Off the Shelf #3 – Heathens

Daguerreotyped Reader,

I own plenty of old books that have at some time or the other been the textbook of an unhappy schoolchild or two, and their bored doodles and sometimes even their homework cover lengths of battered page-margins. That is almost certainly true of my next book in these little stories of my library: The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods and most Illustrious Heroes.

I can’t say exactly when it was printed – the first and last few pages have been ripped out apparently a long time ago, but surprisingly the cover is pretty much completely intact. The binding stylistically is of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, being a single-tone panel binding, but the style of it is simple and it could easily be an early 18th century binding done by a country binder as a cheap but hard-wearing piece of work.

Oh look, a binding.

Indeed it needed to be hard-wearing; the original owner certainly used this book thoroughly, and it seems to me that he is largely responsible for the state of the book today. This is John Digby – a mysterious owner who has the handwriting of a young teenager, and filled the front and back paste downs with his name and two years in which he seems to have read the book – 1745 and 1748. Thanks to a hand-written alternative to a bookmark in one margin, we know that on 20th March 1745 he had read up to page 76.

His bored doodles turn up from page to page, and he’s coloured in a few parts of different engravings with his ink pen. He must have been studying Latin since, even though the book is in English, a short handwritten essay from 1745 appears on the back of one of the book’s engravings, which discusses Theseus and the Minotaur. There’s also several corrections of printing errors, and in one translation of a poem Digby even steps in to fix the rhyming of one line.

Aside from him, sadly, there is no history of the owners of this little book. The nibbling along some of the fore-edges shows that it was once kept where mice were running around, and the wear on the boards suggests it has more likely been kept for most of its life on its side rather than stood upright on a shelf. Other than that, there is very little that one can assume about this quaint old schoolbook.

Adieu, Happy Reader

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Off the Shelf #2 – Epitaphs

Tags

books, history

Prebendary Reader,

You get books on all sorts of subjects – granted my collections attempts to keep to theology, philosophy, poetry, and history – but sometimes an odd subject appears that catches the eye and just has to be read. There’s plenty of these that came out of the bizarre curiosities of past ages, and this next book is one of them – Select and Remarkable Epitaphs on Illustrious and Other Persons.

This octavo volume was written by John Hackett, a mysterious antiquarian with a slightly morbid interest in epitaphs who was himself dead by the time the book was published. I own only one volume of the two volume set, a first edition from 1757.

The book is essentially a survey of graveyards and churches across the country and a record of their curious memorials as they were in the first half of the 18th century; whenever the author found a gravestone that he thought was particularly interesting or witty he wrote it down. Some are touching, others heroic, and others even humerous:

On an Unlucky Woodcutter

The Lord saw good, I was lopping off Wood
And down fell from the Tree,
I was met with a Check, and I broke my Neck,
And so death lopp’d off me.

On an old Hawker found dead in the Highway

John Sherry lies here, whose fixed abode
Before was no-where, for he lived on the road;
And when with Age grown scarce able to creep,
He there laid him down, and he died in a Sleep.
But some Friends who lov’d him soon heard his Mishap,
And hither remov’d him to take out his Nap.

On the Parson of an Unrecorded Parish

Come, let us rejoice, merry Boys, at his Fall;
For, egad, had he liv’d, he’d a bury’d us all.

It was printed for Thomas Osborne and John Shipton, two booksellers who regularly worked together in the 1750s to pay for books to be produced, which would then be sold between the two of them. Osborne was the son of a bookseller – a family trade – and had worked with men including Samuel Johnson earlier in his career. At the time he helped produce my book he was working to start shipping some of his stock to the Americas. His partner, Shipton, sadly is far more obscure and it is beyond my minor research to present his history.

My copy was owned, possibly originally and almost certainly during the 18th century, by Edward Brock. I can’t tell you much about him either. What I can tell you about, though, is the actions of a particularly impressive 19th century bookseller, who has had a good play around with my poor old book.

The binding is battered and the hinges tired – it has clearly been well read since this binding was added.

It was last bound in the first half of the 19th century, and I entirely blame a single bookseller for the appearance of the book, since only someone who wanted to disguise its faults would have changed the book in the way that it has been changed. Since the ultimate benefit of disguising the book’s damage would seem to be to sell it for a better price, I blame an unknown bookseller for the wonderful lengths that have been gone to:

Firstly, this is one volume of a two volume set, but the binding has only the title on it and no volume number. Odd, perhaps, for a book that should be part of a pair, but not any real proof that someone has tried to purposefully disguise that its partner is missing. However, at the end of the book where the final page should say end of the first book, the page has been scratched out, making it seem like the book naturally finishes.

