Tag Archive: 0manuscript

This week we received the printed copies of a catalogue that has been in the works for some time, and have finally mailed them out. Published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, it has been years in the making.  Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest […]

We are currently preparing for the London book fair, and here’s one item we shall be exhibiting.  It’s a volume of manuscript music compiled in the 1820s containing approximately seventy pieces, one of which is ‘The Death Song of the Cherokee Indian’, a piece notable for its impact on the British mind on the subject […]

I have long been interested in the intersection of manuscript and print culture.  The wonderful 2011 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago Altered and Adorned was full of fascinating examples. Here is another, which came in recently: It is manuscript biographical dictionary (202 × 163 mm), created in Germany in about 1750, in which the anonymous compiler […]

Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire.  Casanova had […]

This week is Banned Books Week.  I’ve written about banned books before: the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Weimar Republic, in the Soviet Union.  Here’s something a little earlier: the libellous Philippiques of François-Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel (1677–1758).  These virulent satires against the Regent, the duc d’Orléans, enjoyed a huge popularity in manuscript throughout the […]

I’ve seen lots of silhouettes before, but never anything quite like this: a wonderful combination of hand-crafted image and handwritten verse produced in Germany c.1860, with 12 exquisitely-executed full-page silhouette illustrations cut from black varnished paper and mounted on pressed oak and chestnut leaves. The book is a poem entitled Die Blätter erzählen (‘The leaves are telling’), written […]