Hyde Collection Catablog

“I ha reade thys Booke ande doe fynde fromme same howe cruelle bee the Spanyardes. Tis strange howe differente bee the myndes modes ande mannerres o menne. Wm Shakspeare.”If this inscription were genuine, it would easily be the most valuable item in the collection. It is, however, the work of the notorious 18th century forger, William Henry Ireland. Ireland began his career as a forger to win favor from his father Samuel, a passionate collector of Shakespeariana. When his first efforts were delightedly accepted by Samuel as genuine, William (despite his nearly nonexistent knowledge of Elizabethan orthography and handwriting) became bolder, forging legal documents, letters, manuscripts of existing plays, and finally an entire new play, Vortigern. Distinguished visitors flocked to the Irelands’ London home in 1795, among them James Boswell, who was greatly moved by his encounter with the spurious documents. William writes in his Confessions that James Boswell knelt before them and exclaimed “I now kiss the invaluable relics of our bard, and thanks to God that I have lived to see them!”

Wider circulation of Ireland’s forgeries hastened their inevitable exposure. The first and only performance of Vortigern in April 1796 was hooted off the stage at Drury Lane, and the credibility of the documents was destroyed by the publication of Edmond Malone’s masterful An inquiry into the authenticity of certain miscellaneous papers. Samuel died shortly thereafter, and William’s subsequent attempts at achieving a legitimate literary career were largely unsuccessful. Frequently in debt, he was often reduced to producing new Shakespeare forgeries to sell as souvenirs of the scandal, which may be the origin of the present work.

This book has a note to the binder that I’ve never seen before: “When these books are sewed and put in boards, it is desired
that they may not be beaten; and it is recommended not to bind them till
next winter.” Houghton’s conservation expert advises me that this refers to the practice of beating the unbound sheets of a book with heavy flat hammers to get the paper perfectly smooth and flat. In a lavishly illustrated book this could have the effect of ruining the plates, and so would be recommended against. But my book has just three illustrations, and was intended for the use of serious readers of Shakespeare, so it’s well printed, but not a particularly fine production. In addition, we don’t know what the significance of waiting until winter to bind the book would be. I’d be interested to hear any suggestions Catablog readers might have to offer; send me an email by clicking on my name just below this post.

In 1771, Samuel Johnson published Thoughts on the late transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands, a pamphlet defending the actions of the government of Lord North in a dispute with Spain over England’s occupation of the Falkland Islands, which would flare up as a trouble spot again in 1982. As first published, the pamphlet contained a cutting remark against the former Prime Minister George Grenville, then recently deceased, about an earlier showdown with Spain. “Let him not, however, be depreciated in his grave; he had powers not universally possessed; if he could have got the money, he could have counted it.” This relatively subtle insult (indeed, I’m not sure I entirely understand how it is an insult, although all my reference sources agree that it is) apparently contained an even subtler swipe at the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Francis Dashwood, who was described by Walpole as “a man to whom a sum of five figures was an impenetrable secret” (now that’s an insult I understand!).

In any event, the remark was politically inconvenient for Lord North, who needed the support of Grenville’s followers, and he insisted that sales of the pamphlet be halted until the offending line could be altered. Johnson apparently chose to soften the line to such an extreme that it almost reads as damning by faint praise: “he had powers not universally possessed; and if he sometimes erred, he was likewise sometimes right.” Since the unexpurgated pamphlet was only on sale for a few days, copies with the original line intact are rare. The Hyde Collection has four copies of the later version, but just one of the earlier, and not surpisingly, it was one of the copies Johnson received to give to friends and colleagues. Johnson wrote rather wickedly to Bennet Langton, just after Lord North’s injunction, that “Before his order a sufficient number were dispersed to do all the mischief, though perhaps not to make all the sport that might be expected from it.”

As amazing as the Hyde Collection’s books are, the manuscripts in the collection are just as spectacular. I asked my colleague, Rick Stattler, to contribute some information on searching the very detailed finding aids he’s created for the manuscript collections.

