An old surface ...

 

Over Christmas, Microsoft had a special offer on the snapdragon based Surface Pro, and I took advantage of the offer to buy J one.

While I didn't like the install procedure, I was impressed with the lightness and power of the device, so much so that a few days ago I bought myself a refurbished Windows 10 based model.

It wasn't that expensive - a tad over two hundred bucks with shipping, power supply and keyboard included. The screen is good and bright and the keyboard looks hardly used. The case is scuff free and unless you looked closely the machine would pass for new.

I would guess that being as it's the turn of the year a lot of corporates and government bodies are rolling over their machines to newer ARM based devices, and its comparative cheapness comes from it being stuck on Windows 10 until it goes to the big network in the sky.

It has a number of advantages for me over the newer models, intel, not ARM based, meaning I can install my standard Windows tools, as well as use VirtualBox to make a virtual Linux machine should I need some Linux in my life (in theory, you can install Linux as a replacement operating system but the procedure's a bit finger-in-the-ear, more so than installing Linux on an old Chromebook, so I'll go with VirtualBox for the moment).

But the main draw is the form factor - it's light, and even though the battery is a little tired, battery life is still good enough for four or five hours.

With a USB A and a USB C port I have the external connectivity I need for archiving work, and of course it connects to OneDrive.

As you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to put together a highly portable little machine for research and cataloguing, and while I've come close, every iteration has either been too heavy or had poor battery life, both of which are a pain if you are planning on carrying it about in the course of a working day.

This time I might just have hit the sweet spot...

Hygenic libraries (again)

 I've written before about Hygenic Libraries.

Today's cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum brought to light another hygenic library label

this time from a library in St Kilda.

Again, there's no real information on what the procedure used was, but a little digging suggests that the books were either wiped down with formaldehyde solution, or, for a slightly more sophisticated treatment (and one less risky to the library staff) fumigated by being placed in a  chamber with formaldehyde vapour, perhaps like this 1930's example of a fumigation cabinet

Libraries and archives centres still carry out periodic fumigation to control silverfish and and the like - for example, when I worked at ANU, I had an office on the top floor of the Menzies library, and every Christmas shutdown they warned us that the building was closed as they were fumigating the books...

In the 1920s and 1930s, in the wake of the flu pandemic, and other local epidemics, such as the polio outbreak in Melbourne in the late 1920s, there were serious concerns that diseases might be spread by library books, and as I've written elsewhere, public libraries were still sterilising books as late as the 1960s if the borrower had come down with a notifiable infectious disease,

The advent of antibiotics, widespread vaccination and generally better public health meant  that by the late 1960s,  books in public libraries were no longer normally sterilised between loans, although during the recent Covid pandemic libraries that kept lending books did sometimes use UV sterilisation boxes.

Formalin is a pretty powerful sterilisation agent and was used extensively in hospitals and is still sometimes used in laboratory situations, but is not usually used on museum specimens. to sterilse them or get rid of insect infestation.

A shoestring circulating library

 Well, after the Christmas and New Year break, it was back to cataloguing the Athenaeum's historic book collection. I'd managed to complete shelves A4 and A5 before the seasonal break, so today I made a start on A3. (A1 and A2 need a ladder, which has health and safety implications, principally that there's someone else there to call triple zero in case I miss my step and fall off the damned thing.)

Before Christmas I'd accumulated enough evidence to show that the people running the library in the latter part of the nineteenth century were buying second hand books discarded by Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne, or imported second had books from England.

Not all books were bought second hand but quite a few of them have been, including this copy of JM Barrie's A Window in Thrums, dating to 1890.

Initially it didn't look to be terribly promising with a circulating library label on the front of the book.

The label was in poor condition and only just legible

but if you stare at it you can make out the words Horsham and Mechanics Institute. At this point I was envisaging the fun I had tracing the circulating library in Ryde, but they had made it easy for me, with a second copy of the label on the inside fly leaf

showing it came from the Horsham Mechanics's Institute - that's Horsham Victoria, not the one in England. 

