Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
27th February 2020
Also in our newly-released Anglo-German catalogue is a copy of the extremely rare first (and only) edition in English of a book by Christian Felix Weiße containing over 50 songs for children, an early appearance for a German children’s book in English. It is also featured in our New York book fair list, available by […]
Read more
5th January 2017
When I put out a list on the theatre last year, this was one of the most sought-after items: excerpts from Ariel, a burlesque stage production based on The Tempest by the prolific playwright, librettist and editor of Punch, Francis Cowley Burnand (1836–1917). Ariel was first performed by John Hollingshead’s company at the Gaiety Theatre […]
Read more
17th September 2013
Songs of Hard Labour. Songs of Siberian convicts, fugitives and vagrants. Collected and written down in Siberia by Wilhelm Harteveld (Moscow, 1912; 144 × 97 mm). Julius Napoleon Wilhelm Harteveld (1862–1927), a Swede by birth, lived in Russia 1882–1918, where he was instrumental in recording songs sung by exiles and political prisoners in Siberia, publishing a […]
Read more
10th September 2013
20 Siberian folk-songs for solo voice with piano accompaniment from those collected in 1900 in the province of Irkutsk and the Transbaikal region by Nikolai Protasov … Published … by the Song Commission of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1902). The stunning chromolithographed cover was designed by V. P. Shneider. Nikolai Protasov (1865–1903), an active member […]
Read more
16th July 2013
As it was Bastille Day recently, I thought I would share this. It’s taken from a very rare little book called Recueil d’hymnes philosophiques, civiques et moraux, compiled by François-Nicolas Parent in around 1798. Dedicated to those living in the countryside, this extraordinary work prints the texts of Republican songs, the ‘Marseillaise’ among them, with the music […]
Read more
18th December 2012
The Reverend George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848–1934) is remembered today (if remembered at all) as the author of the carols ‘Ding dong! merrily on high’ and ‘Past three a clock’. His major contributions to English church music, however, are now all but overlooked: the compilations Songs of Syon (1904), The Cowley Carol Book (1901) and, later, […]
Read more