“Catablog readers may be interested to know that the manuscripts in the Hyde Collection are also being cataloged, in addition to the fine work being done on the books. To see catalog records for the Hyde manuscripts, go to the HOLLIS catalog. Browse for “MS Hyde” under “other call number,” and links to several dozen catalog records from the collection will be displayed.

Detailed finding aids for much of the collection can be viewed easily at OASIS (Online Archival Search Information System), which provides centralized access to thousands of Harvard’s finding aids for archival and manuscript collections. To look at the records for the Hyde Collection, you can enter “MS Hyde” in the Quick Search box at the top of the screen As of this writing, eighteen findings aids are on OASIS.  The finding aids on OASIS include most of the highlights of the manuscript collection, such as:

* The Samuel Johnson Letters ( MS Hyde 1), including 746 letters and fragments, comprising almost half of the known surviving letters in his hand.

* An extra-illustrated set of the 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (MS Hyde 76), expanded to thirty-one massive volumes by the insertion of more than five thousand prints and manuscripts.

* The Hester Lynch Piozzi Manuscripts (MS Hyde 35), containing thirty-two items by Johnson’s friend and confidant, many of them still unpublished.

Thirty additional finding aids are still awaiting evulgation (see “John’s Favorite Words” below), but everything should be accessible by the end of the year.

Sincerely,
Rick Stattler
Project Manuscript Cataloger”

This copy of Rasselas has what looks exactly like the signature of a previous owner, except that the name is ‘Steadfast Bunny’. Our index lists several people with the last name of Bunny, so I guess it’s not impossible, but still I feel strange putting “Bunny, Steadfast, former owner” in my record. That’s not a name, it’s the title of a children’s book!

“…and so, the Steadfast Bunny returned to his warren, having learned a very important lesson about the value of friendship.”

Often I catalog books which have a previous owner’s signature, and since these names represent an important part of the book’s history, they are always recorded in the record I make. Although I try to find a positive match for every name, if all I have is a very common name, it just isn’t possible to know which “J. Smith” owned the book. This case was a happy exception, however. The book has two inscriptions; one in Johnson’s hand, reading simply “Miss Wesley”, and another which says “These books were presented to Mrs. Hall by the author Dr. Johnson, a gift to her niece S. Wesley”. Armed with that information, I checked the index of The letters of Samuel Johnson, which is always a good source for names associated with Johnson.

I got even more than I expected when I found a letter from Johnson to Sarah Wesley, dated October 28, 1783: “Madame: I will have the first day that you mention, come, my dear, on Saturday next, and, if you can, bring your aunt with you, too.” Footnotes to the letter helpfully supplied the birth and death dates for Sarah Wesley and Martha Hall, Sarah’s aunt. The note adds the fascinating tidbit “According to John Telford, SJ ‘greatly admired Mrs. Hall … and wished her to reside under his roof, but she feared that this step would arouse the jealousy of Johnson’s other lady friends.'”

Happily, this letter also resides in the Hyde Collection, so these two sources of information can be consulted simultaneously.

Samuel Johnson — poet, lexicographer, checkers-player? Indeed. Although Boswell reports that Johnson did not play checkers later in life, he was fond of it in college, and in fact wrote the dedication and preface to the first English language book on the rules, William
Payne’s An Introduction to the Game of Draughts. In the dedication he neatly defends the study of a mere game with words that
will stir the souls of Civilization IV and Dungeons & Dragons addicts the world over:

“Triflers may find or make any thing a trifle; but since it is the
great characteristic of a wise man to see events in their causes, to
obviate consequences, and ascertain contingencies, your Lordship will
think nothing a trifle by which the mind is inured to caution,
foresight, and circumspection.”

Today, I’m cataloging the first edition of the Dictionary, and part of my job is to make sure that our copies aren’t missing any leaves. This requires collating them, which means going through and counting the signatures (sequential marks which tell a binder the correct order of the leaves) in each copy. A copy of the Dicitionary has 580 leaves in each of its two volumes, and we have five copies of the first edition in the Hyde Collection. Do the math, and you can see that it’s fairly labor-intensive. Since the signature appears on every other leaf, in the lower right corner, that’s pretty much all of the book I get to look at. Therefore, I’d like to present you with John’s Favorite Words Appearing in the Lower Right Corner of Every Fourth Page in Johnson’s Dictionary. Use one in conversation today!

