ESTC to add Title Pages

Patricia Hargis from ESTC North America has circulated an email to the EXLIBRIS-List suggesting that ESTC will soon add images of title-pages to its records. Not surprisingly, bibliographers, eighteenth- centurists etc are excited by this development and each has their own priority. (One scholar has called for the broadsides to be first: a fair call.)

Here is the text of Patricia's email:

We have long had the practice of saving the photocopies of title pages and other pages you have sent us and attaching them to printouts of the appropriate on-line records, thereby creating a paper file of almost every item in the ESTC from 1701-1800. This "manual file" now occupies nearly an entire room. Remarkable isn't it?

After much thought and discussion, we have decided to digitize this 18th century manual file. We will scan your title pages to create image files and then link those files to the appropriate ESTC records, thereby making images of the materials you have been sending us for 35 years publicly accessible.

Digitizing the manual file will greatly increase the value of the ESTC as a bibliographical tool. Users tell us that having pictures attached helps to ensure that they are matching correctly. It is often not possible to articulate in a bibliographic record every small discrepancy that enables one to identify separate imprints. A picture is worth a thousand words!

Of course, ESTC needs permission to do this from all contributing libraries. I hope they co-operate.

In fact, I'd like to see this record>artifact link extended. ESTC already lists Eighteenth Century microfilm numbers, details of facsimiles and ECCO references in its records. But ECCO is a subscription service and it is not possible to follow a link in ESTC to ECCO image files. As long as Gale had a monopoly on digitised eighteenth century texts, this stalemate persisted. One of the beauties of this proposal is that it cuts out ECCO.

Of course, Gale (who owns ECCO) does not have a complete monopoly on digitised texts any more, and it would be nice to see links to eighteenth-century texts on Google Books and elsewhere listed on ESTC.

As I have mentioned before, some people are compiling this sort of information, but—just as it is a pain to separately log into ECCO and search for an item you have already located on ESTC—it is a pain to have to search for the text on Google Books or even on a list of digitised eighteenth-century texts.

Linking Google Book texts to ESTC records would also help Google overcome one of the strongest criticisms leveled at it, the dodgy cataloguing of their digital texts. No doubt the clear benefit to all parties will make such a development inevitable. And in the meanwhile, we can look forward to seeing at least a single page of the texts catalogued on ESTC!

Haywood Bibliography Note 3

Ab.35 Cleomelia (1726) was not Eliza Haywood's successful work, but it is one of her more interesting works from a bibliographical point of view. It was only printed once, but it was translated into French in 1751 and it was revised, re-titled, and reprinted in 1788 as The History of Miss Leonara Meadowson. This latter edition was lost for over two hundred years; my discovery of a copy in the Fales library in New York was one of the highlights of my research. (My essay on this discovery was published in the BSANZ Bulletin in 1999.)

The French translation is particularly interesting because it appeared in a collection—Mélange de différentes pièces de vers et de prose translates as A Mix of Various Pieces of Poetry and Prose—with works by Susanna Centlivre (A Bold Stroke for a Wife), Alexander Pope (Eloisa to Abelard) and Thomas Southerne (Oroonoko).

Happily for Haywood scholars the Bodleian copy of Mélange is now on Google Books. The Bodleian copy is one of nine I know of. I now have two copies of my own; one from an incomplete set (vol. 1, 2 of 3), one not.

Just as the high-grade paper, crisp printing and wide margins of this book suggest an upper-market product, the elaborate gold-tooled bindings on my copies suggest that the buyers of these books were—economically speaking—just as select. I am sure Haywood would have been delighted.

The images below shouldn't need any further introduction. However, if you'd like any more information, I have added a corrected entry for Mélange de différentes pièces de vers et de prose to my Haywood Bibliography, Addenda and Corrigenda page.

[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.]

Bawdy Songbooks Online

Below are links to any early nineteenth-century bawdy songbooks—such as we will include in our Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (2011)—that are on Google Books, The Internet Archive, or anywhere else. There are very, very few online, but I'll add whatever items I can find, as I find them.

Fanny Hill's Bang-up Reciter, Friskey Songster (1835)

Transcribing Eighteenth-Century Texts

A colleague at Monash asked me if I knew of a commercial transcription service that could transcribe a 450-page early eighteenth-century English text into a Word document. The text would serve as the basis for an edited version of the text. It would be compared, word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark, a number of times over.

This sort of textual editing is tedious, but it would be even more tedious to type the whole thing first, and still have this job ahead of you. Transcription is also very, very time-consuming for all but the fastest and most accurate typists. Which is why she wanted to pay someone else to do it. Unfortunately, the conditions of the grant she has received rule out paying a research assistant to do the job; but she can pay a business to do it.

