Owner bound sheet music in the nineteenth century

 

Today, down at Lake View I catalogued some bound sets of sheet music dating from the 1880s or thereabouts.

At first I was a little confused by the collections as some of the sheet music had different people’s names - one waltz in the bound set might have Phoebe Illegible on the cover and another Mary O’Scribble while the volume itself said it belonged to Mary Higgins.

And then I realised - people, particularly in country Australia, in the nineteenth century probably collected and exchanged sheet music just as we used to sell CDs to second hand music shops, and buy others from the same shops - after all a set of sheet music was typically priced at between 2s and 2s 6d - which would come out at around between $20 and $30 today allowing for inflation - and strangely enough roughly the cost of a CD.

Sheet music was popular - a quick search of Trove will show any number of stationers offering popular composers at discount.

The reason of course was quite simple - if you wanted music, on the whole you had to make it yourself, or else wait for a travelling music group to pitch up at the local music hall, which outside of the cities could be quite a long wait.

And people crave entertainment, especially in the cold dark nights of winter, where there was nowhere much to go - and remember in small country towns where everyone knew everyone, there was only so far a social soiree could go to alleviate boredom.

So just as people, especially middle class people read books to pass the time, they would also play the piano, the violin, the flute or simply sing to entertain each other, and for that reason, people would have the pieces they especially enjoyed playing bound together to make them more manageable, and more portable, perhaps much as we would gather favourite CDs together to take on a long car trip ...

Really popular authors in the nineteenth century

 Up at the Athenaeum I've been working on the heritage book collection, which basically consists of all the books bought by the Reading room from the early 1860s to the 1950s.

Uniquely, the collection was never broken up, so we can get a picture from its contents of what people actually wanted to read. 

Sometimes a book was so popular that they bought a second copy, and sometimes a book was so worn it was replaced with a newer edition, so following on from my previous post what were the good folk of Stanley reading in the 1870s and 1880s?

Totally unscientifically, I roughly scanned the collection listing for a number of well known nineteenth century authors - as some books from the period don't have a date of publication in the front matter (Not all nineteenth century publishers included a date of publication  on either the title page or its reverse) and just to add to the fun some books have multiple copies with different dates and different publishers - I resorted to manual scan of the collection listing.

And what did I find?

Sensation novels mostly, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon as well as Louisa M. Alcott, Bulwer-Lytton, plus more than a dash of Charles Dickens.

There are more serious books as well, Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, books on poultry raising and so on, bust basically, just like us, they liked a dash of excitement in their bedtime reading ...