Arbuscule. n.s. [arbuscula, Lat.] Any little shrub.
Cater-cousin. n.s. A corruption of quatre-cousin, from the ridiculousness of calling cousin or relation to so remote a degree.
Curdy. adj. [from curd.] Coagulated; concreted; full of curds; curdled.
To Embale. v.a. [emballer, Fr.] To make up into a bundle.
Evulgation. n.s. [evulgo, Lat.] The act of divulging; publication.
Flagitious. adj. [from flagitius, Latin .] Wicked; villainous; atrocious.
To Gloze. v.n. [Saxon.] To flatter; to wheedle; to insinuate; to fawn.
Kicksy-wicksey. n.s. [from kick and wince.] A made word in ridicule and disdain of a wife.
To Knubble. v.a. [knippler, Danish.] To beat.
Yux. n.s. [yeox, Saxon.] The hiccough.

Well, okay, not really. But I did want to point out a very good article on marginalia in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (The link in the title of this entry will take you to the article, but anything after the first paragraphs requires a subscriber’s login.) “Scholarship on the Edge” highlights the work of Univ. of Toronto professor H.J. Jackson, whose 2001 book Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books provides an excellent overview of the history of the subject. Her new book, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia focuses on the period 1790-1830 in England. Both works discuss the marginalia of Hester Piozzi, drawn from books in the Hyde Colection. One of the most famous, given her prickly relationship with James Boswell, is her copy of his Life of Johnson; the annotations to were considered important enough to reprint as notes to a later edition of the Life.

The Chronicle‘s article concludes with a quote from Mrs. Piozzi: “I have a Trick of writing in the Margins of my Books. It is not a good Trick, but one longs to say something.”

James Boswell’s copy of The government of the tongue has a note from him about its acquisition:

“Presented to me by my worthy freind Bennet Langton, Esq. of Langton, as a book by which I might be much improved …. He gave me the book and hoped I would read that treatise, but said no more. I have expressed in words what I believe was his meaning. It was a delicate
admonition.”

What would have been a less delicate admonition — a gag?

Often, I learn the most about the behind-the-scenes story of a book when somebody messes up. Statuti ciuili, et criminali dell’isola di Corsica is the first book printed on the island of Corsica, and it shows; the paper is terrible and the typography is a bit sloppy. The book ends with a very lengthy list of errata (see above comment about the typography) printed on a single leaf, and in a normal copy of the book, that’s all I’d know about it. My copy, however, contains 2 copies of the same errata leaf at the end. Because the binding is as crummy as the paper, I can see into the gutter margin to the sewing, which makes it clear that both copies of the errata leaf were printed on the same sheet of paper. Since this book is a folio, each leaf in it occupies half a sheet of paper, so the printer did the smart thing and set the type of the errata leaf twice. Thus, instead of printing a single leaf (say) 200 times, he only had to print 100 2-leaf sheets. Of course, the crucial step to making this trick work is that you have to remember to separate the leaves, and put each one in a different copy. It’s no earth-shattering discovery; printers did this sort of thing all the time. It’s just that when they do it right, it’s likely to go unnoticed, and this way we know a little more about the making of this book.

One of my favorite things about the Hyde Collection is the large number of books in their original bindings. The book that an 18th century buyer took home from the bookshop was frequently not a finished product, with books often sold in loose sheets or temporary cardboard bindings. Its pages were still unopened and retained their ruffled deckle edges. The buyer was then expected to take the book to a binder for a formal leather binding. (However, see this recent book for a contrary view of how common finished bindings were at the time of sale.)

