Tag Archive: 0english

In our recent e-list, we featured what the great William Trevor once called ‘The jewel at the heart of English comic literature’, and one of our favourite recent acquisitions: George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody. This copy is the first edition in book form, first issue (with the final leaf of adverts […]

I’m sure that if you asked anyone “what was the first bibliography of eighteenth-century English literature?”, they probably wouldn’t guess that it was published in Berlin:    The book was the brainchild of the great Enlightenment publisher (and Anglophile), Friedrich Nicolai.  In 1789, he wrote a letter to Jeremias David Reuß (1750–1837), under-librarian at the […]

Regular readers will know of my interest in the history of the reception of English literature abroad.  But I’ve never come across this before: a case of the translation preserving a text, when the English original is lost. This is the first edition in German of The Man of Honour, or the History of Harry Waters […]

I have a soft spot for glees, a peculiarly English genre of unaccompanied part-song which developed from the madrigal in the eighteenth century.  Percy Young, in his introduction to The English Glee, notes that ‘such music was in the first instance cultivated by lay clerks and vicars choral as respite from the rigours of professional […]

This is the first edition of Kegel-Reime (‘Bowling Rhymes’) by Dr Richard W. Müller, published in New York in 1886: a collection of German verse brought out as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations held by the Centennial Kegel-Club of the Deutsche Liederkranz von New York, describing particular bowling nights from the 1880s.  The 24 plates depict members […]