Tag Archive: 0eighteenth century

With the Boston book fair now behind me, I’ve now got time to focus on cataloguing some recent acquisitions and thought I’d share one with you. This is a rare eighteenth-century perspective view depicting a miniature contemporary library, complete with library users reading, discoursing, or simply admiring the shelves.  Such Guckkastendioramen (or ‘peepshows’ as they […]

This is a copy of the first edition of The Musical Bouquet (1799) by the Welsh harpist Edward Jones (1752–1824); the etched frontispiece is by Rowlandson. ‘Bard to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ as the title-page here styles him, he had moved to London from Llandderfel in 1774.  ‘The harp was very fashionable […]

As many will know, ephemera has been an interest of mine since I set up the business (ten years ago this year!). Recently, I discovered a genre of which I was previously unaware: fancy printed greetings cards from eighteenth-century Germany, using colour and silk. Here is a New Year’s card, the etching printed in blue, […]

German interest in folksongs began in the middle of the eighteenth century, stoked in no small part by the Europe-wide mania for Ossian.  Thomas Percy’s influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was also much admired, and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been sent a copy by Rudolf Erich Raspe (of Munchausen fame) […]

Many of the items in the Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue are rife with cross-cultural connections. One such item is the copy of John Frederick Lampe’s A plain and compendious Method of teaching Thorough Bass, after the most rational Manner … (London, J. Wilcox, 1737). This, the first (and only) edition was dedicated to Colonel John Blathwayt […]

The late eighteenth century saw a rise in personal travel and tourism, making it only a matter of time before travel accounts became an amusing and sought-after genre of reading material. Item 40 from Anglo-German Cultural Relations is one such example, and was both lauded and entertaining: Karl Philipp Moritz‘s Reisen eines Deutschen in England […]