Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
17th June 2014
I am currently putting some things together for a new catalogue. This will be included: a spurious will by which the testator, the ‘superabundant’ Mary Hughes, in 1758 distributed various parts of her body to, among others, a Bedfordshire clergyman, the King of Prussia, the Royal Society, and the Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College, […]
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20th May 2014
This rather charming book, from 1857, is the first edition of the comic autobiography of a Scottish ‘packman’, or commercial traveller, whose travels around the British Isles include a sighting of Queen Victoria at Braemar Castle, and a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The author was born in 1819, in very […]
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17th January 2013
I like books based on conceits. See, for example, my earlier post on a 1732 German satire in the form of a translation of a letter from one Sir Robert Clifton to a correspondent on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya regarding an apocalyptic image he has seen in a frozen window pane. Here’s another I came […]
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