Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 15th, 2008 No Comments »
We recently acquired two very different manuscript library catalogs: one, a list of books purchased for the Reading Society, Benevolent Society, and Sunday School of Bury, Lancashire from 1806-1826, and the second, the catalogue of the Dundas family’s private library at Melville Castle near Edinburgh, compiled in 1862. Library catalogs often can be much more [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 9th, 2008 No Comments »
This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted - the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket.
Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence Sterne’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2008 1 Comment »
In an 1820 letter to his son, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stated that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was hard at work translating Goethe’s closet drama Faust. Coleridge and his friends, however, openly expressed dislike for the German poet, and in 1834, Coleridge wrote, “I need not tell you that I never put [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 1st, 2008 No Comments »
Alfred Tennyson first published his poem “Sea Dreams. An Idyll” in Macmillan’s Magazine in its January 1860 issue (for which he was paid between £250 and £300, an enormous sum for a single poem). We recently acquired the page proofs for this printing of the poem, with numerous manuscript annotations by Tennyson. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 13th, 2008 No Comments »
In 1910, Horace de Vere Cole and five friends, including Virginia Stephen (who would marry Leonard Woolf in 1912) and her brother Adrian Stephen (a classmate of Cole’s), coordinated and successfully carried out an elaborate hoax against the Royal Navy.
Cole began by sending a telegram to the HMS Dreadnought, moored in Dorset, telling the [...]