Discoveries and Rediscoveries – Page 11

Copper Plate Pictures: Prints for the Juvenile Market

Jill Shefrin spoke to the Friends of the Bodleian on 8 June 2010, describing a volume of picture prints issued by William Darton Jr. (1781-1854). Darton was one of the family of publishers whose books for children, appearing in the late 18th and 19th centuries, have been documented most recently in Shefrin’s own monograph, The Dartons : publishers of educational aids, pastimes & juvenile ephemera, 1787-1876 : a bibliographical checklist. (2009)

The volume of prints [shelfmark Bodleian Vet. A6 c.118], acquired by the Bodleian Libary in 2008, dates from about the 1820s and contains over 50 prints from the numbered series Children’s Copper Plate Pictures, including such edifying scenes as ‘The stag at bay’ (no. 1) and ‘A farm house on fire’ (no. 8), as well as sheets with sets of smaller pictures.

The volume contains more of the harlequinades originally published by Benjamin Tabart (1767 or 8-1833) , probably acquired by William Darton Jr. at a time when Tabart was facing bankruptcy. Apparently Darton then issued these himself from his firm at Holborn Hill, London, as they remained popular.

Thirty-two of the prints are sheets of book illustrations. Eight to a sheet, these provided the plates (usually 16 for each volume) for entertaining and educational books for children, with such titles as ‘Inhabitants of the world’ and ‘The book of dogs’.

Shefrin described how a careful examination of this volume of prints supported her research into the workings of the market in children’s books. Having the sheets together in one volume confirmed that Darton had consolidated a stock of picture publications for children from works originally by Tabart, himself, and his father William Darton Sr. (1755-1819). The selection of items shows that earlier prints were re-used, and that old and new pictures were combined into series to be sold together.

It may have been intended as a sample album, to show potential customers examples of Darton’s work.

The volume is described in OLIS, the Bodleian’s online catalogue, (catalogued under the title ‘Darton Sample Album’, shelfmark Vet. A6 c.118).

See this earlier post for descriptions of other Benjamin Tabart harlequinades in the Bodleian’s collections.

Rare portrait of Commonwealth leaders during decolonisation

Thanks to the generosity of the South African Friends of the Bodleian, the Library has acquired a number of portraits, photographs and certificates from Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1956 to 1963, which were recently offered for sale.

Welensky_small — Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, London, 1957

The most notable item in the new accession is a photograph from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference held in London in 1957. The photograph shows the Prime Ministers and one Foreign Minister of the ten countries which then made up the Commonwealth in the garden of Downing Street and is signed by them. Only ten copies were signed for the ten participants. The photograph captures decolonisation in progress, with Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Shaheed Suhrawardy of Pakistan and Kwame Nkrumah of newly-independent Ghana alongside Welensky of the short-lived Federation and E.H. Louw, the Foreign Affairs Minister of South Africa.

The collection includes a certificate of life membership of the Rhodesian Railway Workers’ Union and a photograph of Welensky at the Union’s annual conference which reflect his origins as a locomotive fireman and driver. A leather-bound album contains the official photographs of the funeral in January 1957 of Lord Llewellin, first Governor General of the Federation, and captures a particular era in colonialism. An illuminated manuscript certificate presented to Welensky and signed by the members of the Federal Cabinet in December 1963 marks the end of the Federation.

The main collection of Welensky Papers was donated to the Bodleian by Sir Roy, who died in 1991, and was catalogued in detail in the mid-1990s. Comprising over 800 boxes it is vital source for the study of central Africa in the mid-twentieth century. A collection-level description can be seen at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/blcas/welensky.html .

Lucy McCann
Archivist
Bodleian Library of Commonwealth & African Studies

A gift of miniature books

The Library has just been given by Mrs Chloe Morton an extraordinary collection assembled by her late aunt Miss Ursula Mary Radford.

They arrived double- and triple- banked in a specially made bookcase with an overflow in a cardboard box. So far there are some 320, but more are being found as the Radford house is cleared and they are destined for us.

The range of books is wide, from a 1625 Psalter in a contemporary embroidered binding to a mid-20^th century paperback dictionary, a 1780 thumb Bible to a finger New Testament of 1900, a book bound in wood from the Mary Rose to a cathedral binding.