I should explain, that the text had never been reprinted, and no version of the text was available in digital form. So, not on Google Books, not on ECCO, no substantial excerpts in recent editions. Zip. She was going to have to create the text ex nihilo.

When she first discussed this problem with me I suggested that, if the text were clear, she could scan the text and run OCR software over it herself. She would have a lot of f/s substitutions to make, but you can get a fairly useable text this way. Nowhere near as good as a transcription service, but usable. But she would have to spend quite a while getting nice clean copies and then either scanning them all herself or send these to a bureau to be scanned and OCR'ed.

I also suggested voice-recognition software, which I use all the time for transcribing chunks of eighteenth-century texts. You get better results than with OCR, but still, a lot of copy-editing is required.

We also discussed just sending it to a secretarial service for typing. You might end up with a lot of f/s substitutions, but, as I said, that really isn't too difficult to do. But once you are sending it out to be done you start to think of commercial transcription services who have handled eighteenth-century texts before.

I had heard of a number of large projects that have sent material to be transcribed in India or in Asia: I am pretty sure that the British Library Catalogue was transcribed in Asia (with predictable results). And I figured, other people must have wanted a commercial transcription service before, for the same reason. But, looking online, the only transcription services my colleague could find were for legal and medical records. What she wanted was someone with experience handling eighteenth-century texts.

So I sent a query to the 18C-List. The answers I got, on and off-list, were (1) offers by individuals to undertake the transcription, (2) suggestions that the she didn't need a transcription (that the text might already be available in some form), (3) suggestions that her publisher might do the transcription for her and (4) details of a transcription service. (There was also a reply that contained an attack of Obama's health insurance legislation (!?!), which implied the question was off-topic, or warning that the answer was. I am not sure which.)

I gathered from the answers I got that most editors transcribe their own texts, even very lengthy ones. It is seen as part of the job. The textual editor might take over responsibility (in a larger project) but the volume editor, the editor of an individual text in a series or multi-volume set, actually does the typing. It is called keystroking. Which suggests something much more pleasurable than the RSI-inducing activity that is transcribing.

The next most common arrangement—no. 3 above—is that the press does it in-house. I know Pickering & Chatto do this, they are transcribing the texts of 2000 bawdy songbooks right now for a collection I am editing with Paul Watt. But apparently it is not just Pickering & Chatto. It seems some of the larger presses, like Cambridge, farm out this transcription, but I couldn't find out who they were sending their texts to.

This brings us to no. 4 above: one scholar with experience in this area told me that,

We outsource practically all our transcription to India. The only transcription we tend to do ourselves is unique manuscript material. The companies we use are Planman Technologies (good, but slightly uneven) and Acogent.

How this works is that we sign a contract with the companies for a certain volume of transcription work (this gives us a bulk discount), and then we fill this using our own internal budget to cover the costs. We either ship books physically via courier to India, or, if they’re fragile or rare, scan them here and send the page scans to India via FTP server.

What we do is somewhat different from what your colleague wants, in that we do bulk digitization and we get our transcription encoded in TEI XML rather than as a Word document.

A New Zealand scholar also suggested that it would be worth getting in touch with digital humanities centres that deal with early modern and eighteenth-century works (such as The Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria) to see who they outsource their transcription to.

Both of these answers suggested what is now obvious.

Thinking of the texts as special (they are almost three hundred years old!) is misleading. Transcribing eighteenth-century texts is just data-entry and data management: "Acogent provides data entry and data management services …"

Also, thinking of single-author, single-volume, painstakingly edited texts is also misleading (i.e., it leads you in the wrong direction). The digital world is full of text collections created in digital humanities centres, all of whom outsource transcription. (The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, to take an example that never occurred to me, contains the text of The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, Esquire (1778). Texts like this are all over the net). So, asking a bunch of scholars who prepare one-off, minutely collated texts, is really unlikely to elicit a useful answer. I am just lucky—and so is my colleague—that 'online, everyone hears you scream' (for help).

Fear-mongering for FREE! 1724

In The Weekly Journal; or, Saturday’s Post, 22 February 1724, an advertisement for the 9th ed. of Onania (a work on the evils of onanism—i.e. masturbation) concludes:

N.B. As the Pamphlet lately published on this Subject, under the Title of ERONANIA, is made up only (as by comparing them will be seen) of Paragraphs, Sentences, and many Bits and Scraps stolen from ONANIA, abovementioned, by one notorious for pyrating other Mens Works; the Bookseller thought proper to give Notice thereof, that the Publick may not be imposed upon by it.

What this note doesn't mention is that Eronania was being given away; so whether or not the "Paragraphs, Sentences, and many Bits and Scraps" were "stolen from ONANIA," the price was pretty attractive. (BTW only two copies of Eronania survive to verify the claim that it was made up of "Bits and Scraps.")