There was a mechanics institute in the English Horsham but it seems to have closed down in the 1860s. Given that the book in question was published in 1890, I feel confident in saying it is from the Horsham in the western district of Victoria.

We have a partial provenance in the form or two handwritten notes on the flyleaf, one to say it was acquired for 6/- on 02/01/1891 and a second note in a different hand saying it was acquired on 13/12/1901, presumably by the Athenaeum.

In contrast to the Athenaeum, which was clearly run on the smell of an oily rag the Mechanics Institute in Horsham was a well funded organisation which regularly purchased new books as in this article in the Horsham Times of 28 June 1912.

(Horsham Mechanics Institute Building in 2008 - wikimedia commons)

The Mechanics Institute later transitioned to become Horsham's public library. The old Mechanic's Institute building is no longer the town library, but is now home to the Horsham Historical Society.

I had a look on StreetView and the building still looked much the same in 2024, rather unglamorously located next to a Bunning's carpark ...

I guess the only remaining question is why gentlemen were charged a quarterly subscription of three shillings but ladies were charged 2/6. Was it, given the attitudes of the time, because men were expected to use it for serious study, while women only used it to read romances and sensation novels ...?

The circulating library in Ryde

 That's Ryde, IoW, in England, not the suburb of Sydney.

I'd previously mentioned that while cataloguing a Victorian triple decker up at the Athenaeum, one volume had come from Mudie's, one from a Mudie's franchisee in Weymouth and one from a circulating library in Union Street Ryde.

Identifying the library has been tricky, but a discussion with Ann Barrett of the Ryde Historical Society has confirmed that the most likely source is either the long established circulating library at the Assembly rooms in Ryde, or another more commercial enterprise run initially by the Misses Gibbs.

Crucially, neither of them seem to have been Mudie's franchisees, suggesting that they were buying second hand books from Mudie's and perhaps elsewhere, and then selling them on for export to Australia ...

In connection with Mudie's

 Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best

I guessed that the phrase "in connection with Mudie's" on John Pruddah's library labels might be a standard phrase used by Mudie's franchisees, so I searched Welsh Newspapers online for adverts using the phrase and got just under 700 hits

Some of the adverts are obviously repeats but a quick eyeball survey suggests that it occurred multiple times in multiple newspapers, meaning that there were circulating libraries affiliated with Mudie's in not only the major towns and cities of Wales 

but also in those towns we can identify as nineteenth century holiday resorts such as Llandudno

Woodley's Llandudno

and in Aberystwyth which was then both a university town and a popular holiday resort

Book Depot, Aberystwyth

Using the SLV's subscription to Gale Newsvault to search nineteenth century British newspapers produces quite a few hits including this one from the Stirling Observer in Scotland

No Irish newspapers appear and a search of the Irish Times archive only produces articles about Mudie's, but no advertising, similarly a search for 'circulating library' produces a reasonable number of hits, but again no mention of Mudie's suggesting they did not operate in Ireland.

Equally, in 1886 WH Smith sold their railway bookstall business in Ireland to Eason's. Eason's went on to become the dominant chain of booksellers in Ireland and operated their own circulating libraries.

John Pruddah

 Richard Samways of the local history team at Weymouth Museum went above and beyond in providing me with further background information on John Pruddah, the owner of a major circulating library in Weymouth, in the 1870s. 

Curiously, a book with a label from his library, pasted over a Mudie's label, turned up in the Stanley Athenaeum historic book collection.

How it got there is important for understanding the mid Victorian book trade in Australia, and hence I began to investigate Mr Pruddah.

John Pruddah was born in the 1840s in Hexham, Northumberland where his father, Edward was a printer and bookseller.

(His brother, also Edward, took over the running of the family business, and after his early death in 1879, his business was managed by Edward junior's wife until it was sold a few years later.

