Reports from 2024 Projects

Lindsay Frederick Braun, University of Oregon
‘Map and Book Compilation and Trades in Natal, South Africa, 1850-1910’

Summary

Between 7 July and 18 August, I conducted research on book and map compilation and publication in colonial Natal from 1850 to 1910 on-site in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, both cities today in KwaZulu-Natal province (KZN), South Africa. Four weeks of this six-week trip were the subject of support from the Trust. This funding not only permitted the trip this year, but also allowed me to remain flexible in the face of unforeseeable circumstances.  As a result, I was able to consult every resource I had identified prior to the visit, as well as many I hadn’t.

This research trip will materially advance my broader research on manuscript on map and book compilation.  I now have a stronger sense of the environment of map and book production, as well as many internal relationships, including some new nodes within the network I had not recognized before.

Work

My time in KwaZulu-Natal required constant adaptation to new challenges and a determination to use all available time efficiently. I was successful, and exigencies that arose pushed me to look beyond my plans and find very useful information and collections in places that I had not believed to be important.

I began my work in Durban at the Killie Campbell Africana Library (KCAL), where I stayed a full week and worked through the relevant collections, especially the Bird, Baines, and Erskine papers. Government documents were openly available to me, which allowed me to orient myself to the governmental, scientific, and literary environments of Natal as a settler colony with a surprisingly militant attitude towards recruiting European immigrants. I was able to view all of the collections I had identified in my proposal, as well as a few others – and a variety of maps as well.  I also consulted contemporary books and pamphlets that only became relevant to me as my work unfolded. Late in that first week, I learned that the Msunduzi municipality (Pietermaritzburg / PMB) had shut off water and power to the Provincial Archives over a ministerial dispute, but that they expected restoration on Monday or Tuesday.

Unfortunately, the Archives’ outage dragged on for the full week after I arrived in PMB, but I had contingency plans. I first used time to make inquiries with the Surveyor General although they did not allow the access I enjoyed elsewhere, and I also learned only then that they had unceremoniously destroyed their former departmental library about twenty years ago. At the same time, new collections became unexpectedly important.  These included the government publications and Nataliana at the Renaud central library at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), the Alan Paton Centre, and Struggle Archives on the same campus that inherited the special book collections of the pro-settlement Natal Society (1851-2007), and the vast store of hardcopy periodicals at the Bessie Head Library formerly run by the Society. This second week of my work cemented the Natal Society as the crucial venue for the promotion of science, literature, and colonization itself—as stated in its early charters—and its leadership included key scientific and governmental figures as well as major publishers like Peter Davis (senior and junior).

On Monday of the third week service resumed at the Provincial Archives, and in the following four weeks I was able to see every collection I had identified, and investigate most of the other record classes as well.  I was able to work through the unindexed portions of the records of the Colonial Secretary, the Lieutenant Governor, the Surveyor General, the Legislative Council, the administrator of Zululand, and several district magistracies.  To my disappointment, the magisterial records of Pietermaritzburg as well as many of the municipal papers were lost in the City Hall fire in 1898. There is no other dedicated body of papers available for the Natal Society or the major publishers elsewhere, but I was able to collect a great deal of indirect information from court cases, departmental papers, and library catalogues.

Of course, logistics and staffing continued to dictate my movements between repositories. Despite a renewed shutoff of municipal water in weeks three and four that cut the archives’ operating hours in half, I managed full days with a few hours at the collections at UKZN and the Bessie Head Library.  After the return of normal water service in week four, I set aside one day a week in the Paton Centre looking at original pamphlets and books with valuable endpapers and maps intact, along with one day a week at the Bessie Head working through the major publishers’ newspapers for commentary and advertisements about literary subjects. Mercifully the Provincial Archives’ staff often also let us stay beyond stated hours (0900-1500) on most days, and some other repositories stayed open slightly later.  The unpredictability would however have been damaging to my work without the car hire and extended lodging that the Trust grant made possible.

Between the KCAL, the Provincial Archives, UKZN and the Paton Centre, and the Bessie Head Library, I collected copious notes and took over 7800 digital images of maps, books, and documents that I am still indexing. I was able to consult almost all of the resources I intended to see apart from those now lost (see above), and I was able to extend my time to follow further leads into collections and institutions I had not recognized as being so important before.

Contribution

Without the support of the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, this year’s research stay in South Africa would not have been productive. Its duration could not have been long enough to overcome the early frustrations, and I would not have enjoyed the resources that allowed me to pivot my research plans adaptively and sometimes more than once a day.  I believe the benefits of the Trust grant will continue through the familiarity I now have with research repositories and holdings in KZN. These tack-on benefits had already become visible by the time I left this year, but they will continue when I likely return some years hence.

In terms of relevance to my study, the research I conducted in July and August transformed my understanding of the connections between government ministries, authors, publishers, and the overall process of colonial expansion in the context of colonial Natal. The networks of publishers, sellers, and knowledge creators (or appropriators) were tighter than in other settler colonies in southern Africa, and the active promotion of the colony to settlers is a matter I had not given enough weight before. Although the direct commentary on publishing and distribution that I hoped to find was not present in the records, the indirect signs of those activities were visible everywhere.  The major exception involves the surprisingly high level of central control the Surveyor General and Colonial Secretary held over mapmaking, which allowed me to locate many documents about the creation of manuscript and print maps for exhibitions, emigration guides, prospectors, and geographers.

This knowledge overall materially advances my planned manuscript on map and book culture around South Africa, but the connections via the Natal Society will surely enrich my thinking about matters in Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. At the very least, the Natal case is a useful variant on the themes of settler production and control over knowledge of the colony.  I am now building the outline for an article specifically on the cartographic elements of this research, even though I am still indexing my images from the last week of this trip.

Junia Ferreira Furtado
‘Cartography and travel literature on the map of North America by Hermann Moll and its instrumentalization in the Congress of Utrecht (1712-1715)’

The aim of this project was to investigate the relationship between cartography, travel accounts and diplomacy during the Congress of Utrecht (1712-1715), when England, France and Portugal used maps to trace, with more precision, the new lines of proposed boundaries between their possessions in the Americas.

The Willison Foundation Charitable Trust’s budget was used to carry out a one month research stay in London in order to 1) study Moll’s book, The British Empire in America, and the maps contained therein, from the copies in the British Library; 2) investigate the cartographer textual sources, specially travel and historical accounts, in the British Library and establish its use in his book; 3) study the English cartography, especially manuscript, and French cartography in the same institution, and to investigate the cartographic sources of Moll’s maps; 4) research the diplomatic documentation produced by the English diplomats at the Utrecht Congress, held at The National Archives, Kew, especially the ‘State Papers Office, including papers of the Secretaries of State up to 1782’ and ‘Foreign Office’ and try to locate the map used in Utrecht at ‘War Office: maps and plans extracted to flat storage’; and 5) investigate the diplomatic career and writings of the Bishop of Bristol also in the British Museum “Archive and Manuscripts”.

I stayed in London from 25th April to 25th June, 2024. All the research that I planned was successful accomplished. In this period, I concentrate my research at The National Archives, at Kews. There I could research all the diplomatic papers related to the Treaty of Utrecht that helped me to understand the role of John Robinson (Bishop of Bristol, latter of London) to negotiate the British territorial possessions in North America and the context in which he used a map from Herman Moll in the negotiations with the French diplomats. I also worked in the British Library, and the Lambeth Palace Library which holds documents from the Bishop of Bristol in the Fulham Papers. I made one day field trip to the Gloucester Archive to research a document from the Bishop of Bristol, D 3549 – b/I/B25. I was able to research online documents on the impeachment of Duke of Oxford and the Earl of Strafford related to their actions on the Treaty of Utrecht.

I then travelled to France where, between 1-5 July, I attended the 30th International Conference on History of Cartography) organized by the University of Lyon. There, I was able to present the first conclusions of my research in a paper entitled ‘ “The map of North America” by Hermann Moll and the cartographic instrumentalization method used at the Congress of Utrecht (1712 -1715)’.

My book will be titled ‘Maps and Diplomacy’. One of its chapters will focus on the Utrecht Treaty and the Bishop of Bristol map strategy, and another chapter will discuss the  ‘fake maps strategy’ in diplomacy and will explore the use by the French of a fake English map that was presented in Utrecht.

Research

I started my research at the Archives des Affaires Étrangers, in Paris. Some of its documents revealed that, in August 1712, the English ambassador, the Bishop of Bristol, armed with various documents including a map of the North of Septentrional America, in which the English had traced, with a red line marking a border between the two states which they intended to establish from in Placentia Point in Newfoundland in the east, to the coast of the continent, on the shores of the Labrador Lands, and from there turning towards the west. One copy of the map was sent to the King of France so he could ” draw on it another line of a different color, distinctly marking the land which he wants to preserve.” On November, Louis XIV notified his ambassador in Utrecht that he hadreceived the map and agreed that it would be used to define the boundary line. He drew a blue line on that copy, sending it back to Utrecht and a copy was ordered to be kept at the Depôt de Cartes de la Marine. But it disappeared.

A note by Abbé Raynal from the 1770s reinforced my hypothesis that the map in question was a made by Herman Moll. In 1708, 1715 and 1720, Moll produced at least five very similar maps depicting the disputed region in the north of North America. The first two, from 1708, prior to the Treaty signed in February 1713, were published in John Oldmixon’s book The British Empire in America. Were they the maps used in the Treaty? The British documentation in the British Library and in the National Archives reveal that the English authorities in London knew nothing about the Bishop cartographic strategy.

As French and English archives have not preserved the Bishop’s map, the clues to whether it was a Moll’s map and which one was it must be sought in the maps themselves.

Everything points out to the Bishop’s map being a manuscript of Moll’s first edition map printed in 1715, the Map of North America, dedicated to Lord John Sommers, President of the Privy Council of the new King William III.