And there are books that aren’t: a housewife of scissors, bodkin, thimble, writing tablet, all contained in a book shaped case, a tiny wooden box with a sliding lid to keep something small safe, and a portable writing-case holding an ink-well, sealing-wax, and wafers, bound like a book in gold-tooled red-morocco.

Bodleian’s Winter Exhibition “Crossing Borders”

The Kennicott Bible. MS. Kenn. 1 fol. 352 v.

On Monday 4^th May some 600 visitors grasped the last opportunity to see the exhibition, ‘Crossing Borders’, in the Bodleian Library exhibition room. During the five months of this exhibition, 30 Hebrew manuscripts together with about 30 Arabic and Latin codices were viewed by 30,412 visitors in total. This precious selection of the Bodleian holdings was ‘a feast for the eyes,’ as Bodley’s Librarian Dr. Sarah Thomas said when she opened the exhibition on 7^th December 2009.

Several bibliographic celebrities were present, among them the Kennicott Bible. Thanks to a digital display, users were also able to ‘turn the pages’ of a facsimile of this 15th-century manuscript. Maimonides’ autograph draft of his legal code, the Mishneh Torah was another outstanding presence.

CBMishneTorah — Maimonides’ autograph draft of his legal code, Mishneh Torah (from the Cairo Genizah), in cursive Sephardic script (Egypt, c. 1180).

Other books, however, were on public display for the first time in their long lives, such as the 13^th century illuminated prayer books for the Jewish festivals, Nicholas of Lyra’s commentary on the book of Exodus with gold leaf images of the Menorah, the selection of Arabic, Hebrew and Latin fables, the oldest extant 13^th century Hebrew Encyclopaedia of science and its Arabic and Latin counterparts, some precious Greek papyri and Hebrew fragments from the Cairo Genizah, must have been thrilled by this extraordinary interest in their existence. As these manuscripts sat in the exhibition cases, they might have found the number of admirers visiting them less surprising than their unusual neighbours. Resting on their accustomed shelves in the bookstacks they had always been surrounded by family members: Hebrew by Hebrew, Latin by Latin codices.

CBKolNidre — Tripartite Mahzor: Initial word of the opening prayer for the Day of Atonement (Kol nidrei; Ashkenaz, fourteenth century).

But in December 2009 they became the centre of a cross-cultural event. In the exhibition the Hebrew manuscripts became a meeting place of cultures. In a direct comparison with Arabic, Greek and Latin manuscripts they showed in unexpected ways the social and cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews in both the Muslim and Christian world.

CBMenorah — Nicholas of Lyra, Commentary on Exodus, with comparative diagrams of the menorah and the table of showbread (France, late fourteenth century).

The interaction came to light in decorative patterns, writing styles, script types and text genres. By absorbing elements of the host cultures in which the Jews lived, the Hebrew manuscripts became proof of coexistence and cultural affinity, as well as practical cooperation between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Middle Ages. Back in the stacks they all will miss their new friends.

– from Piet van Boxel, Curator of Hebrew Collections, Bodleian Library.

An online selection of images from the exhibition is available: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/about/exhibitions/online/crossing-borders

Dr James Willoughby: ‘An English library in Renaissance Rome’

On Friday, 19 February, Dr. James Willoughby (Oxford) spoke to the Seminar on the History of the Book on the library of the English hospice in Rome from 1496 until 1527. St. Thomas’ Hospice, and its library, served the needs of English pilgrims, royal envoys, commercial travellers, suitors and litigants at the curial courts, humanist scholars such as Thomas Linacre and William Lilye and English students studying in Italian universities. A remarkable surviving series of book-lists records the library’s ownership of, chiefly, scholastic, medical, legal and devotional works, in both manuscript and print. Dr. Willoughby argued that the book-lists were evidence not just for the intellectual life of the English community in Rome, but for the diffusion of print and the workings of the English book trade in the period: he demonstrated how the provenance of both manuscript and early printed books might be tracked by means of ‘secundo folio’ citations given in booklists.The library was ransacked in 1527, but exists today as part of the English seminary in Rome, retaining its manuscript records alongside a single, printed book dating from its earlier life.
The Seminar is convened at All Souls College by Prof. Ian Maclean.
— from Giles Bergel

