Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
24th January 2022
For some time, I’ve been aware that lithography seems to have been a useful medium for amateur women artists in the nineteenth century. I blogged once before about one such artist, Josepha Hart Gulston, and I thought I’d share a couple more examples I recently came across. This volume, entitled ‘Morning Hymn’ on the cover […]
Read more
14th January 2022
Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) was best known for her Rhenish poems; Goedeke called her ‘the true poet of the Rhine’. This is a copy of the first edition of The Rhenish Minstrel, published in Frankfurt by Carl Jugel in 1835, a version of her book Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis which Jugel had brought out the same year, […]
Read more
3rd September 2021
This book (a first edition, privately printed on the Royal estate at Windsor) describes itself as ‘The gift of the Queen, to her beloved daughters, Charlotte Aug: Matilda. Augusta Sophia. Elizabeth. Mary. And Sophia. And with Her Majesty’s permission dedicated to their Royal Highnesses by the Translator Ellis Cornelia Knight’ (p. [3]). Cornelia Knight (1757–1837)—novelist, poet, […]
Read more
19th August 2021
One of the items in my recent Theatre list is this playbill, which advertises an important performance of Romeo and Juliet in 1832. If you look closely, you will see that the role of Romeo, ‘for this night only’, was taken by Ellen Tree (1805–1880; Kean as she subsequently became, on her marriage to the […]
Read more
28th April 2021
Intended as the first of a projected series of works with the general title ‘Idées singulières’, this is an important early manifesto for the regulation of prostitution, published not in London, as the title-page maintains, but in Paris in 1769. It also holds a significant place in the historical use of pornography—literally ‘writing about prostitutes’—as […]
Read more
3rd September 2020
This is a copy of the first edition in English of Bettina von Arnim’s first book, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835), translated in part by the author herself and privately printed in Berlin. ‘The printing had almost come to end [sic], when by a variance between the printer and the translator, it was interrupted; […]
Read more