In the British-French negotiations we see two different diplomatic strategies in confront. One, more traditional, led by the British authorities in which the frontier line was established only in the texts of the Treaty and in a generic geographical description. The other, a more modern one, was the Bishop of Bristol’s cartographic strategy presenting a more precise and detailed map with the frontier line carefully displayed in order to remains no doubts of its main points and that was only partly successful.

Melinda Susanto, PhD Candidate, Institute for History, Leiden University
‘Afterlives of knowledge from Sri Lanka and the Malay world in early modern European texts’

The award from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust supported my trips to undertake research in library collections in Berlin, Kraków, and Paris. My project aims to investigate the reception of knowledge from Sri Lanka and the Malay world in early modern European texts. I focus on two key figures, Andreas Cleyer (1634-c.1697) and Paul Hermann (1646-1695). The ‘afterlives’ of knowledge can be traced through making connections between their personal papers, unpublished drawings and manuscripts, and the subsequent circulation of such information within European contexts. I am also keen to study material aspects, such as the role of manuscripts and printed books as objects in circulation and in use.

I am attempting to contextualise the reception of knowledge from Sri Lanka and the Malay world through several aspects. One aspect is to re-connect materials from the same geographic regions and associated with the same persons, which are now held in different collections. Andreas Cleyer’s materials are found in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and the library of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Materials in Berlin include correspondence and drawings of plants from Japan. The manuscript in Kraków features drawings of plants and people, as well as health conditions encountered. This was a valuable resource for study, because there are few visual documentations of the work of European medical practitioners in early modern Asia. In this way, I could attempt to reconstruct local knowledge-making practices. I was able to relate Andreas Cleyer’s drawings in the collection of the Jagellonian University Library in Kraków, to letters he and his correspondents wrote in the collection of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Bringing together Andreas Cleyer’s materials found across these different collections has allowed me to have a clearer picture of his activities in Asia, as well as the long-distance circulation of knowledge that took place between Asia and Europe in the early modern period.

Another aspect of my research involves looking closely at the materiality and reception of manuscripts and printed books. Paul Hermann’s materials are found in five different institutions: Leiden University, the Natural History Museum (London), the University of Oxford, the University of Erfurt (Gotha), and Bibliothèque de L’Institut de France (Paris). I proposed to study the Paris herbaria as part of my research for this award. The Paris manuscript contains annotations by later scientists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and serves as an good example of how botanical knowledge collected from Asia became reformulated in European scientific discourse. From my visit to the library, I gained important insights into the manuscript’s collecting history that led it to be part of Benjamin Delessert’s collection. The opportunity to view this manuscript in person, guided by the expertise of the library curator, was also crucial in allowing me to study its materiality and its methods of construction.

Lastly, I had been keen to trace signs of use in early modern printed books. I was hoping that I might be able to come across marginalia in texts which reflect on their contents, or to find out whether differences in printed editions might make a difference in terms of usage. Unfortunately, this aspect of my research did not lead to conclusive findings. General findings include ownership labels, written definitions and underlining of texts on the pages.

These research trips were initially scheduled for early 2024, however, I had to reschedule these t due to health and family concerns. As a result of changes in itinerary and the availability of materials, I reallocated part of my award to spend more time in Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where I anticipated finding more primary and secondary sources for my research. As a result of this, I came across promising new sources relevant for my research, both in Berlin and Kraków.

In tracing Andreas Cleyer’s networks, I came across information about the artist Heinrich Muche who had worked for him in Batavia (present-day Jakarta). In the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, one manuscript contains drawings that might be connected to their circle. Heinrich Muche’s 1694 travel journal is no longer extant, but a modern typescript copy in 7 parts is in the collection of the Berlin Ethnological Museum’s library. This library was closed for renovations in fall 2024, so I hope to have another opportunity to make a future visit to review this material. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin also holds a volume of botanical drawings from Java, a new and exciting find for my research.

In the library of the Jagellonian University in Kraków, one manuscript was described in the catalogue as representing views of port cities in Asia. Unexpectedly, this manuscript also features representations of peoples from the region. As this artist only signed with his initials, more research is still necessary to ascertain his identity. In Kraków, in addition to time spent in the archives, I was also able to undertake visits to the Princes Czartoryski Museum and the Pharmacy Museum of the Jagiellonian University Medical College. A truly fortuitous find was the portrait of the Sultan of Tidore, Sayfoedin, which is now in the collection of Princes Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.

With the additional time I was able to spend in Berlin, I was also able to study the proceedings of the German scientific society, Academia Naturae Curiosorum, which was established in 1652 and known as the Leopoldina from 1687 onwards. It began publishing proceedings in 1670, with the academic journal titled“Miscellanea curiosa medico-physica Academiae naturae curiosorum sive Ephemerides Germanicae”. I had previously studied meeting minutes and proceedings of the Royal Society in London (for the 17^th century), as well as the Zeeland Society of Arts and Sciences and the Holland Society of Arts and Sciences (both for the 18^th century). By focusing on the geographic origins of knowledge (in this case, Sri Lanka and the Malay world), I could extrapolate trends in topics of interest across these three societies. I was also able to find new leads for my research, such as Andreas Cleyer’s involvement with the Academia Naturae Curiosorum and his correspondents, in particular Christian Mentzel, as a result of the primary sources I consulted in Berlin.

My research looks at manuscript sources produced by Europeans in Asia, in combination with early modern printed European texts. My book historical approach aims to understand the many layers of mediation in European production of knowledge about distant spaces in the Indian Ocean. By mapping the trajectories of knowledge from initial practices in Asia, through to their subsequent circulations and adaptations in European contexts, I hope to demonstrate how local knowledge-making practices became global, informed by multiple traditions and cross-cultural exchanges.

These research findings on Andreas Cleyer and Paul Hermann will contribute to my doctoral dissertation. My dissertation will be deposited in my university library’s online repository once it is approved. I am immensely grateful to the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust for its generous and timely support that has enabled me to undertake these trips in the final stages of my doctoral research and dissertation writing.

Dr Lena Wånggren
‘Women’s writing in trade union periodicals: 1876-1920’

Summary

This project conducted primary archival research into four late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British women’s trade union periodicals, in order to discover the contributions of working women to periodical literature and the labour movement. The material review, consisting largely of a distance reading and annotation of holdings, included examining Women’s Union Journal (1876-1890), Women’s Trade Union Review (1891-1919), Women’s Industrial News (1895-1919), and Woman Worker (1908-1920). The funds received from the Willison Trust made possible short research trips to Manchester, Glasgow, London, and York, visiting key collections at the People’s History Museum, Working Class Movement Library, Glasgow Women’s Library, TUC Collections (London Metropolitan University), Borthwick Institute (University of York), and British Library (Boston Spa). The main findings, so far, attest that women’s trade union periodicals are a rich source of literary writing of diverse genres, and that women trade unionists pioneered trade union work in print history.

Progress review and timeline

The award allowed me to visit all main collections needed for the project. The main collections visited, and the material consulted there, are detailed below.

TUC Collections Library (London Metropolitan University)

This is the main archive of UK trade union materials, with the largest coverage. I made three visits (February, May, September) for work on already identified material and also to examine related holdings (e.g. Gertrude Tuckwell papers). Material consulted includes ‘Women’s Trade Union League’ (Gertrude Mary Tuckwell, Mary R. MacArthur, J. W. Ogden) which details the constitution and objects of the Women’s Trade Union League; Women’s Trade Union Review (1891-1919); The Women’s Industrial News (1895-1919); and certain issues of The Woman Worker (1908-1920).

Glasgow Women’s Library

In May I consulted The Woman Worker (1908-1910 issues) and selections of materials on women’s trade unionism (including an 1888 Match Girls Strike pamphlet, and the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades and Union for the Abolition of Sweating 1918-1919 report).

The Working Class Movement Library (WCML), Manchester

People’s History Museum (PHM), Manchester

I took two trips to Manchester (May and September), where at the Working Class Movement Library I examined Woman Worker selections (in physical form rather than microfilm, very exciting!) and related material on women’s trade unionists such as Mary Macarthur and Emma Patterson. At the People’s History Museum I examined local East London newspapers covering the 1888 Match Girls Strike, and related contextual material on the women’s labour movement.

Borthwick Institute (University of York)

In August I consulted outstanding issues of Women’s Trade Union Review and Women’s Union Journal, and attempted to locate missing issues of Woman Worker here.

British Library (Boston Spa)

In January 2025 I made a final visit to locate four missing issues of The Woman Worker (1908).

With the assistance of the Willison Trust, I have now visited all major archives, making initial findings.

Main findings

This project aimed to examine women’s trade union periodicals to uncover neglected stories of literary women in trade unions, and stories told about (and by) women and work in the late nineteenth century. I set out with the hypothesis that women’s trade union periodicals are crucial to further understanding women’s place in both labour and literary history. From the primary archival work done this past year, I find that periodicals play a crucial part in early women’s trade unions, and that the imaginative writing published in these periodicals play a key part in union activities. All three major periodicals linked to women’s trade union leagues and federation contain literature including drama, fiction, poetry, and book reviews. Notably, the Women’s Union Journal was the first lasting trade union periodical in Britain.

Both the Women’s Trade Union League (1874-1921) and the National Federation of Women Workers (1906-) saw their periodicals as key to their movement, spreading the word and connecting women workers across Britain and the world. The founder of the League, Emma Patterson, had worked in bookbinding before she established a Women’s Printing Society and printing press to publish the League’s Women’s Union Journal (1876-1890), and later the Women’s Trade Union Review (1891-1919). Patterson and later editors of the Journal and Review were pushing new ground with their periodicals: as Goldman (1974) notes, the Journal was ‘a remarkable publication’, as male-dominated trade unions at that time ‘were about activity – protests, demonstrations and stoppages … active unionists saw little need for the printed word other than leaflets, pamphlets and calls to meetings’. Women’s Union Journal published poetry alongside reports on the setting up of new trade union branches, while the Women’s Trade Union Review mixed in short stories among quarterly reports and updates on factory legislation.