Jane Austen’s Volume the First

MS. Don. e. 7: The conservation of Jane Austen’s Volume the first

This manuscript takes its name from the inscription on its upper cover. It contains a compilation of Jane Austen’s early short works, written in Austen’s hand as a fair copy, and includes Henry & Eliza, The Adventures of Mr Harley, and The beautifull Cassandra. Austen wrote in a ready-made bound blank-book and completed the transcript when she was seventeen. The manuscript was bought for the Bodleian Library through the Friends of the Bodleian in 1933 and was first published in an edition by R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1933).

The conservation of the manuscript was made possible by a grant from the National Manuscript Conservation Trust and was carried out in parallel with an Arts and Humanities Research Council award to digitize the manuscript. The original, though damaged condition of this major literary manuscript required sensitive conservation treatment; a stationer’s binding was not intended to last indefinitely and subsequent use has led to its breakdown. Unfortunately, the damage was at a stage where it threatened safe handling of the volume, and a complete breakdown of the manuscript’s structure was threatened.

The conservation treatment was focussed on the repair of the damaged and broken spine folds of the manuscript as well as the breaking sewing and collapsed spine without dis-binding the manuscript. All repairs were carried out in-situ and the original structure was disturbed as little as possible during treatment. The conservation work was carried out by Andrew Honey of the Bodleian Library’s Conservation & Collection Care department.

Temporary repairs were carried out so that the manuscript could be fully digitized before conservation. The general condition of individual leaves was very good but many of their spine-folds were breaking down and several leaves were completely detached. The original sewing had broken down in places and the text-block was loose although sewing supports were sound and were still attached to the boards. The covering leather had broken down and the boards were not protecting the text-block.

To repair the leaves, Japanese paper patches were fed around the backs of sections, around the remains of the sewing thread, and pasted in place. The manuscript’s loose structure was repaired by re-sewing the text-block through a stiffened spine wrapper made from a laminate of linen and Japanese paper. This spine wrapper was then used to reposition the boards and formed the base for the new spine. The new spine was covered with layers of toned Japanese paper with a surface finish. Finally the repaired manuscript is housed in a new cloth box.

— From Andrew Honey
See more Conservation projects at the Bodleian Library

Cain in the canefields

Genesis 4:3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

Wood E 25(10) The beginning, progress, and end of man

A curious case of a strong image from within the ballad genre highlights the strength of the visual tradition of broadside ballad printing even up to 1840, beyond the point when a wealth of new types of illustrated print had begun to appear in such publications as the Penny Magazine. The old ballad woodcuts look crude beside the wood engravings which had become standard fare in newspapers. But towards the middle of the 19th century there reappeared on some cheap printed songs an image whose earliest survival, on a ballad in Anthony Wood’s collection in the Bodleian Library, is from the 1650s [Bodleian Wood E 25(10)]. The 1650s broadside, entitled The beginning, progress, and end of man, was unusual enough in itself. It was a primitive pop-up book, in which images were transformed by turning the folds of the paper first up, then down. Adam becomes Eve, who turns into a mermaid; Cain’s offering is shown, then Abel’s, and then one brother murdering the other in a jealous rage.

It is the picture of Cain making his offering that was printed – probably from a later copy of the woodcut — two centuries later. It turns up on two ballads published in the 1830s or 1840s. One of these, Coffee and Tea, [Bodleian Harding B 25(392)] is shown here.
Did the 19th-century printer know or care about the bible iconography and the old-fashioned look of the woodcut? At this time, printers all around Britain were able to get hold of stereotyped images used in advertising and package labels. Tea, coffee, and tobacco labels might be illustrated with pictures of Chinese or Native American scenes, and these often came in handy for illustrating songs about far-off places, One song, entitled “Old King Coffee or the Ashanti War”, printed by H. Disley circa 1873, shows an American Indian on a quay, smoking his pipe as barrels are loaded onto a ship. It seems to have been taken from advertising or packaging for tobacco. The Indian with a feathered head-dress is made to stand in for the Asantehene (king of the Ashanti), Kofi Karikari.