The most incredible disfigurement, though, appears where page 75/6 should be. These pages have been cut out, but to try and disguise that a very careful circle has been cut into pages 73/4 around the page number to neatly remove it, so that it now takes a double check to see that the pagination is in fact incorrect.

There isn’t any evidence of the book’s history after those changes, but the book is very scuffed and worn – I’ve done a little restoration work on it myself to pull the binding back together. It’s a well read little book and one that, though a truly peculiar and gothic subject, is well worth perusing for the range of odd and sometimes magnificent epitaphs of history’s figures – both well known and obscure.

Adieu, my Kindest Reader.

Off the Shelf #1 – Sun Dials

Celebrated Reader,

It’s been a while since I had a series of posts going on in this blog – the last was my pre-written history of London’s gates – so I thought I’d try something I’ve wanted to write for a good while; a history of some books. In case the Happy Reader is unaware, I’ve got a lot of them. I’m in the middle of cataloguing them (something I’ve claimed to have been doing for about three years now), but I’d guess I have at least three hundred volumes stretching from the 20th century back to the 15th.

Here’s the history of a few (we’ll just have to wait and see exactly how many) of them, with this first post being on a fascinating old book I bought a few years ago.

The full title of this first volume is lengthy – Dialing: Plain, Concave, Convex, Projective, Reflective, Refractive, shewing, How to make all such Dials, and adorn them with all useful Furniture, Relating to the Course of the Sun – and the book itself is as grand as the title; folio sized, and full of large engravings of sundials and mathematical scales.

It’s a first edition, printed in 1682, and still in the majority of the original binding – it’s on my list of books to get professionally restored and one that I would never attempt to work on myself. It was written by William Leybourn, a seventeenth century surveyor and mathematician, and printed for and sold by an extreme Whig and Williamite who was involved in treasonous activities during Monmouth’s Rebellion – one Awnsham Churchill.

My copy is a splendid survival. It was originally bought in 1682 by Joseph Moxon, a famous mathematician and surveyor in his own time; he had grown up as a Royalist exile in the Netherlands, and when he bought my book was the advising hydrographer to King Charles II as he rebuilt London’s watercourses destroyed in the great fire. Moxon, by a note in the front cover, seems to have lent the book out and found it necessary to add the inscription Joseph Moxon lend mee. Moxon must have had a particular interest in sundials – in 1697 he published his own work on designing and creating them.

The opening page of the book was quite filled up with names

He sold the book on 8th June 1689 to one Joseph Howes, who I’ve been unable to track down. There is the slimmest chance he could have been a bookseller in Nottingham. Howes paid 12 shillings and sixpence for it, but doesn’t seem to have kept it for too long:

This is where the most active owner of this book comes in, Isaac Kirk. Kirk was given the book as a child in 1690. His childish handwriting repeats his name countless times over the front and back endpapers of the book, along with a faded Sunday school rhyme and a few other phrases that sound like the sort of thing a theologically minded parent or schoolmaster might have taught a child – things like put away from you all Evill and I ask not for Evill but Shun yt.

Isaac took a great interest in this wonderful book, and as he grew up he clearly became a skilled surveyor and mathematician – and a keen ‘Dialer’. Unlike almost any other annotator in any of my books he named and dated every note he made, many of which are long calculations and solutions to problems poorly outlined in the text – some of which he claims as his own invention or idea. There are also grand tables for calculating different angles for the dial depending on latitudes. Amazingly, he also hand-rubricated the entire book with his own pen.

There are plenty of grand engravings, some have been enlarged upon by Kirk.

He lost interest in the volume in about 1705 when his notes trail off (although it is quite amazing that for some 15 years he regularly made new notes in the margins of the book, all on the art of creating sundials), he returned briefly to the pages in 1715, when a few small notes indicate that he had re-checked several sums and found them to be correct.

Kirk himself is a very interesting character, and it took me a long time to track him down – it was one small note towards the end of the book that gave him away; a line of latitude that relates to a sundial he built in Pilsley, Derbyshire. I had misread Pilsley as Tilsley, so hadn’t managed to find him before, and only once I traced the route of the line did I recognise the name and connect the man to the places he knew. Isaac lived down the road from Pilsley, and turns up in Derbyshire records as Isaac Kirk of Shirland Lodge, a freemason and surveyor. He was important enough to take charge of repairing the bridge at Swarkestone, and may have worked on Pilsley Hall – since he references his work on a sundial at Pilsley in relation to a ‘Great Chamber’; the main room of an old hall house.

