852.E(24)] NLA catalogue entry; L.C.2847(6)] ¶ issue without number NLA catalogue entry.

[UPDATED 2021.07.19]

Gossip in a Library, redux

The last time I mentioned Edmund Gosse and his puningly-titled essay collection, Gossip in a Library (1891; see here), I was rather hard on both the writer and his essay ("What Ann Lang Read").

Since I wrote that post in 2012, I have given four lectures on Gosse and his essay collection, in a variety of teaching units at Monash, and have continued to be equally hard on both.

In light of this, it may seem a little odd that I would spend a reasonable sum of money to buy the volume illustrated in this post, which is a signed, limited edition of Gossip in a Library containing a photogravure of Gosse.

Given that this limited edition was published a year later than the first edition, a copy of which I already have, I was clearly not motivated by any high-minded bibliographical or collecting principle: this is in no way better than a first edition. Quite the opposite, in fact.

However, the 1892, limited-to-one-hundred-copies, signed-by-the-author, deckled-edged, large-paper edition, has—as I mentioned—a photogravure of Gosse, and this sort of artwork is just the thing I need want for my book on Haywood's readers.

Looking online, I can only find one site which uses this 1892 photogravure. Not only is their reproduction (here) watermarked with text, it is also rather small: I will do better!

My only other justification for buying this kind-of duplicate is that it contains a two-page supplement of reviews ("Opinions of the Press"), which is not present in the 1891 edition of Gossip in a Library on Google Books (see here), and which will also be rather useful for my chapter of Gosse.

Marginal Notes, Now Published

Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins, edited by Patrick Spedding, Paul Tankard and Mia Goodwin (London: Palgrave, 2021)—the latest volume in the New Directions in Book History series—was issued on 29 March 2021. However, as far as I am concerned it was only really published yesterday, when I got to sit down on a quiet and relaxed Saturday morning, with a fresh coffee, and with the book in hand, like this:

The book, which is extremely satisfying to handle, is the final product of a conference collaboration that I first discussed with Paul Tankard in late 2015. The cover is also illustrated with the same image that graced the poster for our original conference (of the same name, and from which the book sprung) in September 2016 (announced on this blog, here).

I am inordinately proud of the cover image, since it contains a rebus—made slightly more obvious, I hope, by the positioning of image and title on the cover. As you can see in the original photo above, the annotator of my copy of Samuel Croxall's Fables of Aesop, not only glossed difficult words and phrases in the text, but also illustrated the silver tankard that is a central feature of this tale (which the thief is seeking at the bottom of the well). Not only is Paul's surname thus illustrated by way of annotation and rebus on the cover, mine is kind-of implied too: the "arch dissembler" being in the process of running or speeding (!) away. (Yes, this is lame, but it is a little less lame to me since, if I do not spell out my name, letter by letter, it is unfailingly recorded as "Speeding"!)

Moving on … of course, once I had a calm, reflective browse of the contents of our collection—I found one alarming error after another. And so I stopped, picked up my pencil, and annotated my copy with the corrections illustrated below. If you happen to read the book, or any of the essays in this collection, and find any more errors, please don't tell me. Rather, do as I have done, and as readers have long done, correct your copy too.