Interestingly an archive of the Hexham Pruddah's jobbing printwork - flyers, posters etc, came to light a year or two ago.)

John Pruddah didn't join the family firm, but moved to London where he worked for Mudie's Circulating Library before buying the Royal Library in Weymouth in 1869 - George III had visited Weymouth for his health, and was arguably responsible for turning it into a fashionable resort. 

Several Weymouth businesses styled themselves as Royal as a consequence, but in reality they had no more connection with royalty than a chocolate royal.

John originally managed the business with his sister and quickly became an agent for Mudie's.

Clean copy of the Royal Library label above, the partial label from Stanley below - click to enlarge and compare

and was offering books for holiday reading. 

In a list published in the local newspaper in July 1872 the books on offer included Middlemarch by George Eliot, Ombra by Mrs Oliphant, Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins, and Robert Ainsleigh by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

John Pruddah married Lucy Jane Bradbury in 1872 and their daughter Charlotte was born the following year.

In 1875 John Pruddah sold the business, including the stock of 3500 books, returned north to the industrial boom town of Middlesborough - then in the North Riding of Yorkshire, now in North Yorkshire, where he ran a successful booksellers for many years.

So, John Pruddah was obviously a shrewd businessman, but for our purposes the key takeaway is that Mudie's did appoint agents who had a formal agreement of some kind and perhaps an arrangement to be supplied with books from Mudie's stock.

Quite how the books ended up in Australia is still an open question...

(with thanks to Richard Samways and the Weymouth Museum for their assistance with this post)

The Mystery of the mid Victorian second hand book trade

 In the 1870s, the patrons of the Athenaeum library had a taste for sensation novels, including those by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Among those in the collection is a triple decker edition of the now almost forgotten Lost for Love, one of her less popular novels.

We have all three volumes, one with a Mudie's circulating library label, one with  a label from Pruddah's Royal Library, a circulating library in Weymouth, Dorset, pasted over the original Mudie's label and the third with a label from a library in Ryde also pasted over the original label.

I've not been able (so far) to trace the Ryde library, but the local history team at the Weymouth Museum have been helpful as regards Mr Pruddah.

The 1871 census shows that Mr Pruddah was a bookseller and printer in Weymouth who, like a lot of booksellers at the time, also ran a circulating library.

 

 

A little bit of digging shows that in the 1870's Mr Pruddah was advertising 'Books for Seaside Reading' in the local press. Annoyingly, the State Library of Victoria does not provide free access to the British Newspaper Archive, meaning I can search the index but not read the articles.

Mr Pruddah's library label proclaims itself in connection with Mudie's - exactly what his relationship with Mudie's was is not clear.

The third volume came from a library in Ryde (presumably the Ryde on the Isle of Wight - Union Street being one of the main streets in Ryde), again with a Mudie's label just visble underneath the Ryde library's label.

which is interesting as both Weymouth and Ryde were well known tourist resorts in the mid Victorian period.

Weymouth in the mid Victorian period

(source unknown)

In the mid Victorian period it was not uncommon for people summering in the town to join the local circulating library - this is probably why the circulating library charged half a guinea (10s6d or a little over fifty pounds or A$100 in today's money), half the subscription cost of Mudie's, knowing full well that most visitors would be unlikely to stay more than a month or two.

It also shows that these libraries were buying their books second hand from Mudie's as a way of keeping their costs down - or possibly they had an arrangement with Mudie's to be supplied with books that were returned after the summer season was over. I'm speculating wildly here, but such an arrangement could explain Pruddah's in connection with Mudie's claim on his labels.

However, what is more interesting from the Australian point of view is that it was obviously worth some second hand book dealer's time to package up books discarded by circulating libraries (remember in this case, possibly an extreme example, each volume came from a different library) and export them to Australia for resale...

(Many thanks to the Weymouth Museum and their volunteers for helping identify Mr Pruddah)