Highlights from some of my research last year on women bookbinders of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Sybil Pye - 1, 3, 6, 8
Sarah Prideaux - 4, 5
Katharine Adams - 7
Guild of Women Binders - 2, 9
Wonderful evening at @the_london.archives with a talk from Prof Laura Cleaver on crime in the London rare book trade, in conjunction with the archives’ brilliant new exhibition, Londoners on Trial 👮♂️
It’s incredibly vindicating to realise that bibliomania is an inherited inevitability. I am temporarily living in my late grandfather’s house whilst slowly packing away his life. I’ve just made a start on his library and am endlessly loving the little signs of him. My great grandfather’s book plate, the little ownership mark my grandfather left on the bottom of every book, and the small notes in the back about what he was doing when he bought the book, however mundane.
Scenes from a busy few days
- finished up two pieces of work, one on late Elizabethan/early Stuart satire. Another on the collecting practices of John Bagford.
- started researching my next piece of work on forged authorship produced by printer Edmund Curll.
- all of the above overseen by the world’s fluffiest, laziest diva cat.
Have been spending a lot of time of late with the scrapbooks of John Bagford. A seventeenth century book agent, Bagford collected fragments of manuscripts and early print - becoming notorious in the process. (Parts of Gutenbergs and Caxtons cut out to fit said books). Despite his unconventional collecting habits, many texts only now survive in Bagford’s scrapbooks.
(Images all MS Harley 5927)
#johnbagford #bookhistory #bookcollecting #bookcollectors
A research day themed around the Marprelate tracts - anti episcopalian pamphlets circulated between 1588-89, all made possible by a travelling and ever-evasive printing press.
Looked at the tracts themselves, pamphlet responses, the manuscript of the statement by some of the men prosecuted and a very obliging reader’s mark.
#marprelate #tudorhistory #bookhistory
Day spent researching rival Civil War newsbooks Mercurius Aulicus (Royalist) and Mercurius Britanicus (Parliamentarian). Petty and bitchy - political satire at its best.
#englishcivilwar #newsbooks #historians #civilwarhistory #bookhistory