Firth c.16(149) Old King Coffee, or the Ashantee war

Similar images would have been available to W. and T. Fordyce in the 1830s. Their choice of Cain, and this old picture, looks more deliberate when we know this. Antiquarian interest in ballads was well established even fifty years before this, and some printers deliberately marketed their broadsides as “old ballads”. Reprinting an old picture was certainly a way to give a distinctively antique look to the page.
Then again, the half-naked figure engaged in labor in an exotic agricultural setting, together with the allusion to hot drinks sweetened with sugar, suggests one reading highly relevant to the 1830s, the decade of West Indian slave emancipation, and to the 1840s, the decade of free trade in sugar. The deliberate use of the old woodcut of Cain manages to be both topical, in its suggestion of slave labour in the canefields, and traditional, linking the bawdy song Coffee and tea to the English broadside tradition.
– Alexandra Franklin

To search these and other ballads, see :Bodleian Broadside Ballads

Antiquaries 2 – the final cut

Plate 67 from Centuria II, of Itinerarium curiosum (Bodleian Library D 3.9 Art.)

William Stukeley, an 18th-century antiquarian, documented Roman remains for his publication ‘Itinerarium curiosum; or, An account of the antiquitys and remarkable curiositys in nature or art, observ’d in travels thro’ Great Brittan’ (1724). But when he thought of having this drawing engraved for publication in a later edition of this work, he made a note to the engraver to “leave out the woman”, whom he had depicted sitting in an alcove near to the Roman figure (see post “Antiquaries 1”). And so the lady vanishes ….

1-penny survey of English history

At the Seminar on the history of the book, Giles Bergel told us about the Wandering Jew’s Chronicle, a broadside ballad first published in 1634 and updated in at least 14 subsequent editions up to the 19th century. As these were turbulent times for England and the monarchy, the use of an unbroken portrait gallery of monarchs to illustrate most of the versions suggests a royalist theme, and the “Whiggish”, triumphalist view of English history.

Visual representations of history are a fascinating subject in themselves, and Bergel also showed the first use in print of a stemma, much used by historians of texts, in an 1827 publication, Carl Johan Schlyter’s Corpus iuris Sueo-Gotorum antiqui.

Benjamin Tabart Harlequinades

veroni1

The Library has recently acquired an album of 89 coloured prints dating from the early 1820s. It may have been issued by William Darton Jr. (1781-1854) and his firm at Holborn Hill during the mid-1820s as a sample album to show potential customers examples of his work. It contains a small number of sheets originally issued in 1800 by William Darton Sr. (1755-1819); 11 harlequinades in unfolded sheets with the imprint of B. Tabart & Co., and some sheets bearing Darton Jr’s imprint with dates ranging from 1821 to 1824. This mix of imprints suggests that Darton Jr. inherited some of his father’s old stock upon his death, including some of Benjamin Tabart’s publications which William Sr. possibly acquired in 1811 when financial difficulties may have forced Tabart to sell off some of his stock.

The harlequinades are especially interesting as very few examples survive generally, and four of the eleven Tabart examples in this album are currently untraced elsewhere. There are certainly difficulties locating harlequinades in library and museum catalogues around the world as they can be treated equally as toys, books, ephemera or prints, but as some titles were not located by Marjory Moon in her bibliography of Tabart’s Juvenile Library it seems likely that some of the Bodleian copies may be unique survivals. It is also possible that these eleven titles represent Tabart’s entire output of harlequinades, but that is pure speculation.

Blue Beard. Sold by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robinson Crusoe. Sold by B. Tabart & Co. June 1. 1809.
Veroni or the novice of St. Marks. Published by B. Tabart & Co, June 1. 1809.
Mother Goose. Published by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st 1809.
Hop o’ my thumb. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 1st. 1810..
Black Beard the pirate. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st. 1809.
Parnell’s hermit. Published, by Tabart & Co., Jany. 31st. 1810.
Exile, as performed at the royal theatres. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robin Hood. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Polish tyrant. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., Aug. 1st. 1809.
A tale of mystery. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 25th, 1810.
Shelfmark: Vet. A6 c.118

The entire album will be available online in Summer 2009 as part of the John Johnson Collection’s Electronic Ephemera Project. Full records for the harlequinades are available now via OLIS.