Kirk last appears in my book in 1715, and last appears in records in 1717; no one put their pen to the pages of my book again for almost a hundred years, when the book turns up only just down the road from where Isaac lived. This owner was Elijah Hall, a well of mill owner who lived at South Wingfield Park, who came to own the book in 1812.

Hall himself would become involved in an interesting moment of British history a few years later, when his mill workers refused to work in the face of the industrial revolution and the introduction of machinery. This turned into an armed uprising called the Pentrich Rising, which shortly afterwards was crushed by the government. One of the men who challenged Hall over the new machinery in Hall’s mills would be among the three last people executed by beheading in the British Isles.

He was the last man to write his name in the book, and no other notes appear recording its history since then. The next step in its history will be a trip to the restorers before it deteriorates any more – the spine is already missing and several pages are loose, with the front board detached and leather pealing away. Fortunately though, once I have the funds together to get it properly restored, the unique history of this book and the wonderful musings of its owners can be preserved for as many centuries to come as the aged pages have struggled through until today.

Until next time, Merry Reader

A Little Story

Tags

Art, gilding, gold, good God what's Mike up to now, illumination, Poetry

Wellbeloved Reader,

I think I blogged a few months ago about a small project I’d been working on as a sampler and prototype for illuminating with gold leaf. I say I think because I’m not sure when I posted it, and can’t seem to locate it on my blog. Rest assured, happy Reader, now I have tried my luck enough to finish it, I’ll remonstrate a little here first about my lack of organisation on this blog and with that now accomplished I shall continue concerning my accomplishment of the next:

About ten years ago now after my granddad died I found among several odd papers a little notebook probably from the middle of the last century – completely unused. In there I began writing until I had put together some fifty short fables, the very first of which was titled The Three Princes. A few years later I started to get into writing poetry and in my second longest poem I turned the story into a lengthy ballad. That was probably four or five years ago now at least. I thought I had also posted that on this blog, but again the lack of organisation has left me unable to find where I likely hid it.

Oh look, poetry

Early this year I’d discovered some heavy duty rag paper that I’d bought as part of an attempt several years ago to make ‘fake vellum’ using a shellac based varnish. It hadn’t worked particularly well so the idea was scrapped, but it had left me with about twenty sheets of very nice unused paper. I decided to put it to some use and attempt to illustrate and illuminate my own manuscript – for whatever reason at the time I chose The Three Princes as the text. This would basically be a proof of concept and, if it went well, I hoped to do more – the indulgent Reader may now judge the result.

First I had to write out the length of the poem including the introductory verse – I decided on a humanist script that by the time I had finished the work had replaced my day-to-day handwriting.

I then went through and illustrated an initial at the opening of each verse.

To add leaf to them I then added a glare to the areas that should be gilded and left it to try.

Once the glare had spent an hour or so drying it became sticky and I could lay sheets of leaf over the areas, and in turn give it time to dry further and adhere the leaf to the paper.

Once the glare had completely dried I could rub away the excess leaf and leave it only covering the areas to which the glare had originally been applied. The letters could then be finished with some colour.

The paper was far too thick to make a useful book, it’s something like 600gsm, but I still bound it and we’ll just have to see how much it pulls itself apart and whether the glue and stitching can control such weighty pages.

The binding is based on a book in my collection that was bound in Paris in about 1610, although the style is found across Europe in the closing decades of the 16th century through until about 1620.

The pages actually open well, although are still clearly unusually stiff for a book – weighing something more like thick vellum pages than paper.

(I’ve already ordered another lot of lighter gauge rag paper and once that’s here I may well have my next manuscript very soon)

Adieu, happy Reader!

Pamphleting (Poetically)

European Reader!

Apparently of the three blog posts for which I’ve hastily thrown drafts together on my phone, this is not one of them. Since it’s far too late to blog right now, and this is the one I’d really like to write next, I suppose I’ll finish it tomorrow.

I saw a brief image a few weeks ago of an absolutely ingenious pamphlet, with artwork stringing it together in a way so well considered that it is without and beyond doubt that I should not only replicate it myself (to the best of my truly amateur abilities), but that I should also happily present some evidence of my attempted successes here.