With the League thus having built a foundation for literary women’s trade unionism, Mary Macarthur turned the newly established National Federation of Woman Worker’s Woman Worker (1907-1920) into a mass-produced weekly that published literary works by established as well as unknown writers. Macarthur notes the key role of the publication in organising women workers:

‘It [Woman Worker, started Sept 1907] was a modest organ with a modest mission. Those of us who were concerned to stir industrial women found our task very difficult. The living voice is mighty, but we were few. Though we went hither and thither, only a comparative number of women heard our message, and of these, when we departed, many forgot. / It seemed that a journal might be a medium of wider appeal, might touch some whom else we should never reach, might be a means of deepening the faith of those who already heard the call of Unionism and Comradeship.’ (MacArthur, ‘The Last Word’, 5 June 1908)

With the help of the periodical, the Federation spread the message of unionism and solidarity in print where they could not go physically. Literature, including the readers’ own writings, played a key part in spreading the message: Woman Worker contained poetry, short stories, plays, book reviews, and various forms of imaginative literature, alongside reports on legislation, trade union work, home improvement, and dress.

Through the archival research made possible by the Willison Trust grant, I have discovered that literature was indeed a staple in early women’s trade union periodicals. Furthermore, women trade unionists pioneered trade union work in print history through their use of periodicals.

Dissemination

In June and September I presented initial findings from the project at two international conferences: the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) annual conference, and Victorian Events organised by the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS).

While the plan for research outputs were two journal articles on working women / New Women in trade union periodicals, with one article publishing the findings of the archival research, and the second providing a closer reading of some of the material, I am now in discussions with a book publisher to write a larger work. I wrote a blog post for the TUC Library Collections, marking some initial findings (Wånggren 2024).

Dissemination beyond academic institutions was envisaged through collaborations Glasgow Women’s Library and the Working Class Movement Library. An initial meeting with Full Time Fierce, a partner of the Working Class Movement Library, was held, but for now plans are on hold. Glasgow Women’s Library are interested in an application to work together on an exhibition/event, however this is put on hold for until a larger grant bid can be put in for research leave funding.

Contribution of the Trust’s funding

While exploratory work had been done in mapping the main sources for the project, no archival visits had been carried out before the Willison Trust grant. No other funds were sought for this project. Other costs for the project (research time, living costs, conference costs, non-archival literature purchased) were financed by the applicant’s part-time teaching work. The contribution of the Willison Trust funding for this project was absolutely vital.

Kelsey Jackson Williams, Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature, University of Stirling
Daryl Green, Co-Director of the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh
‘Scottish Country House Libraries: A Pilot Study’

The funding provided by the Trust allowed us to visit six libraries across Scotland during the summer and autumn of 2024: Arniston House (Midlothian), Glamis Castle (Angus), Haddo House (Aberdeenshire), Kinnordy House (Angus), Mount Stuart (Bute), and Thirlestane Castle (Roxburghshire).  Alert observers will note that Strathtyrum House, listed in our proposal, was replaced by Kinnordy in the final study due to access reasons.  Haddo House is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, while the remaining five are owned by private individuals or trusts and we are deeply grateful to the NTS and the other private owners for the remarkably generous and unrestricted access they provided to us during our study.

Each house took from one and a half to three days of work, generally beginning at ten and ending at five.  We quickly developed a system for working through presses, photographing and taking notes as we went, which saw us – once we had hit our stride – collectively examine about 2,000 books a day.  This meant that with the exception of Mount Stuart, whose 27,000 volumes defeated even our extensive stay there, we examined almost every book in every house, for a total of approximately 30,000 books examined over the course of the study.

What did this bibliographical marathon reveal?  Our results can be summarized as (a) individual discoveries and (b) general trends.  In terms of individual discoveries, we uncovered perhaps fifteen or twenty books of genuinely national significance of which a representative sample might include (with locations anonymised for reasons of privacy and security):

A 1483 Venetian edition of Cicero’s letters (GW 6838) with early ownership inscriptions of John Adamson, provincial of the Scottish Dominicans, and the Dominican house in Edinburgh, together with a charming 1754 letter of gift from Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, to the then owner of the house where it now resides.

A Nuremberg Chronicle with a dated (8 February 1552) ownership inscription of the Middle Scots poet John Rolland, making it the earliest Nuremberg Chronicle known to have entered Scotland.

A 1534 Basel Polydore Vergil with a full-page manuscript dedication in Vergil’s hand and signed by him, dated at London, 13 December 1559, to Mary, Queen of Scots.

A collection of seven substantial manuscript letters from Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) associated with a presentation copy of his Essay on the Principle of Population.

Many unrecorded items from major early Scottish libraries such as those assembled by Henry Sinclair, Bishop of Ross (1508-1565), Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney (1527-1593), Adam King, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Paris, (1560-1620), and William Guild, Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen (1586-1657).

A frankly astonishing number of unrecorded copies of Hector Boece’s 1527 Scotorum historiae a prima gentis origine and its Scots translation, John Bellenden’s 1540 Hystory and croniklis of Scotland.

Highlights such as these could easily be multiplied and amply repaid our intuition that a significant portion of Scotland’s early book history – as well as British intellectual and book history more generally – remains unstudied and in private hands.

However, we submit that of equal value are the identification of general trends which we observed in most or all of these collections.  All of the collections we examined were very fluid – with one exception – and had seen many moments of expansion and contraction from the eighteenth century onwards; sales were not a modern phenomenon, but a natural part of the life cycles of these libraries.  Most of the collections we examined had been at least partially assembled elsewhere, whether in an Edinburgh or London townhouse or another country residence, and only later came to rest in their present locations.  In no case did we find a collection which had been in situ in its present room prior to about 1830.  These collections were not gradually assembled by many generations but developed in fits and starts and often owed their present appearance to the energies of a single, determined collector (usually of the nineteenth century).  Every collection contained substantial numbers of books owned by and gifted between the women of the family, challenging narratives of the library as a predominantly, much less exclusively, male domain.  And, finally, almost every library we visited retained traces of use by readers from the local area or elsewhere beyond the family circle as well as scholars from the Enlightenment to the present.  These were open, fluctuating, dynamic collections whose lives bore very little resemblance to the stereotypical popular vision of the country house library as a static and closed repository.

These preliminary conclusions will inform us as we move forward to the next stage of our project.  Dr. Jackson Williams has been granted a period of research leave in autumn 2025 during which he will build upon our successes here to prepare a larger grant proposal, targeted at either the AHRC or the Leverhulme Trust, to take this project into its next stage, looking at a substantially larger cross-section of Scottish country house libraries and asking more expansive questions about how they relate to Scottish book culture as a whole and what they can teach us about the country’s intellectual and cultural history.  Our eventual goal is a substantial and (we hope) definitive work on the country house library in Scotland from the Renaissance to the present day.

More immediately, this pilot study will result in the following outputs (both co-authored):

A summary of our findings and discussion of the trends we believe they indicate, to be submitted to The Library in early 2025.

A study of the archival paratexts surrounding these libraries – manuscript book catalogues, receipts, notebooks, etc. – which has been solicited by Scottish Archives for submission by March 2025.

We have also presented our work at the Scottish Records Association Conference in Perth (15 November 2024) and look forward to doing so again at other venues in the new year, including an invited lecture and pop-up exhibition at Mount Stuart in August 2025 focusing on its rich collection of continental armorial bindings.

We would like to once again thank the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust for their extremely generous support this year and for making this project possible.  We have necessarily been formal and descriptive in this report, but hope that fellow members of the book world will readily imagine just what a sheer delight it has been this year, running up teetering ladders, scrubbing red rot off grimy hands, rejoicing over the discovery of long-lost cupboard keys, and feeling one’s spine tingle as a nondescript eighteenth-century calf binding reveals a hidden incunable.  Working in these private, largely unmediated, and historic repositories has brought the embodied nature of the bibliographer’s task very much to the forefront of our minds this year and has reminded us of why we study the things we do.

Alexandra Wingate
‘Expanding sources for early modern Navarrese book history’

Overview

During the project period, I spent 11 weeks in Pamplona and Tudela, Spain in the Archivo General y Real de Navarra (AGN), Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP), and the Archivo Municipal de Tudela (AMT). I spent 40 days in the AGN, 10 in the ADP and 5 in the AMT. I spent each day in the archives transcribing either court cases relating to the sale, circulation, and ownership of books or looking through notary protocols to locate inventories or other documents related to book ownership or the book trade. At the AGN, I consulted all 68 court cases listed in the grant proposal (except for a few that the archive could not find), plus several additional cases I identified while consulting the in-archive finding aid system which were not listed online. Most (61) cases contained relevant information and constituted valuable new sources of information. In terms of the notary protocols, I consulted at least 150 boxes of notary documents (about 15,000-30,000 documents), and I found 94 new sources, mostly inventories containing books. At the ADP, I consulted the 60 court cases listed in the grant proposal to determine whether the cases’ inventories contained books. Only 35 contained books, and the most exciting find was the book inventory for an apothecary shop. At the AMT, I consulted notary protocols and was able to identify and transcribe 20 new sources from 60 boxes of material.

Ultimately, 209 new sources were transcribed during the grant period, bringing the source base for my dissertation to 360. At least 110 new sources contained book inventories providing evidence of books sold, owned, or otherwise circulated in Navarre. Others discuss the conditions and practices of bookselling, problems with distributing books, institutional forays into bookselling, and many other issues giving us insight into books’ circulation and use in Navarre.