Clearly, the publisher "at the Sign of Dr. Chamberlen’s Anodyne Necklace" was making his money from the cures he offered to the "Nine miserable Consequences" of masturbation, which he spells out in his advertisement in The Weekly Journal; or, British Gazetteer, 1 February 1724:

Publish’d this Day the Particulars of, ERONANIA on the Crimes of those two unhappy Brothers ER and ONAN Judah’s two Sons, who for defileing their Nuptial Bed, and frustrating the end of Marriage, were punish’d with immediate Death. Gen. 38. Or the hainous Crime of Self-Defilement, with all Nine miserable Consequences; SELF-EMASCULATION, Impotency, Senility, unfitness to Marry, deprivation of Manhood, Seminal Gleets, and the other Three wretched Miseries of it in both Sexes, (whom it generally Initiates in Wickedness) laid open to all Persons ever guilty of this Vice, whether Single, Married, Widdowers, WOMEN-HATERS, or Molles: And why this infamous Word MOLLES made English is applied to the Doers of this ill Action.[1]

Felix quem faciunt Aliena pericula Cautum.[2]

Also of the Use, Abuse of, frustrating, and defileing the Marriage Bed: With all Doubts thereunto belonging (as also of Retentio Seminis, and it’s Consequences in the Body, where the Debitum Conjugale cannot be) solved.[3]

Hoc nihil esse putas? Scelus est, mihi crede, sed Ingens.
Quantum vix animo concipis ipse tuo:
Ipsam tibi crede Naturam dicere rerum.
Istud quod … Pontice Perdis, HOMO est. Martial.[4]

With the Particulars of a scarce Tract cited by a late Author pag. 25 on this Crime; entituled Letters of Advice from two Reverend Divines to a young Gentleman about a weighty Case of Conscience[5], viz of Defileing himself, to which he was so greviously addicted, that he had well nigh bereft himself of his Manhood, and almost EMASCULATED himself by this wretched Practice of Self-Conversation[6], but was quite cured by these Letters, which being printed some Years ago, and now out of Print, and not to be had for any Money, and therefore are here Reprinted along with this Treatise.

Sometimes the Sin does us o’ertake,
  And on OUR WEAKNESS win;
Sometimes OUR SELVES our Ruin make,
  And We o’ertake the Sin.
O save us, Lord from all such Darts,
  That seek our Souls to slay;
Save US from US, and OUR FALSE HEARTS,
  Lest WE OUR SELVES betray. Aust. Dev.[7]

GIVEN GRATIS up one Pair of Stairs, at the Sign of Dr. Chamberlen’s Anodyne Necklace, next to the Rose-Tavern without Temple-Bar. Where the SCHEME on the Secret Disease, Gleets, Broken Constitutions, and the GOUT is given Gratis.

NOTES

[1] Molly: An effeminate man or boy; a male homosexual.
[2] "Fortunate the man who learns caution from the perils of others."
[3] Retentio Seminis, retention of semen; Debitum Conjugale, the duty of married couples to have sex with each other.
[4] Martial, Epigrams 9.41:

Pontice, quod numquam futuis, sed paelice laeva
  uteris et Veneri servit amica manus,
hoc nihil esse putas? scelus est, mihi crede, sed ingens,
   quantum vix animo concipis ipse tuo.
nempe semel futuit, generaret Horatius ut tres
  Mars semel, ut geminos Ilia casta daret.
omnia perdiderat si masturbatus uterque
  mandasset manibus gaudia foeda suis.
ipsam crede tibi naturam dicere rerum:
   "Istud quod digitis, Pontice, perdis, homo est."

The Mad-Latinist translates this as follows (here)

Ponticus, the fact that you never fuck, but use your left hand as a concubine
  and your girlfriend-hand serves Venus,
do you think that this is no big deal? It's a crime, believe me, and a huge one at that,
  so big that even you can hardly conceive it in your mind.
I mean, Horatius fucked just once to father three,
  and Mars just once, to give chaste Ilia twins.
Either of them would have ruined everything if he had masturbated,
  and entrusted his shameful pleasures to his own hands.
You had better believe that it is Nature herself that tells you:
  "That mess which you waste on your fingers, Ponticus, is a human being."

[5] Only a single copy survives of Letters of Advice from Two Reverend Divines … (London: J. Collins and D. Newman, 1676) Wing (2nd ed.), L1782B.
[6] i.e., criminal-conversation with yourself: "criminal-conversation" being adultery.
[7] John Austin, Devotions in the ancient way of offices: with psalms, hymns and prayers for ...‎ (Paris, 1668); Wing (2nd ed.), A4248A; "John Austin" is a pseudonym for William Birchley.