Louisa, you have led me a merry dance...

 Up at the Athenaeum today I had a good day's cataloguing, mostly of Victorian lady novelists.

That has its own challenges, like those books published by "the Author of Lord Halifax's Nose" - I made that up, but it's uncomfortably close to the truth, or authors who publish books under their maiden name, get married, and then publish under their married name.

Annoying, but there's so much in the way of Victorian literary studies out there it's relatively easy to run them down - quite often there are name authority files out there, if you can find them.

I find that the National Library of Scotland is a bit better than the British Library in publishing name authorities, but working between the two of them you can usually identify both the author and the edition.

In fact it's quite amazing I can do this sat at the end of a wireless nbn connection in an old wooden building on the far side of the planet - fifteen or twenty years ago this simply wouldn't have been possible, or if it was, it would have been a hell of a lot more slog.

So I was feeling quietly confident when I came across a book published in 1873 by a Mrs L Crow - A Twisted Link, published by Tinsley brothers in London.

Only one problem - it's not in either the NLS or BL catalogues. It's not in the Library of Congress either.

Google books wasn't much help either, other than showing that the book was listed in various nineteenth century public library and mechanics institute catalogues that had been digitised.

Clearly I wasn't delusional, I had the book on my desk, and however short its print run it had been picked up by other libraries at the time.

from the GWR Mechanics Institute Catalogue 1888

Montrose Public Library 1896

But who was Mrs L Crow?

Well I ended up searching wikipedia for pages containing the phrase 'A Twisted Link' and found that her full name was Louisa Elizabeth Crow and that her maiden name was Fenn.

There's also an entry for her on victorianresearch.org.

So, back I went to both the NLS and the BL to search for "Louisa Crow".

That turned up various of her other novels, but not 'A Twisted Link'.

Searching for Louisa Fenn OR Crow didn't improve matters one jot.

Google Books was a little better and provided a stub entry, but nowhere seems to hold a copy.

By 1873, legal deposit in England was firmly in place and publishers were prosecuted for failing to comply with the legal deposit regulations, so I can only guess that someone at Tinsley Brothers stuffed up and didn't send out the legal deposit copies...

So, how's the facebook thing going?

 Almost three years ago, at the end of the pandemic I made the decision to abandon social media.

I closed my accounts, deleted my profiles and did the digital equivalent of going to live in a hut in the bush, with only an old manual typewriter for company.

Sure, I still blogged, and I did keep my mastodon account, but for all intents and purposes I had walked out the door.

I did this because, post pandemic, I felt I was spending too much time on social media and it was time for a break.

And it worked.

And then, a few months ago I rejoined facebook.

Quite consciously and deliberately as part of my work with the historic book collection at the Athenaeum.

In its early days, the Athenaeum was clearly buying second hand books from large commercial circulating libraries as Mullen's in Melbourne and Mudies in London, and, while I have no proof I'm fairly certain that they were buying them from second hand book dealers who imported their stock from England.

This makes perfect sense - books were expensive in the Victorian England of the 1860s and 70s, and doubly so in Australia, where the lack of local publishers meant they were almost all imported from England, although a few were imported from the United States.

Some of the books I presume were sourced from England had stickers suggesting they were the property of smaller local circulating libraries, quite often in coastal resorts where the middle classes of Victorian England would spend their summers, either in improving pursuits such as rockpooling as in this satirical illustration from Punch in the 1860s

or indeed reading frivolous novels, or perhaps both or indeed something else entirely. 

Often the only way of tracking down information on these circulating libraries was to contact local history groups to ask if anyone knew anything about a particular circulating library.

A lot of these groups don't have a web page or a contact email, instead they have a facebook page, and the only practical way to contact them was via Facebook, which meant my getting myself a Facebook account (again - as I'd deleted my old account and all my contacts).

So, I did.

And as a means of initiating contact with these local history groups it has worked well.

While the dread facebook algorithm does tend to show you the same material over and over again, and does operate on the 'if you liked that, try this' model it has not come up with any inappropriate content after the first week or so when it had a predilection to suggest various mad right wing flag waving groups.

Likewise, this time around it has not come up with any really silly friend suggestions - one of the things that I used to dislike about facebook first time around were the spurious friend requests from somewhat over endowed young women, all of whom seemed to live in West Texas.

So far, everything all seems above board, and while there are way too many adverts for my taste, everything seems reasonably innocuous.

In fact the one time I saw an advert I felt was sailing close to the wind as regards advocating violence and complained about it, the helpdesk wrote back to say that other people had already complained about it and the advert had been removed and the account banned.

So, basically it's ok. I did worry initially that it was a bit of a swamp, but this time, perhaps not as much as I feared ...

The things one finds in old books ...

 Despite still feeling a bit raw after Lucy's passing, I had my usual Friday morning cataloguing session at the Athenaeum.

Nothing of great interest, some 1940s and fifties bodice rippers, and quite a bit of Dickens.

Some of the Dickens editions are quite old, one is a Chapman and Hall edition of Little Dorrit dating to 1861, and others look to be equally old, and form part of the same series, but have irritatingly lost their title pages.

Others date from the 1930s and seem to have been bought deliberately to replace earlier copies which have worn out beyond repair.

However, the old editions were still in use until the closure of the Athenaeum as a library in the early 1970s

An old Melbourne tram ticket used as a bookmark, and we can date it to sometime between 1966 when Australia abandoned the old British £sd system for the rather more prosaic dollars and cents we use today, and 1972 when the Athenaeum ceased to function as the village library.

