It’s hard to know for sure which state is the earlier, but it seems plausible that the translator, Antoine Marie Henri Boulard, having noted in the original version that he had given up the profession of translation, subsequently decided to remove his name (and some identifying information about his new employment) from the work altogether. He appears to have had another change of heart, however, since we own several other Boulard translations from the 1790s and early 19th century.

UPDATE 7/6/11: My colleague Stephen Ferguson, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton, points out that the Princeton copy, scanned for Google Books, is halfway between these two, lacking the name on the title page but including the text in the preface.

Houghton is very pleased to have acquired Johnson’s copy of The Seven Champions, adding to our substantial collection of books from his library.

Like most of the Johnson books in our collection, this volume does not bear Johnson’s signature, but rather has a contemporary inscription attesting to its purchase at the 1785 auction of Johnson’s library.

Thomas Percy left a number of unfinished projects at his death, including an intended edition of the works of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687). The section of the works including the 1672 play The Rehearsal was printed probably at some time in the 1760s, but the unpublished sheets languished for many years in the warehouse of John Nichols, where they were eventually destroyed in an 1808 fire.

Both works are understandably rare: ESTC lists just four other copies of Burke’s Abridgment, and has no listing at all for the Percy work, although a copy is known to survive at the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

What’s particularly interesting about this item is that, according to a letter in the Hyde Collection, it shouldn’t exist. MS Hyde 30 is a collection of documents relating to Reynolds’s funeral and estate, and the first item is a letter from the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi to Philip Metcalfe, one of the executors, thanking him for the commission, but protesting that it will be impossible to complete the engraving he requests in time. It’s hard to understand why Bartolozzi writes “If Mr. Bartolozzi had received this Notice the day after his Decease, he would have thought himself highly honoured by the Preference shewn to him” since the Reynolds died on Feb. 23rd, and the letter is dated the 24th.

Apparently the two were able to come to an understanding (and perhaps Metcalfe soothed the engraver’s artistic vanity), since Bartlozzi’s name appears on the finished product. The design is by Edward Burney, cousin of the novelist Fanny Burney.

Boswell, James. The life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. London, 1807.
Boswell, James. The life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. London, 1816.

Mrs. Piozzi’s copies of Boswell’s Life are the most famous of her annotated books. A 1938 Limited Editions Club edition of Boswell’s Life printed Mrs. Piozzi’s annotations as marginal notes. At that time, the 1816 ed. was already at Harvard, as part of the Amy Lowell collection. The 1807 ed., then in the possession of Col. Ralph Isham, would join it 65 years later with the rest of the Hyde Collection.

Johnson, Samuel. The history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia. London, 1818.

We recently acquired a copy of Rasselas which Mrs. Piozzi inscribed first to her husband Gabriel, and then to her adopted son Sir John Salusbury Piozzi. But this copy, given to the library by its namesake, Arthur A. Houghton Jr., is even more interesting, since the extensive notes capture Mrs. Piozzi’s reflections on one of Johnson’s best known works.

Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Observations and reflections made in the course of a journey through France, Italy, and Germany. London, 1789.

Here, Mrs. Piozzi annotates her own travel memoir, as well as augmenting it with several additional pages of manuscript material, as a gift to William Augustus Conway.

The Holy Bible, containing the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the Apocrypha. Bath, 1785.

This handsome, three-volume Bible with ample margins is extensively annotated.

Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Poems and little characters, anecdotes etc. introductory to the poems (manuscript).
Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Minced meat for pyes (manuscript).

These two manuscript commonplace books are an amazingly rich and dense collection of thoughts, quotations, and personal history. I also have to thank the staff of the Weissman Preservation Center for their amazing and painstaking work on Minced Meat for Pyes, which had been an unusable Frankenstein’s-monster assemblage of pasted-in slips and sewn-together random scraps. Thanks to their work, both the original and this digital facsimile will be accessible to scholars.