Successes and challenges

Given the huge number of useful sources encountered, the overall research was successful with relatively few challenges, and I have a solid source base for writing my dissertation and eventual monograph. Most court cases were very relevant, and irrelevant ones were those at the ADP whose inventories lacked books or those at the AGN where the ‘libros’ mentioned in the finding aid referred to account books versus books to be sold or read. The notary protocols presented a greater challenge because I had much less of an idea of what material was available or what I would likely find. This was why I chose a select number of random scribes from promising cities in my grant proposal. However, as the just 114 relevant notary documents from 170 boxes of material (about 17,000-34,000 documents) demonstrate, finding sources requires fishing in a vast sea of material. Initially, I glanced at every document in the first couple boxes for all my chosen scribes in the AGN. This revealed that some scribes were much more fruitful than others, and that this strategy worked well for the scribes who were clearly often used by the book trade. However, going through many boxes without encountering any relevant materials by scribes chosen at random felt like a poor use of time. I changed my tactics in Tudela where the registers of the scribes were digitized, and so I spent part of my time the first day going through all the registers of the scribes I had planned on. From that, I could identify the boxes that at least had potential. I then examined those boxes to see if additional materials appeared besides that which I had identified as relevant in the register. This strategy worked well because there was a higher chance of finding something in every box while maintaining the serendipity of the archive. It also meant that I saw more material than the scribes I had planned on (12 scribes versus 3), and thus I have a more diverse base of scribes for Tudela

I adopted the same strategy in the second part of my trip in Pamplona. Again, this meant I found many more documents than the original strategy would have, and I have a source base from 46 different scribes in the AGN instead of the 19 originally planned. In future research trips, I will be adopting this same strategy.

Preliminary findings and patterns

The sources encountered over the course of the project contribute both quantitative and qualitative data to what is known about books in Navarre during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The major patterns in this new addition to the corpus were:

Greater diversity in the types of book owners encountered to be added to my corpus’ existing strengths in legal professional, clergy, and women’s private libraries.

New groups/types of individuals encountered include bishops, scribes, secretaries, government functionaries, gentry, and institutions (parish churches, royal gaols, and monasteries)

Medical libraries at all levels were an important new sub-group (apothecaries, surgeons, medical doctors, and protomédicos, an administrative medical position for licensing doctors)

More pathways of bookselling and provision of books than brick-and-mortar stores

Itinerant peddlers

Non-book trade private individuals selling to each other (more or less successfully and with or without antagonizing professional booksellers). This is particularly useful for thinking about divisions between professional and non-professional bookish practices.

Bartering

Auctions

Varying perceptions of the “value” of books in terms of monetary value, usefulness, and other factors

Impact of funding

The impact of the Trust’s funding cannot be overstated. Due to this grant, I was able to double the amount of time I spent in Spain by combining the grant with funding from my institution. This meant I could dedicate time to transcribing both court cases and the notary protocols. I was able to consult virtually all of the court cases held by the AGN that very likely had relevant information regarding bookselling or ownership judging from their finding aid description, and I could work through an additional 60 cases at the ADP. The extended time for exploration of the notary records (27 days) uncovered some extraordinary inventories in terms of size of collections, description levels, and to whom the books belonged. Without the additional funding of the Trust, I would have been forced to dedicate my time to either one or the other of these sources or consulted a smaller portion of each source type.

Significance to current and future research

The overall significance of these 11 weeks of research is that I have now identified and transcribed all the sources that will form the base for my dissertation and likely most of the sources for a future monograph resulting from the dissertation. Through this project, my quantitative corpus of bookseller and private library inventories has grown from about 81 inventories to at least 190. Further, analysis of the TEI-XML transcribed portion of my corpus has revealed that there are at least 11,421 individual book inventory entries or mentions of books among all the court cases and notary documents. This number is likely closer to 15,000 once the non-TEI transcribed inventories from my undergraduate and master’s theses are included. This corpus certainly represents the largest number of book inventories for Navarre, and when published on my website as both data in the database and digital editions of transcriptions, I believe it will be one of the largest open corpora of Spanish book inventories. The size and variety of collections represented in their corpus—from just one book to more than 600 books and owned by widows, jailors, clergy, physicians, lawyers, bishops, and others—would not have been possible without this extended period of research. The qualitative side of the corpus has also grown from the additional 61 court cases at the AGN transcribed during this project. Ultimately, this research has permitted me to construct a comprehensive corpus of documents to sufficiently understand the circulation and ownership of books in Navarre for my dissertation and will be the jumping off point for future substantive research.

Reports from 2023 Projects

Jeonghun Choi, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.
‘Globalizing Historical Knowledge in the Netherlands and Japan’

In the research statement I submitted to the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, I planned to visit Tokyo and Tsuyama in Japan. I stayed in Japan from July 4 to August 25, and made additional visits to the archives in the Fukuoka and Sage Prefectures, which also house some significant but understudied materials concerning Dutch Learning and localization of historical knowledge in the nineteenth century. Overall, I was able to examine more primary sources (as well as some secondary sources) that were relevant to my research on the processes of production, circulation and consumption of historical knowledge in Japan than originally planned.

As was planned, during my trip I visited the Library of the University of Tokyo, Library of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, National Diet Library, and Tsuyama Archive of Western Studies. In Tokyo, I examined the titles that are usually labeled as the ‘Foreign Books Collected under the Shogunate Regime’ and some of the Japanese-language texts either written or translated by the scholars of Dutch Learning (rangakusha). While many of the Dutch publications imported during the nineteenth century are already digitized, my study of the physical copies of them resulted in an intriguing discovery that any scholar who relies only on the digital editions would never expect. Even though it is challenging to determine how exactly the Dutch texts were read by the Japanese consumers, I was able to identify some copies whose pages are left uncut – such as Leesboek voor meisjes (2. druk) by P. D. Anslijn (Ran3238)– which is more suggestive of the possibility that those copies were either unread or not actively perused. And the existing catalogues of the Dutch texts have yet to single out such features as significant bibliographic dimensions.

In a few cases, I also found some traces of the readers’ use such as marginalia and bookmarks, as in a copy of Rekenboek voor meisjes, ter dienste der scholen (2. stukje 12. druk) by Nicolaas Anslijn (Ran3239), attributes to which existing scholarship has failed to pay sufficient attention. The only major challenge I had to face in Tokyo was that some libraries, especially the National Diet Library, prohibit scholars from scanning or photographing the materials. (Presumably this is one reason only a few scholars have discussed the Dutch publications in this collection.) It took more time to take notes on the titles that are most relevant to my research than expected. Also, the National Diet Library limited the number of books one can examine in a single day to about ten. My examination of the collection was far from comprehensive, even limited to the genre of history and pedagogy. Thus, I believe I will need to visit the collection again in the near future.

At the Tsuyama Archive of Western Studies, I was also able to get photocopied texts by Mitsukuri Genpo 箕作阮甫, the prominent scholar of Dutch Learning. One thing of which I was not aware until I arrived in Tsuyama was that the staff members of the archive were less willing to assist visitors, because they believed the main function of the archive is to exhibit materials in the museum within the archive for the public, rather than offering the copies for the scholars who visit the site. After all, many materials related to Dutch Learning were also accessible at the National Diet Library in Tokyo, a fact of which I was not fully aware. While I ended up getting many manuscripts by Mitsukuri that would be more closely examined for my dissertation, I will need to visit the National Diet Library again.

Additionally I visited the collections of the Library of Kyushu University (Fukuoka), the Sage Prefectural Library (Saga), and the Takeo City Library (Saga), which also hold printed books and manuscripts that reflect the trend of Dutch Learning and its intersection with other intellectual genealogies such as Neo-Confucianism, National Learning (kokugaku), and Military Learning (heigaku). I was able to examine almost all the texts I intended to at the Library of Kyushu University and Takeo City Library, such as Karaktermastige Beschrijving van het Bijzonder Leven en Gedrag van Napoleon Buonaparte by Lewis Goldsmith.

I realized that many titles relevant to my research project were housed at the collections of the Saga Prefectural Library. A key challenge was that one can read or photograph the Dutch Learning-related texts such as the ones in the Nabeshima Family Archive only after one gets permission for access to each text from the descendants of the family. Thus, it was challenging to examine the titles comprehensively within the limited amount of time available. Nevertheless, I was able to undertake preliminary research on the collection. The Sage Prefectural Library is another site I plan to visit again for a deeper study the materials from the Nabeshima Family Archive. Eventually, though my exploration of the texts in this archive was far from comprehensive, I began viewing Sage as another central site of knowledge production and consumption that I need to emphasise in my project, especially in the dissertation chapter where I plan to discuss both the continuing and waning influence of Dutch Learning from the mid-nineteenth to the late nineteenth century.

I would like to single out two significant points that became clearer during my research trip. First, in my project that examines globalization of European knowledge with an emphasis on Japan in the nineteenth century, both the contexts – of the Western publications, and the East Asian literary sphere – should be taken seriously, as suggested in my research proposal. Tokyo, Tsuyama, Fukuoka, and Sage are all famous for the rich intellectual ecologies, where the orders of knowledge such as Chinese classics and Dutch Learning intersected. The catalogues of the collections such as the Nabeshima Family Archive suggest that indeed it is highly likely that Western knowledge on some major themes such as the Napoleonic Wars was reframed by the conventional fields such as classical studies.

Second, the attributes in the physical copies housed in the archives can offer more clues through which to understand the process of circulation and consumption of the texts, such as marginalia, bookmarks, and uncut pages. In the chapter I aim to write, I will discuss both the textual and non-textual information as significant evidence that gives useful testimony to the modern Japanese book history.

As was stated in the synopsis in the Project Proposal, this research trip will result in a chapter in my doctoral dissertation that I plan to write. An e-copy of the dissertation, or the link to its web page will be provided to the Trust when it is completed. My trip to Japan was significantly funded by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, and I would like to express my deep gratitude for the Trust’s support.

Tim Fulford, Professor of English, De Montfort University.
‘The Collected Poems of Henry Kirke White’.

