Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
8th October 2020
According to The New Oxford Book of Carols, this year marks the 125th anniversary of the famous carol known in English as ‘Gabriel’s Message’. It is actually a translation, by Sabine Baring-Gould, of a Basque carol, Birjina gaztettobat zegoen, which was collected by the French musician Charles Bordes and published in his Dix cantiques populaires […]
Read more
20th December 2019
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). […]
Read more
19th December 2019
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 = […]
Read more
18th December 2019
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 […]
Read more
16th December 2019
As with many of our favourite Christmas carols, ‘It came upon the midnight clear’ first appears (with its tune) in a Victorian publication: Arthur Sullivan‘s Church Hymns with Tunes (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1874): ‘This fine Christmas hymn is a meditation on man’s wilful deafness to the message of the angels, and, not […]
Read more
13th December 2019
‘We Three Kings of Orient are’ has always been a crowd-pleaser (and a magnet for children who enjoy changing the words). An American carol, it first appeared on p. 12 of John Henry Hopkins‘s Carols, Hymns, and Songs (New York, Church Book Depository, [1863]): ‘Hopkins was rector of Christ’s Church, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when he published […]
Read more