Another nice little example of using ephemera to date when an item was last used ...

Swapping out my old Thinkpad for an Acer Travelmate

 Last week, Ausnet left the Athenaeum in the dark (literally) while they carried out preventative maintenance in advance of winter.

Up till then I'd used my old Thinkpad, the one I'd used to document both Lake View  and part of Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust.

As I'd feared, the Thinkpad's battery is not what it was, and I ended up swapping over to an Acer Travelmate I'd originally bought as a second machine for J.

Last week's power shenanigans convinced me to try shifting to using the Travelmate full time for my cataloguing work.

As you'd suspect, it coped comfortably with this morning's cataloguing session, leaving me with just over half a battery's worth of power when I shut down.

I thought the smaller screen might be a problem, but in practice it turned out not to be.

It's going to be the Travelmate for cataloguing work until further notice...

Prayer and hymn books

 Today I started work creating stub catalogue entries for those prayer books and hymn books we decided to record and save.

Needless to say they are all very similar. Most were printed by James Nisbet,  a major publisher of hymn books and prayer books in the nineteenth century.

Interestingly, as well as the short hand annotation on the fly leaf, it's worth noting that this particular book was printed by the Australian publisher George Robertson, who also published Australian editions of yellow backs and other English novels.

Bible, hymn books and prayer books were in steady demand in the nineteenth century and it was probably well worth George Robertson's time to enter into agreement to produce Australian reprints of the standard editions.

James Nisbet, was one of these irritating Victorian publishers who didn't put publication dates or other identifying information on their books. Perhaps they thought that the word of the Lord was immutable and you didn't need to distinguish between printings and editions.

It's particularly annoying in the case of some of the early books, however some of the early books have dates

as in the case of this bible printed by Eyre and Spotiswood for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1856.

Gratifyingly, someone has added 'Stanley Sunday School 1863' to the fly leaf. 

1863 is quite an important date in the history of Stanley as it's when the Athenaeum was founded and Stanley was changing from a rough and ready goldminers' camp to a more permanent settlement.

We know that the Sunday School used the Athenaeum building in the early days of the settlement. It's got to be remembered that even though the state school (No 550) dates from 1858 as part of the early national School system, education was not compulsory until 1872, and Sunday Schools, besides religious education, often provided basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic for children who did not attend school full time as they were needed on the farm or were employed as 'picky boys' helping to sort ore from general spoil and tailings.

Joseph King's cheap circulating library in Norwich

 

One of our items is an 1841 edition of The Heiress and and her Suitors, which has a stamp from Joseph King’s Cheap Circulating Library in Norwich.

1841 is unusually early for the collection - we have very few books from the mid 1850s as the Athenaeum was only founded in 1863. What we do know is that many books were bought second hand from book importers some of whom bought up stock from failed circulating libraries in the UK.

Searches of those trade directories for Norwich and surrounding towns which are available online (principly via the Universith of Leicester) do not list Joseph King’s library

 ➜  a circulating library run by King and Baker in Bridewell is listed in the 1845 edition of White’s directory

 ➜ no circulating library owned by anyone known as King is listed in the 1854 directory

 ➜ no directories from the late 1850s/early 1860s are available online

with kind assistance from Darren Armstrong of the Norwich Heritage Centre, Belinda Kilduff of the Norwich records office, not to mention invaluable help from Hannah Henderson and Bethan Holdridge of the Norwich Museums service in pointing me in the right direction, I think I can now make up a story.

King and Baker’s circulating library was in business in the early 1850’s but was not listed in any trade directory after 1856.

The Norwich Heritage Centre actually holds a catalogue for King and Baker’s library which lists the Heiress and her Suitors as one of the books available.

Unfortunately the catalogue is undated.

However we can imagine the following scenario: 

• King and Baker were in partnership until sometime after 1854 when the business ceased. - King tried to continue the business but was unsuccessful and the stock sold 
• We know there were brokers who bought second hand book from circulating libraries, including failed ones, for export to Australia 
•  It’s more than a tenable suggestion that King’s stock was bought up and exported to Australia. 
• As the Athenaeum library did not start until 1863 it’s possible that the book may have been in use elsewhere and resold before coming to Stanley, but the evidence would seem to suggest that it would be one of the earler acquisitions in the historic book collection

Dust jackets

 Earlier today I tooted a link to an online article on the history of dust jackets - you know, these paper sheets folded around hardback books.

Working with historical library books up at the Athenaeum, I don't get a lot of time with dust jackets - those from the 1920s and 30s are mostly gone as are the majority of those on later books, although sometimes the dustjacket illustration has been pasted on the cover like this

which I'm guessing was just something someone did.

The interesting thing is that dust jackets didn't really appear until the 1920s.

Before then, while yellowbacks and other mass produced books had illustrated covers, sometimes in colour, more expensive books did not, although, perhaps following the trend for illustrated covers, increasingly hardback books did have some form of decoration on the cover, sometimes in monochrome, sometimes with a little colour.

Designs varied from simple floral designs

to illustrated

to those with a little colour in them

I'm going to wildly wave my hands here and suggest that sometime around 1920 the paper dustjacket was introduced, perhaps because that reduced production costs, allowing books to be produced with simple minimalist covers, and also, perhap because it was a way of making hardbacks as attractive as these pesky paperbacks that were making inroads into mass market publications...