I am happy to say that the grant generously made has enabled me to undertake the research I proposed, and a little more. My research has resulted/is resulting in the following publications:

1. The Collected Poems of Henry Kirke White, ed. Tim Fulford. Liverpool University Press. April 2024. This now contains a hundred-page introduction assessing Kirke White’s poetry, explaining the preparation of his work for the press after his death, and surveying the production and circulation of editions of his work, including pirate editions, on both sides of the Atlantic, and also the circulation of poems in British and US magazines and journals. It also contains extensive editorial notes detailing the first publication of poems in magazines and editions, documenting the gradual establishment of Kirke White’s oeuvre and reputation by the nineteenth-century press. The grant enabled me to prepare the introduction and notes because the archival visits which it funded exposed me to the many US editions of his work, to the presentation of the poet made in the editorial apparatus of these editions, and to the magazine publication of certain poems.
2. An invited essay by me on the production and reception of editions and biographies of Kirke White in the UK and US, entitled ‘The rise, fall and revival of labouring-class poetry in the commercial market, 1800-1821’ in the book collection British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700, ed. John Goodridge (London: University of London Press, 2024). This article makes use of MS correspondence and early editions of the poetry that I read on the New York and Philadelphia visits financed by the grant.
3. An invited article by me in the journal European Romantic Review (forthcoming 2024): ‘Farmers’ Boys and Doomed Youths: Producing the Poet in the Print Culture of the Romantic Era’. This article makes use of MS correspondence and early editions of the poetry that I read on the New York, Harvard and Philadelphia visits financed by the grant.
4. An extensive website, edited and part-written by me, containing essays on Kirke White’s poetry and biography, and the impact made by the circulation of specific US editions of his work on later writers’ publications. https://kirkewhitecom.wordpress.com/ Articles on this website that are especially indebted to the Willison grant include:

Christopher Catanese, ‘Patronage and Poetic Form: Henry Kirke White, Capel Lofft, and the Monthly Mirror’. I published this piece after my work on magazine publication of Kirke White brought me into contact with the author.

R. J. Ellis, ‘Harriet Wilson, Our Nig and Henry Kirke White’s Poetry’.   Ellis’s article discusses the use of Kirke White made by the first black American novelist. It identifies the specific edition of the poet that Wilson likely used.  My work in US libraries on editions of Kirke White, funded by the grant, allowed me to assist Ellis’s argument by inspecting editions.

My article ‘Kirke White in America: Transcendentalism — Bryant and Whitman’ assesses the impact on the poetry of William Cullen Bryant and Walt Whitman of reading specific US editions of Kirke White. I inspected these editions in the New York Public Library.

My article ‘Visionary Boys and Spots of Time: Kirke White, Wordsworth – the Romantic Child and the Memorialising Poet’ depends upon evidence as to the popularity of the biographical portrait of the Romantic boy genius that was created by the widespread editions of Kirke White’s work. I documented this popularity, in part, by inspecting editions and reprints in the New York Public Library and the Houghton Library, as stipulated in my bid to the Willison Trust.

In addition to these print and digital publications, I delivered a conference paper on the poet at the 2023 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in Huntsville Texas.   This was given on a Book History panel and used my findings from the Willison-funded archival visits to demonstrate Kirke White’s popularity in the nineteenth-century book market. I also delivered an online talk on Kirke White’s reputation for the British Association of Romantic Studies.  This benefitted from the discovery, on my visit to the New York Public Library, of a Paris pirate edition that grouped Kirke White’s poetry with that of Samuel Rogers and James Montgomery.

Overall, the Willison Trust’s funding has enabled me to acquire the expertise and information about Kirke White’s publication history and presentation in print that is necessary to generate significant scholarly interest in his poetry and his reputation, and in his role in influencing readers and poets in the nineteenth century. The success of this research is evidenced in the invitations I have received to publish articles in books and journals and in the willingness of literary historians to contribute articles on Kirke White to my website.  These continue: I shall later in 2024 publish online an article by the renowned Shelley scholar Greg Kucich—Kucich was brought to Kirke White’s work by hearing my conference paper on his reception.  I shall myself discuss cheap print pirate editions of Kirke White at the 2024 meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Romanticism in Washington DC (August).  I will also publish further commentaries on his writing on the website.

Abhijit Gupta, Professor of English, Jadavpur University.
‘Indologists among the Epics: H.H. Wilson and Charles Wilkins’.

The research on this project was carried out for a period of five weeks, from early June to mid-July 2023, chiefly at the British Library, London, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The core of the project was to examine the many rough and fair copies of the manuscripts of an English translation of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, generated by a team lead by the Orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson in Calcutta in the late 1820s. The significance of the translation lay in the fact that though approximately two-thirds of the epic was translated—over half a century before the first published translation of the entire epic in English between 1883 and 1896—there was no attempt by Wilson to publish the work. Consequently, this led to a near-total ignorance about the existence of the translation, even among Mahabharata scholars. No less significant was the presence of a number of Indian translators and scribes—all happily named—who worked according to Wilson’s direction. In most textual projects of a collaborative nature from this period, the names of the ‘native’ assistants are missing. In this instance, the following names emerged: the lexicographer Ramkamal Sen, his son Harimohan Sen, Tarachand Chakrabarti, Sivakrishna Tagore, and Gobindaram Upadhyay. The names of some lesser-known scribes could also be gleaned from the MSS, as well as the occasional European hand.

There was a single research question with which I began this project: why did Wilson carry out this massive undertaking without once moving towards publication? What was it intended for? I am happy to report that I was able to answer this question, though it was not what I had expected. Very briefly, the translations were intended as rough notes or background research for other, more esoteric, Sanskrit texts Wilson was engaged in translating, such as the entire canon of the Hindu philosophical texts known as the Puranas. In fact, Wilson’s marginal notes and instructions indicate that he was assembling a digest of the epics for his own research needs, first starting with an index of the Ramayana in 1821-23 (MSS Eur D379). In the case of the Ramayana, only the index is compiled before a terse marginal note ‘Go on with the Mahabharata’ (MS Eur D415) signalled the shift to the Mahabharata for the next few years. What emerged from the study of the MSS was a fascinating narrative of reception, choice, and interpretation, carried out in a collaborative environment, and for a specific purpose. It also revealed a protocol of workshopped translation not wholly dissimilar to that employed by early Christian missionaries, but with additional features of its own such as access to a trained cadre of Western-educated Indian translators.

In addition to the MSS of the epic, a considerable volume of private papers, letters etc were also studied. But as I examined the textual production of Wilson and his team, I was able to realise that this was not in fact an isolated attempt, but rather, part of a longer history of orientalist engagement with the South Asian world of letters dating back to nearly half a century, from the time of William Jones and Charles Wilkins, Of course, Wilkins’s famed English translation of the Bhagavad Gita—a metaphysical text and the centrepiece of the Mahabharata—had been carried out under the direct patronage of the East India Company in 1785. But his manuscript output—much of it unpublished—is significant, such as his glossary of Hindi and Bengali words (Eur.MSS D130), or his own attempts at translating the first canto or Adiparva of the Mahabhrarata. In this case too, we have both the fair and rough copies, in Wilkins’s hand, as we as that of scribes. Other MSS also emerged, some unattributed, all comprising early attempts at chipping away at the textual mountain that was the Mahabharata. The choices of the passages taken up for translation are revealing, and seem to signal towards a process of miniature canon-formation. What is also interesting are the transliteration strategies employed by Wilkins in his 1780s translations, where Sanskrit names are Bengali-ised, a tendency which is reversed by the Wilson team. Though the project did not closely study questions of linguistic register and style, one could not help but take note of the comparative merits or demerits of the translations–Wilkins’s translation, for example, is rendered in a surprisingly modern idiom, and does not suffer in comparison to the authoritative translation carried out a century later by Kisori Mohan Ganguly.

A third, wholly unexpected figure stepped up in course of the research—none other than the Governor-General-in-Council Warren Hastings himself. Hastings was an enthusiastic champion of Wilkins and his role in the securing funding for the latter’s Gita is well documented, but his own attempt to translate the Mahabharata—as part of a love-letter to his future wife Marian Imhoff—came as a revelation, and adds a further strand to the already complex tapestry of the early Orientalist engagement with the epic.

Some questions remained unanswered, owing to lack of sources and/ or time. I was unable to find evidence of payments made to the translators by the East India Company for their work on the Mahabharata. More sifting of the Company papers may throw up more information on this. As I had indicated in my original proposal, the historical diaspora of material—especially from MSS—from India to depositories in the West is in itself worthy of study. Thus the history of acquisition, cataloguing, and preservation of material is also a part of the life of a textual object; in the case of the BL, particularly, the trail of acquisition would often grow cold after a point, or provide only partial information. Part of the story may also be located in Calcutta, especially in the holdings of the Asiatic Society.

In 2024, I expect the following publications to result from the research:

-a scholarly article on the Wilson project (work ongoing)

-a slim volume, provisionally titled ‘The Love-Song of Warren Hastings, Esq.’, featuring his translation from the Mahabharata with annotations, written for a more general readership (work ongoing)

I also hope to explore funding opportunities to digitize the Wilson MSS, particularly of the Mahabharata.

Thanks to the generosity of the grant made by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, I was able to spend over five weeks in London and Oxford consulting the sources. Owing to the voluminous archives (over a hundred volumes of Wilson papers alone), it was necessary to devote a considerable length of time to the MSS. Without the support of the Trust, this project would have been impossible to carry out, even in a shortened form, and I am grateful to the Trustees for their support and encouragement for the project.

Renske Hoff, Lecturer in Middle Dutch Literature, Utrecht University.
‘Souters and Psalteriums: Paratext and Readership in Middle Dutch and Latin psalters in the Low Countries, c. 1480-1510’

In the project ‘Souters and Psalteriums’, undertaken with financial help of the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, I have studied the use and (intended) readership of Latin and Dutch psalters printed in the Low Countries (current Netherlands and Belgium) between 1480 and 1510. In this period, nine Middle Dutch editions and twenty-five Latin editions of the book of Psalms were published in this area. I worked on this project between May and November 2023. With the received grant, I have been able to study books from libraries in England, Germany, and Belgium in July and November. In England, I have visited the British Library in London. In Germany, I have visited the Bayerische Statsbibliothek in Munich and the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart. In Antwerp, I have visited the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience and the library of Museum Plantin Moretus. In this report, I will indicate how I spend the money, reflect on the results of my research, and look towards the future.

