Tag Archive: 0publishing

The past couple of weeks I have written about the opportunities offered by lithography to British musicians in the nineteenth century, and the problems they also encountered. One of the obvious benefits of the new medium was illustration, and a number of recent acquisitions set me thinking about this: This song was published c.1820, i.e. […]

Here’s rare book: the first (and probably only) edition of A Selection from the Music in use at the Church of St John the Divine Fairfield, privately printed in—presumably—a small number of copies, in 1858.  (This is Fairfield, Merseyside, by the way, not Connecticut.)  The compiler was one J. B. Cooper. The whole thing is […]

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 […]

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know that I am interested in the reception of Anglophone literature abroad, and of foreign literature in the English-speaking world.  One figure in this area who cannot be ignored is Henry Vizetelly (1820–1894), publisher, journalist, and editor, whose defiance of censorship and policy of issuing […]

‘No one buys more books than booksellers.’  This was the advice given to those setting out in the trade at the inaugural York Antiquarian Book Seminar last year by the American bookseller, Lorne Bair.  Lorne was talking about old books, but I suspect that the same may well hold true for reference books, too.  I […]

‘Upton Sinclair seems to have been made to order for Russian readers in the early years of the Soviet regime.  Always topical and sharply provocative, he labored to expose the seamy side of American life, constantly hammering away at moral, social, economic, and political evil.  Ever sympathetic toward the underprivileged, and perpetually shocked by social […]