Category Archive: Bookseller

For those of you following our social media this week, you may have noticed a bit of a floral theme; more specifically, we have been posting a short series of botanical illustrations from William Curtis’s The Botanical Magazine: or, Flower-Garden displayed … (London, Fry & Couchman ‘for W. Curtis, at his Botanic Garden’, 1787). This […]

After every catastrophe comes the opportunity for revival and, just as Notre Dame is rising out of the ashes today, so too did York Minster in the years following a disastrous arson attack in February, 1829. Jonathan Martin (1782-1838; brother of the artist, John Martin) very nearly destroyed York Minster entirely when he lit a […]

What better way to end our Christmas carol countdown than with a rousing round of ‘Here we come a wassailing‘? The words were first published in Husk’s book of carols in 1864 (which we blogged about this past Tuesday), whose sources included a Manchester chapbook and a broadside printed in Bradford, c.1850 (Keyte, p. 545). […]

Today we are spotlighting the antiquary Thomas Wright (1810–1877), an ardent scholar of Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman texts, and his book of carols: Songs and Carols, now first printed, from a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (London: Printed for the Percy Society, by Richards, 1847). The first edition contains ‘This Endris Night’ (ender = […]

Today we will take a break from our series of ‘first appearances’ of carols to bring you a delightful early Victorian gift book, with chromolithographed illuminations throughout: Joseph Cundall’s A Booke of Christmas Carols, illuminated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, Henry G. Bohn, 1845): ‘After Pickering, the publisher with the most devoted […]

Next on our Christmas carol countdown is ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It turns out we have the eighteenth century to thank for this beloved carol and its delightful assemblage of festive feathered friends; according to Keyte, the words first appeared in ‘various forms in broadsides from the early eighteenth century onward’ (p. 469). Lucy […]