As stated above, I have been able to visit five libraries in three countries.   Contrary to what I expected and indicated in my application, I was not able to visit the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library during my stay in England; I hope to visit both libraries at my own expense sometime next year. Furthermore, rather than travelling to Berlin, I realised that a visit to Antwerp would benefit my research more. I decided to visit the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience and the library of Museum Plantin Moretus.

The study of the various copies has allowed me to formulate some preliminary conclusions about the paratext, layout, and intended readership of the Latin and Middle Dutch psalters.

1. Middle Dutch printed psalters sometimes contain Latin incipits that help users connect the Middle Dutch translation to the Latin text. This will have played a role in navigation, as other religious textual devices – such as liturgical overviews – would often provide the incipit of a psalm rather than its number. Latin psalters do not contain Middle Dutch incipits.
2. All Middle Dutch printed psalters studied in this project were in sextodecimo. With regard to Latin psalters, there is more variety. These psalters were published both in sextodecimo and octavo size.
3. The Middle Dutch editions often contain paratextual material alongside the psalms, including a preface, short introductions to each psalm, and several supplementary hymns and prayers. In general, the Latin psalters contain less paratext. Prefaces and introductions are absent.
4. The Middle Dutch nor the Latin psalters contain musical notation.
5. All Middle Dutch editions were printed on paper. The majority of the Latin psalters were as well, but a few were printed on parchment.
6. Regarding layout, the Latin psalters show more variety than the Middle Dutch psalters. Some Latin editions have their lines further apart to allow for extensive annotations (as have indeed been added to the 1496 copy in Munich) or provide space for hand-added musical notation, as is the case in a copy of a 1502 psalter by Hugo Janszoon van Woerden in Amsterdam (University Library, Inc. 407), studied not as part of but still in relation to this project. However, most editions – both Latin and Middle Dutch – have a similar, simple layout. They are all printed in a Gothic type, single column, with simple devices, such as pilcrows and printed initials, to indicate the beginning of each new psalm.
7. A number of Middle Dutch psalters are decorated with extensive penwork, done professionally or by a user him- or herself. This is generally absent in the Latin psalters.

In general, these results appear to indicate that some Middle Dutch and Latin psalter editions share a certain reading public, but that the Latin psalm books were produced in more variety, addressing a wider public and more diverse contexts of use. However, I have realised that I need more material to confirm this preliminary conclusion. At the moment, I am extending my research corpus by studying copies of Latin and Middle Dutch psalters located in various libraries in the Netherlands. I aim to present these results in an article, which I will hopefully be able to write in Spring 2024.

As explained in my application, this study was part of a larger research project dedicated to Psalm culture in the Low Countries around 1500. I am currently working on an application to the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a large postdoc fellowship. The project ‘Souters and Psalteriums’ has been significant for this larger project in the following main ways:

1. It has enhanced my understanding of the differences and similarities between Latin and Middle Dutch psalters, confirming the relevance of approaching psalm culture as a multilingual affair.
2. It has strengthened my conviction that paratext and layout can provide valuable insights into intended readerships, both within religious and lay contexts.
3. It has emphasised the multidimensionality of the use of psalters: as textual containers, as material object, as visual things, and as enablers of song, performance, and prayer.

I will continue working on the topic of psalm culture in the Low Countries. The project undertaken with the financial support of the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust has been fruitful both for my research and for my personal development as a researcher.

Priti Joshi, Professor of English, University of Puget Sound.
‘For Illustrative Purposes Only: From Wood to Litho to Photo in 19^th Century Indian Newspapers.’

Thanks to the generosity of the Willison Foundation, I was able to travel to the UK in June/July 2023 for almost four weeks. During this time, I conducted research on images in the 19^th century Indian press, as well as studied the technologies used for mass-producing images, primarily woodcut/engraving and lithography, in the 19^th century.

In London, my archival research was centered on the British Library, with forays to the Wellcome Centre, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Archives. (The British Museum, where I was hoping to access materials was unable to accommodate me.) At the BL I was able to consult and study closely a broad range of illustrated periodicals between 1850 and 1890. With loupe and light in hand, I discovered, for instance, that images that I had taken to be wood-cuts were in fact lithographs (and in some cases vice versa).

I had taken the Delhi Sketch Book’s images to be woodcuts, but the signature on an image from that publication – a salamander whose tail curls into the word “lithog” – clearly indicates that the journal was at least occasionally using lithography for its satiric images. Details from Mookerjee’s Magazine, one of India’s earliest review magazines, suggests that rather than following in footsteps of the satiric, Bengali-language Basantak that preceded it by about five years and that relied on woodcuts, Mookerjee’s used lithography instead. Time poring over images at the BL taught me that though in British periodicals ‘wood was king’ late into the 19^th century (displaced only by two-tone photographic images), in India lithography dominated in periodical images.

In London I also had archival successes at the Wellcome Institute and the Victoria & Albert Museum. As I embarked on the project, I was looking to trace the representations of figures in the press to 18^th century oil portraits; what I had not anticipated was turning my attention ‘downstream’, as it were, to inexpensive, street prints that proliferated in the bazaars of 19^th-century India. Both the V&A and Wellcome Institute have collections of prints produced in the Batalla market of Calcutta and sold for a few annas (pence). My access to these prints was a break-through for my research and project. While I have yet fully to absorb and formulate the meaning of these findings, my preliminary assessment is that Batalla prints show a far greater syncretism and cosmopolitanism than the prints produced and consumed by a growing middle-class elite in newsprint.

My weeks at London libraries were punctuated by a two-day workshop on lithography at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading. This fantastic event allowed me to converse with scholars such as Michael Twyman and Fiona Ross, as well as emerging scholars such as Vaibhav Singh (who works on Indian periodicals and type design) and Borna Izadpanah (who works on lithography in 19^th and 20^th century Iran). Along with the research findings I describe above, this workshop opened my eyes to the centrality of lithography in the 19^th century print market.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Thomas Bewick territory, was my next stop –  and revelation. Though I had anticipated staying in Newcastle only a short time, I extended my trip to ten research days as the archive there felt like a cloud-burst opening up. When I headed to Newcastle, the questions I was seeking answers to appeared a long-shot (after all, Bewick and his workshop methods were distant – calendrically and geographically – from Indian periodicals). Notwithstanding the unclear relation between my research questions and Bewick’s wood engraving methods and workshop organization, Peter Quinn, the president of the Bewick Society, kindly gave me his time, expertise, and vast knowledge during my stay in Newcastle. I am especially grateful to him for introducing me to Chris Daunt, a master wood-engraver who allowed me to crash his day-long workshop on wood-engraving; while my engraving was decidedly below-par in terms of skill, what I learned in that workshop about Bewick and wood engraving methods were invaluable. The archival door that swung open into a veritable treasury was the Newcastle City Library whose archivists were enormously generous in bringing out a wide range of Bewick materials: carved woodblocks, proof books, and many editions of his books. The latter made clear that the levels of degradation even after frequent printings from the same block was minimal. Though I am not a Bewick specialist, I have already crafted a short newsletter-style piece on Bewick’s vignettes and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (that novel famously opens with the young Jane securing Bewick’s British Birds for company as she shuns and is shunned by her cruel aunt and cousins).

Though I had intended to travel to Manchester, the archival finds in Newcastle were so rich and productive that I decided to forgo that trip. The weeks of research this past summer were stupendous: in just over three weeks, I returned home with some 1,200 image scans! I am deeply grateful to the Willison Foundation for making this research possible; I will be drawing on this archive for many years to come.

In July, I presented a paper at the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in which I incorporated some of my findings of the Batalla woodcuts. I have incorporated materials from the Bewick archive in my teaching already (in a class I taught this past term on Jane Eyre) and am working on a short article on Bewick’s vignettes and the ways their meaning shifts as their location in his various volumes shifts. I have completed an article on the borrowings and exchanges between Indian and British illustrated periodicals (‘Periodical Transactions: The Indian Press Repurposes the British Press’) that is in final editing stages and slated to appear in the Routledge Companion to Global Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Sukanya Banerjee and Fariha Shaikh. A paper on labour and labouring conditions in wood-cutting workshops is partially completed and is my next project to come out of these archival gatherings. I am still grappling with my research finding about the central role of lithography in Indian periodicals, but understand now that the interplay between wood and stone will be a central facet of my next publication/this project.

Nicholas Pickwoad, Professor Emeritus, University of the Arts London.
‘Report on the examination of the 12 manuscript notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in the library of the Institut de France in February, 2024.’

I spent the three weeks from 4-26 February in Paris examining the 12 notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in the company of the Leonardo scholar Carmen Bambach, Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This allowed us three working weeks (Monday to Friday) of continuous study, from 12.00 noon, when library opened to readers, until 6.00 pm, when it closed. Because of these somewhat limited hours, we worked each day without a break, for the full 6 hours, sitting side by side in the reading room of the Institut, under the watchful supervision of different members of the library staff. We established a routine of work, initially each of us examining one notebook at a time, and then swapping them over, before calling for the next pair of manuscripts, but once the library staff had got used to us and what we were doing, we were given remarkably free access to the notebooks, and we were able to revisit ones already seen to check on details and to have more than the allotted number of two notebooks on the desk at the same time, to allow comparisons to be made. We brought with us a cold-light source with a fibre-optic swan-neck light guide, and we were able to borrow a second one from the conservator at the Fondation Custodia, which allowed each of us much greater access to controlled lighting, including transmitted light photography to try to record watermarks. We also made use of my Dinolyte Digital Microscope to record details at high magnification, and were allowed to take as many photographs of the mss as we needed.