It’s exciting, therefore, to see books in a state as close as possible to their original condition, particularly when they retain a temporary binding that was discarded on most copies two centuries earlier. The term “original condition”, however, doesn’t do justice to the pristine beauty of a collection of books known as the Mount Bellew Library. Christopher D. Bellew, a wealthy bibliophile in Western Ireland, amassed a large collection of books in the early 19th century. He read them once, if at all, and with such care that they look untouched by human hands. The collection lay undisturbed in the Mount Bellew family home until it was sold a century later, when it was revealed to an astonished book collecting community. The great collector of 19th century fiction, Michael Sadleir, memorably recorded his reaction to receiving the sale catalog. “I shall never forget the arrival by post of the first slim Bellew catalogue. After tearing through the catalogue’s eight pages, I felt so breathless that I had to sit a few moments before I was capable of going through the whole thing item by item. I made pencil-crosses; I drafted a long telegram. Then I commended my cause to Providence and went through the catalogue all over again.”

The Hyde Collection is fortunate enough to have one item from Mount Bellew, acquired from Sadleir himself. I can report that it is exactly as advertised. Other than a slight browning of the 200 year old paper spine, this four volume set could have come right off the shelf of Christopher Bellew’s favorite bookshop. The delicate blue-gray covers are unblemished by rough handling, and the small printed spine label is unchipped. Holding it in my hands, I feel just a little bit closer to the world the Hyde Collection documents so thoroughly documents.

The battle between copyright-holders and pirates is frequently in the news these days, but it has a history just as long as publishing itself. Eighteenth century verse satirist Peter Pindar (the pseudonym of John Wolcot) was particularly troubled by the depredations of pirates, since he had no other income but that which he derived from his poems. Pindar’s poems were a particularly tempting target for pirate printers, since they were short, highly topical lampoons of public personages.

Pindar’s first anti-piracy effort came in 1788 in the form of a notice that “The proprietors of the works of Peter Pindar, Esquire, find themselves obliged, on account of frequent piracies of his productions, to offer ten guineas reward, on the conviction of any offender; the money to be immediately paid by the publisher, and the name or names of the communicating party concealed.” The effectiveness of this bounty at stopping the pirates can be gauged from the fact that by his next publication, it had been raised to twenty guineas. Eight years later, Pindar and his publishers tried a different tactic, having Pindar autograph every copy of his poem One Thousand Seven Hundred and Nintey-Six, no easy task for someone whose works sold in the tens of thousands. In addition, a small engraved portrait of the author was attached to each copy to identify it as geniune, no doubt driving up the expense of production considerably. Of course, as today’s movie studios could tell you, identifying geniune copies only helps if your customers want to avoid the pirated ones.

For much more on the relationship between Peter Pindar, his publishers, and the pirates, see Satire is a Bad Trade by Donald Kerr

James Boswell’s second separate publication is a poem entitled An elegy on the death of an amiable young lady (Edinburgh, 1761), published when he was 21 years old. The poem itself takes up just 6 pages of the 24-page pamphlet, the remainder being occupied by the effusive praise of three “recommendatory letters,” one of which, signed J— B—, was written by Boswell himself! The fulsome praise of the letters is explained by Boswell biographer Frederick Pottle, who writes that Boswell submitted them for publication in an anthology of Scottish poetry, the editor of which, Sir Andrew Erskine “probably thought the verses too bad for printing in the collection, but, as he did not wish to hurt Boswell’s feelings … he suggested they be printed as burlesques.” Boswell apparently found publishing his seriously-intended bad poetry as a parody of bad poetry preferable to no publication at all.

The English Short Title Catalog records only one other U.S.-held copy of this rare pamphlet, in the comprehensive Boswell collection at Yale.

The modern form of Paint-By-Numbers was a fad that swept the country in the 1950s, but it had an 18th century antecedent in the work of William Gilpin. Gilpin, a landscape artist whose work influenced the Romantic movement, published several books in the 1780s which combined travel writing with Gilpin’s philosophy of art, and included etchings of Gilpin’s watercolors of the scenery. Gilpin advised his readers to construct a table of different colors, each numbered, and carry that table with them when they went sketching. They could then label each feature of a sketch with the appropriate number, to accurately reproduce the colors when painting the scene later at home.