it's been a Wilkie Collins sort of a day...

As usual, I had my morning cataloguing up at the Athenaeum, and this morning it was Wilkie Collins, one of my favourite nineteenth century authors.

Strangely, unless it's been misclassified and I'm yet to find it, we don't appear to have a copy of The Woman in White, which is perhaps his best known novel today.

This isn't terribly unusual - the Woman in White was incredibly popular when it first appeared, and it's possible that the book simply wore out and was not replaced. As I've said before the accession registers and other paperwork relating to the early days of the Athenaeum's library have disappeared

The Woman in White made Wilkie Collin's reputation, even inspiring a cartoon by his friend John Leech depicting a housholder, engrossed in his novel being ordered to come to bed by his wife.

What we do have is a second edition of the Moonstone, unfortunately volume three is missing

which was clearly sourced second hand from Mullen's as the books have remnant Mullen's circulating library labels, 

a copy of Poor Miss Finch that dates from 1872 that was probably bought new by the Athenaeum, copies of his early novels Antonina and Basil that have been professionally rebound, suggesting that they were reasonably popular and even a yellowback edition of Miss or Mrs from the end of the nineteenth century suggesting Wilkie Collins remained popular throughout his lifetime and beyond

Other than that, it was the usual mix of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels, interwar mysteries and 1950s romance novels...

Bottles documented (and a few books)

 Well after last week's unplanned cancellation, it was back to cataloguing the bottles as promised, as well as a few more books in the historic book collection

the job itself was fairly straightforward, and as I'd carefully packed up a box with my little Linux documentation laptop, some weights to hold the background down, right angled rulers etc it seemed to be really quick - actually it took me about an hour due to being out of practice in assembling a documentation package, but I got there.

I'm happy that the procedure, derived from my work with both Lake View and Dow's is robust. My only real worry is the use of excel format for the spreadsheet - its use is only part of my procedure because originally the National Trust had a workflow where they converted the excel spreadsheets automagically to  csv for ingest to their archive management system.

It could be argued that instead of xlsx I should have used ods, or indeed generated a csv format file to ensure the long term accessibility of the data.

In this case I don't think it matters over much, but just for fun I added an ods and csv subdirectory with the supplementary spreadsheets

and replaced the manifest.txt file with an updated version to reflect this change.

Other than that it was simply a case of yet more documentation of the historic book collection.

No spectacular finds, just mid century romance and mystery novels, which perhaps reflects a post war desire for a touch of colour and escapism, but I did find one book that had previously belonged to a circulating library in Melbourne operated by Myer's ...

Not a lot of progress

 Well, the bottles I planned to document yesterday are still undocumented, and I didn't catalogue any of the historic book collection either. I'd had to cancel my morning working up at the Athenaeum due to unforeseen circumstances.

As I alluded to elsewhere, J was due to have a minor medical procedure as day surgery earlier this week, and it turned into one of these things where the wheels come off - because she ended up having to stay overnight and wasn't discharged when we thought she would be, our whole carefully planned schedule fell apart.

We were late home, missed picking the cat up from the cat motel, etc, etc etc...

Well, these things happen, and when they do you just have to roll with it, and sometimes things have to cancelled or reorganised, and one of these things was my morning at the Athenaeum.

However I did do a fair part of the preparation before hand, checking camera batteries were charged, firing up the documentation computer to do any necessary updates, and making up a base recording spreadsheet.

It's a fairly specific job, so I don't need all of my documentation kit, just a couple of scales, a micrometer and a set of glass weights to hold the backdrop down, which will all fit in a simple plastic carry box, and of course my trusty digital SLR to take high resolution images, and certainly easier than taking the whole documentation kit which fills a couple plastic boxes these days.

Once the bottles are documented, I'll make up a little documentation package, one copy of which I'll save to OneDrive and the other I'll write to a USB stick to be squirreled away and archived ...

Bottles (again)

 Up at the Athenaeum, one of my colleagues brought in three glass bottles found while digging in her garden and asked me to take a look at them.

The bottles all look to be from the first half of the twentieth century, and are fairly generic examples of medicine bottles.

This first one is a fairly generic clear glass bottle of the sort used to package aspirin and similar over the counter medicines.

The second one is a little more interesting. Made from brown glass, which has become slightly crazed over the years, it has Faulding embossed on one of the narrower faces of the bottle. Faulding is a long established Australian manufacturer of over the counter remedies.

The bottle is not ribbed or dimpled suggesting it orginally contained a non prescription medicine.