We worked through the notebooks more or less in shelfmark order and were just able to examine all of them within the time available to us, though inevitably more time would have been useful. I took my photo-lights, tripod and camera in order to take high quality images, but it quickly became obvious that we did not have time for this level of photography, and made use instead of a small digital camera and an iPad as we examined the books. This meant that we were unable to take the transmitted-light photographs of the leaves that we had hoped to have, though we were able to photograph a large number of the watermarks. There is still work, however, to be done on the paper used in the notebooks.

I was able to carry out a thorough analysis of all the bindings, and although it had hitherto been believed that only one of the notebooks, Paris M, was in the state in which Leonardo handled it, and therefore in its first and only professionally-made longstitch binding, I was able to establish that the four other longstitch bindings are also all in their first bindings and thus also survive as they were when acquired by Leonardo. Three of them, MSS Paris E, F, and G, clearly came from the same source, most probably a Milanese stationer, showing identical sewing patterns and the simplest possible covers of cartonnage. MS Paris L was a little more sophisticated, with a cover of blue cartonnage, which retains most of a secondary cover of white paper. Paris M has a stronger structure with secondary pierced supports of parchment on the spine. Such informal notebooks are the sort of bound books that seldom survive, and certainly not from this early date (ca 1500), and these survive because they were treated from the time of Leonardo’s death in 1519 with something of the reverence given to holy relics, and were left untouched. Had they belonged to someone less famous, they would probably not have been preserved intact. None of the notebooks in other collections have survived in these bindings, though it is clear that part of one of the Forster Codices in the V&A (Forster II) preserves the six gatherings from such a binding, probably in the same order in which they were acquired as a blank note book.

Four of the books (Paris MSS A, B, H and I) are now in parchment-covered bindings of the same type as the three Forster Codices and the Codex Trivulzianus, which I examined in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan in 2019. With the exception of the six gatherings from a notebook mentioned above, all these books are made up from the separate, unbound, tacketed quires that were presumably made up in Leonardo’s workshop and used on a daily basis, and in which they appear to have survived until he died. His heir, Francesco Melzi, collected them together in different volumes and had them bound in new longstitch bindings sewn though thick cartonnage covers. The four Paris examples of this type all bear evidence of their earlier history as separately-sewn gatherings. The sides of these cartonnage covers were subsequently cut off, and new parchment covers were added, secured to the bookblocks with the slips of endbands, worked with a secondary sewing in coloured silk thread. All of the covers have fore-edge envelope flaps with loop and toggle fastenings. It has been suggested that these covers may have been added in Spain, though as one is to be found on the Codex Trivulzianus, this seems unlikely, as there is no evidence that this book has ever left Italy.

The leaves stolen from MSS A and B by Guglielmo Libri were returned to the library bought from the collection of Lord Ashburnham, and these too we examined. Their removal in fact opened up access to the structures of the notebooks from which they we taken which would not otherwise have been accessible. The leaves remain in the guard-book bindings made for them after their removal.

While I was studying the bindings, Carmen Bambach was working on the composition of the contents, and throughout our work we were able to ask questions of each other, each proposing ideas that other would see as possible or impossible according to our own specialist knowledge. It was highly productive collaboration that exceeded my most optimistic expectations. A considerable amount of data was assembled, but we were handicapped by what the on-line photographs of the mss did not provide, and which we were not able to photograph within the scope of our visit. The notebooks were all photographed in such a way (with 360° lighting) as to eliminate shadows, thus hiding much of the information one would hope gain from the surface of the paper (such as evidence of the felt side of the paper, the texture of the laid moulds and watermarks, erasures, etc.). We were also unable to take transmitted-light photographs of more than small details (such as some of the watermarks).

The question of photography formed part of the discussion which took place in a meeting at the end of our visit with Yann Sordet, directeur des bibliothèques de l’Institut de France and Sabrina Castandet-le Bris, conservatrice en chef of the library. Our case for the need for further photography of the manuscripts was greatly assisted by the discovery by Carmen Bambach the previous day of a hitherto unrecorded drawing by Leonardo in one of the notebooks. This was finely executed with a metal point, as was his habit for the preparation of his more carefully executed drawings, but never completed in ink. It shows some complex groined vaulting, possibly intended for the cathedral in Milan, and is completely invisible unless viewed with raking light, and does not therefore show up in the on-line images.

We also asked about the possibility of photography of the whole collection using transmitted light. This would not only give an accurate record of all the watermarks, but would also allow the virtual reconstruction of the sheets from which the notebooks were made which would in turn allow missing leaves to be identified (and possibly found in other collections) and establish how the existing gatherings, many of which in MSS A, B, H and I are very irregular in their composition, were put together.

Yann Sordet undertook to explore the possibility of further photography by the Institut, as well as the possibility of the Institut publishing a book on the notebooks, to include the Forster Codices and the Codex Trivulzianus. He is to propose this work and the publication to the board of the Institut. He also invited us to return to the Institut for such further examination of the notebooks as might be necessary to complete our work. Carmen Bambach and I are in the meantime assessing and putting in order the data we recorded, but as she is currently heavily involved in the preparation for a major Raphael exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, this is inevitably slow work.

Asha Rogers, Associate Professor in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature, University of Birmingham.
‘A publishing history of the Igbo language novel Omenuko (1935), by Peter Nwana’.

The Trust funded a significant portion of research towards a publishing history of Peter Nwana’s novel Omenuko (1934), widely believed to be the first published novel in the Igbo language. That it did not appear in English translation until 2014, despite its considerable cultural status regionally in Nigeria including as an examination text, raises important questions about the non-circulation of literatures composed in African languages. The research contributes directly to work on twentieth-century African literature and its publishing conditions, including scholarly outputs.

The research was organised in the following way:

1. Provenance and sponsorship (1928-1948): To illuminate how Omenuko emerged as a text in relation to religious, publishing, and other British-based agencies involved in its commissioning, publication and sale, thereby increasing our understanding their historical role in making African language publications available on certain terms.
2. Language and materiality (1935-1963): To analyse the forms of linguistic difference rendered in four materially distinct editions in 1935, 1951, 1958, and 1963, studies in light the available archival information on commissioning, , and sales. To identify how material issues of language, including standardisation, institutionalisation, and translation, might bear upon the interpretation of the text.

1. Provenance and sponsorship

I was able to identify some aspects of the novel’s origins during research visits to the Methodist Missionary Society at SOAS and the archives of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures at the LSE.

The International Institute’s Executive Council minutes between 1926-1939 showed the extent to which its assemblage of interests – religious, educational, anthropological and those relating to imperial governance – were mediated through the annual prize ‘for Vernacular Books Written by Natives’. It was under these conditions that Omenuko came into being initially as an entry that received a second place ‘consolation prize’. In this scenario, missionary anthropologists and others who perceived themselves as a progressive, culturalist influence on imperial policymaking took on the role of literary critic, committed to producing ‘authentic’ ‘African’ literature according to its pre-given judgments. The ample evidence of such thinking in the minutes speaks to a colonial politics of location where the spoken worlds of language, its newly alphabetised forms, and the ownership of writing through formal authorship was entangled with the relations between locals and outside agencies like the IIALC.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to locate the relevant folders holding the reader reports delivered by African language specialists of a European background, nor evidence of Nwana’s initial entry. This demonstrates a potential limitation of the ‘organisational’ approach; granular material on Nwana’s life and writing conditions lay ‘on the ground’ in south-eastern Nigeria; and of the archival approach, in which documentary evidence may still prove unexpectedly ephemeral. The extent of the IIALC’s role in supporting original African-language writing and, of the potential changes Nwana wrought prior to publication following its feedback, thus remain an ongoing enquiry.

The stage was to consult the papers of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, principally the Methodist West African Literature Committee, set up in 1922 to supply English language materials to West African primary schools, and the main repository of information about the business dealings of the Atlantis Press, an imprint of the Methodist Missionary Society for overseas sales, which had published the first edition of the novel in 1935. The Minute Book not only documented annual the sales of the novel from 8 copies in 1936 to an impressive, if not massive, 5000 copies at its seventh impression in 1949, showing a steady drip effect of sales into the changing world of the forties.

It also clarified its position outside the main business of the Press (religious publications and school textbooks), which was buffeted by rivals such as Longman, and existed in wider colonial markets (non-saleable texts were potentially redirected to West Indian markets). Omenuko was dubbed ‘Ibo story book’ by the Press, including in a particularly striking discovery, a hand-inscribed internal copy of the first edition held by the Press. It was the only African-authored individual work that I could see signs of. It generated some profits as a side-enterprise and complemented the Press’s extant interests in developing a ‘vernacular literature’ evident elsewhere (e.g. the publication Parables in Ibo; the Methodist Synod’s interest in educating an African in English studies at Exeter University to take over the vernacular strand of the business).

Although the Minute Book confirmed Omenuko was sold on to Longmans, it did not explain why. Outstanding questions include how and why this rival was able to extract the title, what attracted the press to Nwana’s book in the first place other than its novelty, and the sizeable issue of reception in the missionary school system. My research also benefitted from the SOAS Library’s collection of rare African studies and colonial titles.

2. Language and materiality

For all its strengths in grappling with issues of materiality, the history of the book as a discipline has not always engaged questions of language and language diversity, nor the materiality of language (see McDonald 2016). Among the most exciting parts of this research, then, was to spend time identifying changes in the different versions of Igbo orthography in which Omenuko appeared in various editions. This involved close work with original books and printed orthographies at British Library and SOAS, sourcing the extant 1963 edition in consultation with librarians at the Library of Congress, and liaising with Igbo cultural consultant Yvonne Chioma Mbanefo, who confirmed the various orthographies had been correctly identified. Digital reproductions of the parts of the four editions helped me analyse publishing and copyright information, and document how the rival orthographic systems bearing on written Igbo in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, bore upon the material book. This suggested to me that Omenuko’s fate as a work of African-language writing was made provincial partly through larger disputes over language and writing systems.