I have a few Stuart and Georgian era pamphlets in my collection – all relating to the activities of antiquaries, and the several that I have got a hold of disbound I tend to bind in the style above – simple plain paper wraps with a handwritten title label on brown packing paper. An attractively modest but practical style, that I think relates to the ultimately utilitarian purpose of the original pamphlets themselves – simply to be easily readable and to spread news.

But this new one has a hidden secret.

When opened out, a hidden image allows each gathering to separate, and rather than folding out, the images fold inwards and become a single running scene hidden amongst the words of the book.

For this pamphlet I only used three gatherings – and collected among them some of my unfortunate poetry – with the first gathering rhyming, the second non-rhyming, and the third nonsense.

The image running between the pages was my long-ago-attempted panoramic sketch of Aberystwyth bay; this time I’d put it through a few fancy filters and played around with it on the computer, to give it a quieter effect of a wash-like ink sketch.

Adieu, Dear Reader!

Bolton’s Last Learned Work

Contraband Reader,

I’ve been restoring a small early 17th century work over the last few weeks – a volume of Robert Bolton’s Last Learned Work that I’d bought a little while back in a fairly ruined state. It was lacking the title page and, even though it was sold to me with ‘only one other page missing beyond that’, it turned out that a couple of other pages within the book had vanished over the last four hundred years too.

Aside from various tears to several pages, the boards were missing and the spine had only the barest remnant of a covering. Allow me, then, to blog a little about it!

The damaged book as it looked when it arrived – the top tear was actually across the entire page, but some fellow antiquarian had in some years passed glued the inner corner to the page behind it.

The first job was to undo the few remains of repairs that would obstruct the reconstruction of the book – namely the separation of the top of the first page that was glued to the page behind it, and then remove some later covering material from the spine.

Once that was done I went through each page that needed repair and added repair paper – this involved pasting the repair paper over each tear and pressing the page repairs until dry, then removing them from the press and trimming the new paper.

Oh look, some repair paper

With the paper trimmed, I used one of my artist pens to go over some areas of printing that were missing because they were either obscured by the over-lap of the repair paper, or the original paper had been lost.

The next job was to sew some new bands into the spine to make it a bit more structurally sound – I always find this the dullest part of binding a book!

The book now needed some end papers – Cockerell, that master of all things book-binding recommends end papers to only be added when the binding is finished; personally I’ve never been able to get that quite right, so this is the point that I personally find it easiest to add papers to the book.

One thing was missing still though – the title page – so after a little research I identified the edition and drew out a new title page based on one that was available on Google Books. (I wish I was only as lucky on every book that I need to try and find a replica title page for!)

The new title page, with a minor addition by myself as a subtitle

Next up was shaping the boards – I’d sewn three bands onto the book but was tempted to add fake bands and in fact have seven bands across the book in the final binding – judge as you will, dear Reader, I decided against that in the end.

Once that was done I made the holes in the boards and sewed in the header and footer bands (a new skill only just added to my amateur book-binder’s repertoire), the boards could then be attached and at last the old volume started to look more like a book once more!

I’d also added some leather bands over the top of the sewn string to give a more defined band on the finished binding – a trick I use on a few books that need a nearer-to-medieval look on the finished spine

Then to the leather! I’ve got a wonderful piece of blue leather that I am loathed to use on any piece of work – for a book as old as this I thought it had earned my best piece of leather for it’s binding. Still, I was mean enough with the amount of leather I was willing to use that I decided on a half binding.

Once the leather was on and tidied up, I added the marbled paper to the boards and gilding on the spine panels: At last, a finished book!

And there we have it – adieu, Happy Reader!

One Very Long Book Later…

Good Reader,

Last weekend I finished my drawings of the different gates of London, and over this week I’ve been shaping the boards, stitching, and then binding the pages – and now for the finished result!

This is one of two volumes that I’ve been working on – the second, which isn’t yet finished, will be printed rather than entirely hand drawn as this book is, and will be a written history of the gates to accompany this pictorial one. Have no fear, kind reader, this ridiculous work in its entirety will shortly be rendered happily on this blog.

Here at least, though, is the longest* book that I’ve ever bound:

 

The book sat on top is there for scale, I should probably repair that at some point

This is the first time that I’ve used buckram in a binding, which is a waxed cloth commonly used in bindings since the mid-19th century.

There are only two written components to this book – the title page and a short To the Reader

When open the book is well over a meter wide, and its size has made me rethink the option of keeping it on a bookshelf, but I’m definitely pleased I opted for the shape it is over folding the images inside.