The final bottle is potentially more interesting, consisting of a narrow clear glass cylinder. Close examination showed that it still had a label in white paint on the bottle, albeit faded and worn.

Playing about with the image using Microsoft photo editor brought up the words 'Nyal Cold Sore'.

Like Faulding, Nyal is a long established Australian brand of off the shelf pharmaceutical products. Experience documenting Nyal products at Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern suggests that the form of the logo used - with its distinctive lower case 'y' - means that the bottle dates to the late 1950s or early 1960s

The plan is to document them fully next week, using the folksonomy I developed for the Dow's documentation project. The items are fairly generic and we are not a collecting institution, so once documented we will offer them to a local museum - unlike many bottles, these ones most definitely have a provenance...

Finding Louisa

Following on from finding that one of Louisa Crow’s stories was republished in the New York Times, I thought I’d do a very simple search of Trove, Papers Past NZ, and Welsh Newspapers Online to see if her stories were also being republished elsewhere.

As I said, it’s strange how someone who, while a popular hack novelist of her time, seems to have completely dropped out of the canon of nineteenth century novelists.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable in her writing serial stories for magazines, quite a few of her peers did the same thing, only to have their serials republished as a three decker. Dickens did the same, as did Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

And newspapers, especially the weekly papers, and papers in rural areas liked to have a serialised novel, if only to attract repeat purchases of the paper. The social historian David Kerr Cameron has recorded the importance of the Friday or Saturday paper in rural Scotland in the nineteenth century, where often the weekly newspaper was the only reading matter in a croft, other than a Bible.

The literary historian Katherine Bode has investigated a similar phenomenon in rural Australia, and has uncovered lost novels which only appear to have been published as newspaper serials.

So, to the search.

Trove and PapersPast NZ differentiate between newspapers and magazines. In both cases I searched for the occurrences of the string Louisa Crow - this reliably brought up mentions of her. Searching for Mrs L Crow did not improve the results, suggesting that she was principally known as Louisa Crow.

A search of Welsh Newspapers online shows frequent mentions in book reviews and in advertising for new books and issues of the Quiver suggesting some popularity. She does not appear to be credited for any serialised novels - I’m not sure why - it could be that she simply wasn’t particularly popular in English speaking Wales.

As a sanity check I later reran the search on the SLV's copy of Gale NewVault, and both her stories and poems seem to have been syndicated to a wide range of English, Scottish and Irish newspapers, which suggests that perhaps the results from Welsh Newspapers Online are an anomaly.

On the other hand a search of Trove shows that her stories were reprinted in various country newspapers of the time in Australia and she was thought worthy of mention in various booksellers adverts, and strangely one of her stories was reprinted in the Presbyterian calendar of 1893 - a church annual magazine.

As in Wales, she seems to have been less popular in New Zealand, with very few hits in Papers Past. As in the case of Wales I can only wave my hands, I don’t know enough about nineteenth century newspaper publishing in New Zealand to speculate meaningfully.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, Louisa Crow was well enough known to be mentioned in the Times of London of 01 January 1896 in their list of significant personages who had died in the previous year, as well as earning a couple of obituaries in literary periodicals of the time.

However, as I’ve said, she seems to have almost completely dropped out of the literary canon since her death, which I guess simply shows just how fleeting fame can be...

Mrs Crow continues to confuse

 Yesterday, up at the Athenaeum, I had some fun tracing Louisa Crow, a nineteenth century female novelist.

We hold a copy of one of her novels, yet the novel is not listed in either the British Library or National Library of Scotland catalogues.

Normally I use Google to search, but given the paucity of information about Mrs Crow, I thought to rerun the search using both Bing and Yandex, to see if they turned up anything else.

As is sometimes the case Yandex produced some search results that surprised me:

Firstly a link to the  New York Times of August 12 1866, which features a short story, Hazeley Mill, by Louisa Crow. (It also features a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, exalted company indeed for someone usually considered a Victorian hack novelist.)

Secondly, a link to an 1866 illustration held by Aberystwyth University for a story Hazeley Mill in Once a Week magazine, a magazine Louisa Crow published in.But was it really Louisa Crow?

Well the Hathi Trust archive of Once a Week  from 1866 includes Louisa Crow's story, so I am guessing that in the way of nineteenth century newspapers, the Times republished the story, and indeed it does credit it as coming from Once a Week.

The dates fit, meaning I think we can be confident that the story is by "our" Louisa Crow, even if it does not appear in the usual lists of her short stories on Victorian literature and Victorian studies sites.

It's interesting how someone who obviously had some sort of reputation can almost totally disappear from literary history...

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...