As I wrote last week, I am currently cataloguing new material for a Theatre list, which will go out next month. I love lithography, and so was particularly interested in researching this, from 1823: It’s an apparently unrecorded publication: four fine large hand-coloured lithograph portraits of four leading performers of the day, each accompanied by […]

I wrote once, years ago, about Washington Irving in Germany. I’ve always been interested in finding material that connects two different countries, two different cultures, through literature. Here’s another, and with an added theatrical dimension: This double bill from 1844 features Shakespeare alongside Irving on the London stage, The Miser’s Well being based on a […]

The following post was originally written for Engelsberg Ideas. In his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reminisced about his childhood in Frankfurt: ‘since the earliest times, buyers and sellers had thronged around the Bartholomäuskirche… The stalls of the so-called Pfarreisen were very important to us children and we would come along with fistfuls of money to buy […]

Last year, I blogged about my Three Heine Love Songs. I wrote them back in 2009, so it was very nice to hear them again recently, in a virtual performance by the University of St Andrews Chamber Choir on their Facebook page. Amazingly, the same week as the St Andrews video went online, I received […]

This post was originally written for the Bibliographical Society’s ‘Council’s Choice’ for April 2021. Some years ago, I stumbled across UK RED, the UK Reading Experience Database, and have returned to it many times since when investigating a particular book, to see what real people at the time perhaps thought of it, but often just […]

This is a copy of the first edition in German of William Gilpin’s famous Essay on Prints, ‘published anonymously in 1768, which had influence on the Continent, [and] contained his earliest definition of the Picturesque’ (Grove Art).  The translation is by Johann Jakob Volckmann (1732–1803).  A former owner here has created an index of the […]