Other than two pages, every page consists of panoramic views of the gates throughout history

(Stay tuned for all the images, which will follow over the next week or so as I complete the histories of each gate!)

Adieu, very dear Reader.

*It only has some twenty or so pages.

A Very Red Binding

Significantly Concussed Reader,

Try carrying a thicker umbrella next time.

I’d completely forgotten about this grand binding I produced a few months ago – my first ever commission to produce a binding, rather than just dabbling around adding leather to my own books.

It ended up being a bordering-on-gothic binding, in a vaguely fifteenth century style with added brass. Allow me then, good reader, to present it hereabouts:

A very medieval looking recipe book

It followed the style of a paneled binding, with the centre panel decorated geometrically with ‘hidden’ initials.

Oh look, it’s slightly closer up

Also, kind reader, I’ve been dabbling again in my rather dull attempts at poetry. So, with my apologies for its quality, I’ll end this post on that.

One Day I Wandered

One day I wandered
Out of the age long day,
Beyond the hedgerows and cottage doors,
To where night had plummeted,
Whole and heavy
Under rust-tempered scarlet clouds.
Amber cushions fading from the treetops.
A scattering of quiet stars
Pale and inoffensive
Drifted beyond the grey mantle,
A firmament of sleepy ash
All quiet to the whispering hills.
The solitude and consolation of the dark,
The brambles, thick with secrets and thorns,
And the wild hillsides
Fled into the distant, visionless hue;
Waiting like stone giants
For one moment hidden from every eye.
Until day falls among tumbled hedgerows
Tottered down cottages,
Lighting again the steep of the sky,
And disturbing my perfect peace
And the dull quiet of famous night.

Until another welcome day, dearest reader, adieu!

Some Medieval Bindings

Fair Reader,

Over the last week or so I’ve been playing around with some medieval binding styles on a couple of test volumes. The books themselves, rather than being old books needing restoration as usual, are this time a reprint of a fifteenth-century history of England and the other a manuscript of interesting historical events, both made by myself and therefore of little worry if the binding process should go wrong.

Both are based on examples of 15th and 16th century bindings that I’ve seen, and both use very similar tools to try and achieve different styles.

The first was the small octavo-ish sized manuscript in which I’d recorded all sorts of things I’d seen in 2015, including Waterloo’s bicentenary, Richard III’s funeral, and several other extra odd things I’d been to that are really worthy of a blog post one day.

This binding was based on a volume bound in about 1515

The second was the largest book I’ve done everything from printing to binding myself since the first binding I ever did – this is a quarto-sized volume of the ‘Cronycles of the Londe of Englond’, which I was reading a copy of online and suddenly thought it would be much easier reading such a long book if it was an actual book.

This binding style dates from the late 1400s

I also embellished the title onto the front board

It was quite a challenge creating the constant wavy-line pattern onto the centres of the boards, since a single quarter-circle tool was used for the entire thing, but in the end I created a checkerboard like grid to guide where the tools should go.

The more time consuming part of this particular book was that I wanted the reprint to be acceptable with the style of the binding, so I spent some time formatting the styling using a 15th century font and then (as I regretted after about ten pages) I decided to rubricate the entire 300 page-long work. The effect, though, is at least authentic.

Oh look, some rubrication

Adieu, kindest reader!

Binding a Butler*

Merry Reader,

I’ve been doing a good deal of bookbinding recently, and finally seem to now have more books to work on than time to work on them.

Owing to one of my bookshelves being against an outside wall, for the last week I’ve been trying to keep under control some mold among my books, which spread from a couple of battered old volumes that seem to have been kept somewhere damp in the past – the culprits for bringing mold into my collection in the first place. With that now solved, I decided to repair a disbound book that had been sandwiched among some of those unfortunate volumes – I pray, kind reader, that you enjoy the result.

The book itself is the miscellaneous works of Samuel Butler, a poet and writer famous for his Hudibras – a satire set within the conflicts of the Civil War. This little volume I was working on also contained L’Estrange’s “Key to Hudibras” – and was the reason why I’d originally bought it, being a huge fan of L’Estrange’s works.

My attempted header and footer bands

I had some of my favourite leather left over for this book – a beautiful olive green. I did attempt to gild it using the traditional method of gold leaf and glaire, which I failed at completely, and resorted back to the easier way of gilding with foil.

The internal bottom corner of the title page was missing, so had to be repaired and I went over the new paper with a pen to draw the missing printing

*If you haven’t noticed yet, not an actual butler