Conclusions and outcomes

I have presented work-in-progress to the ‘New Directions in Indigenous Book History’ on the historical and contemporary significance of the material book to Indigenous peoples. I have also written a 10,000-word research article, submitted Open Access to an international peer-reviewed journal, which documents the research described above on institutional provenance and patronage, and the intricate and decisive ways language and its materiality impacted Omenuko as a printed book and its circulation. The visual presentation and impact of this article will be greatly enhanced by the 4 high-resolution colour images of the various editions of the novel, the inclusion of which has been made possible by the Trust funding my acquisition of digital reproductions of sufficient quality.

The article marshals histories of publishing, translation and educational institutionalisation to intervene on debates on literary circulation and the geographical relation between the “local” and the “global” in world literary studies. It elaborates new insights into the novel’s reception based on my recuperation of a bootleg adaptation of Omenuko in the Nigerian newspaper the Daily Star in 1976 (unexpectedly made available to me locally on microfilm by the Library of Congress and University of Birmingham Library, which was not ultimately covered by the grant). It is this final example of the novel’s material life, I suggest, which promises to change how we read Omenuko from a text of putatively ‘local’ relevance to one with a much more expansive world, uses, and set of audiences, in view.

Sydney Shep, Reader in Book History, Victoria University of Wellington.
‘Joyce in the Antipodes: the Chelsea Book Club connection’.

The aim of this research project was to reconstruct the history of the London-based Chelsea Book Club [CBC] and analyse its role in the antipodean distribution of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The research was divided into two main segments: archival research at the National Library of Australia in Canberra which holds the personal papers of Arundel del Re [ADR], the founder of the CBC; and archival research in London at the British Library and the London Metropolitan Archives. While in Toronto I consulted the Virginia Woolf archive at Victoria College, my former alma mater, and met with Claire Battershill, one of the principal researchers on the Modernist Archive Publishing Project [MAPP]. As a result of a meeting with Nicola Wilson, MAPP’s project lead, in London in 2023, I will make a further research visit to Reading University’s Hogarth Press Archive in July 2024, in conjunction with the SHARP annual conference in Reading, where I am delivering a paper on the subject of my research. During this time I will also return to the British Library to continue my research, interrupted last year due to industrial action.

Arundel del Re’s personal papers deposited at the National Library of Australia (MS 1879) in Canberra proved to be an exceptionally rich source of information about this enigmatic figure who straddled many worlds and many places. Although posthumously purchased from the family, it was clearly a collection curated by ADR during his lifetime. Spartan early life history sources were fleshed out by many drafts of his many newspaper and magazine articles, public talks, lectures, and academic writings including transcript variants of his ‘Georgian Reminiscences’ the oral history recordings of which are housed at the JC Beaglehole Room at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ. Substantial correspondence with Japanese colleagues and friends provided evidence of his long-standing interest in Japanese culture and the impact he made on their professional and personal careers during his residency there and in Formosa (Taiwan) from 1927-1954. Notable lacunae were substantive references to his London period with Harold Munro, The Poetry Review, and the Poetry Bookshop as well as any mention of the Chelsea Book Club. As was discovered later, his personal effects including correspondence and books were confiscated when he was interned in Tokyo during WWII as a foreign national with sympathies to the Italian King rather than Communist Party and Mussolini. The idea that ADR brought his personal copy of Ulysses with him to New Zealand was, therefore, finally dispelled.

The British Library houses the extant UK-based correspondence, diaries, and manuscripts of Harold Monro (BL Monro papers, Add MSS 57734-68), the key literary figure with whom del Re was associated in Florence and London. In addition, the papers of the journalist Ruth Tomalin (BL Add MSS 89048) who embarked upon a biography of Monro’s wife, Alida Klemantaski, revealed an unexpected treasure trove of correspondence – mostly reminiscences – from ADR sent in the hope that she might write his biography. Unfortunately, due to ongoing industrial action, the Manuscript Reading Room was closed for the two weeks I was scheduled to be in London. Despite ordering up material from these collections and having an initial tantalising glimpse, I had to wait until the strike action was finished before I could access them again. With no time left for transcription and because personal photography or digital scans were not permitted, I had to order photographic reproductions which cost £1,068.

In the meantime, I had a very productive time tracking down ADR’s copious journalistic writings through the British Newspaper Archive and reconstructing his life in London (1911-1917) and Oxford (1921-1927) where, in addition to being the Taylorian Lecturer in Italian and the Italian Delegate for the League of Nations, he co-founded the Oxford Arts Club and Oxford University Operatic Society, and was involved with the Dramatic Society and various literary enterprises including those based at Basil Blackwood’s Broad Street bookshop.

In 1919, ADR established the Chelsea Book Club at 65 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This was the same year that Sylvia Beach founded Shakespeare & Co., in Paris. The two booksellers, who had previously met in Paris while ADR ran intelligence for the Italian Military Consul during the war, had similar aspirations and operated across similar literary networks. As the publisher of Ulysses, Beach was a key node in the often clandestine distribution of this work, documented by Seymour Leslie in his 1964 memoirs. Although I have yet to find any extant business archives, advertisements for CBC are found sprinkled throughout the leading literary and art periodicals of the period and reviews in mainstream newspaper media. ADR makes a guest appearance in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, CBC bookseller’s tickets and invoices can be found in online antiquarian booksellers’ listings, and the London business directories of the time include CBC. Several photos of the Cheyne Walk location complete with signage, window displays and browsing patrons were discovered at the London Metropolitan Archives. Local business directories proved that the Club continued after ADR left for Japan in 1927. It moved to 326 Kings Road, Kensington in 1929 and was managed by a consortium of amateur booksellers: Hon Oliver Brett, O[live] Guthrie, Seymour Leslie, and Morton Sands. The Club disappears from the public record in 1931. Of note, the original Cheyne Walk location was taken over by the Johnson Head Bookshop run by A. and L. Whitehead from 1929-1931.

ADR’s bookselling enterprise stocked rarer English language titles and international authors, underpinned by a lifelong philosophy that international understanding was best achieved through the eye and the mind. He was also well connected with the local and international art scene. One of the unique features of the CBC was its exhibitions, ranging from drawings and prints by Cezanne and Renoir, paintings by Augustus Johns and Walter Sickert, and prints by Eric Gill to the first exhibition of African (Congolese) sculpture in the UK, famously reviewed by art critic Roger Fry. Advertisements reveal that the CBC stocked fine press books, including those from the Hogarth and Ovid presses, something in keeping with ADR’s own experiences of editing two Golden Cockerel Press titles: The History of Pompey the Little (1926) and Troilus & Criseyde (1927). However, when he published work under the CBC imprint, his output was far more limited than anticipated: two books and one broadsheet. Nine Songs from the Twelfth Century French (1920) translated by Claude Colleer Abbot featured five woodcuts by Claude Lovat Fraser (who had been affiliated with Monro’s Poetry Bookshop) and was produced in a limited edition of 50 copies. The bilingual New Keepsake for the Year 1921 was a far more ambitious project of 600 copies, 50 of which were on Japanese vellum, and featured poems, stories, essays, original woodcuts and etchings edited by X.M. Boulestin and J.E. Laboureur. Finally, the Chelsea Book Club Broadsheet No. 1 was an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s short story, “The Mark on the Wall” with two woodcut images by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

My research to date has uncovered a complex, networked history of Arundel del Re. The bibliographic component of my application is ongoing, having morphed into a bibliography of ADR’s writings as well as a census of the known copies of Ulysses sold by the Chelsea Book Club. Once completed, these will be posted online. Archival absences have led me to re-engage with a career-long interest in auto/biography, resulting in some notable outputs and publications, listed below. I have also developed a new research platform that reframes the theory and method of auto/biography as it engages with ‘big biography’ and generative artificial intelligence. My BSANZ and SHARP conference papers introduce these concepts and a Marsden Fund application is in the review process.

Outputs to date:

• Preliminary bibliography of the writings of Arundel del Re, including journalism, academIc writing and editing;
• Preliminary bibliography of the Chelsea Book Club’s publications;
• Census of CBC copies of Ulysses, tracking current owners and provenance;
• “Ulysses Number 82: a bibliomystery,” public talk, Wellington Wayzgoose 2023, 25 November 2023;
• “Joyce in the Antipodes: the Chelsea Book Club connection,” conference presentation, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 27 November 2023;
• “In pursuit of Arundel del Re: scholar, translator, bibliophile,” book chapter for New Zealand Encounters with Japan, ed. Yushi Ito, Zane Ritchie, Kaori Hakone, Josai University, 2024;
• “Conversations with History: Auto/biography and Generative AI,” conference presentation,  SHARP Reading 2024, UK;
• “Arundel del Re and the Chelsea Book Club: A Modernist Experiment,” book chapter for Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice Festschrift for Archie Dick, ed Matthew Kelly, De Gruyter, January 2025.

My sincere thanks to the Willison Foundation for enabling me to undertake this research and open the door to a fascinating new area of study.

Michael Van Hoose, PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Virginia.
‘John Dickinson and the Economics of Early Machine-Made Paper, 1810–1840.’

With the support of the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, I conducted a month-long survey of the business records of John Dickinson (1782–1869), one of the leading figures of the nineteenth-century paper industry, at the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS). The grant came at a fortuitous time as I finished my PhD and set out to write a monograph on the economics of the British book trade during the Industrial Revolution. Dickinson serves as a crucial case study for this topic. Besides being the inventor of the cylinder-mould papermaking machine, Dickinson had close ties with two of London’s leading book tradespeople, the printer Andrew Strahan and the publisher Thomas Norton Longman. The primary goal of my project was to elucidate the growth of Dickinson’s papermaking and stationary businesses and to trace his connections with Strahan, Longman, and the London book trade during the first phase of his career, during which he erected four machine-powered mills and a rag processing plant near Hemel Hempstead.

The Trust’s generous grant of £4,000 covered the expenses of a one-month trip to Hertford. In all, I consulted roughly 5,000 pages of archival material at HALS, including all of Dickinson’s surviving business records through to 1840. The grant afforded me the luxury of time to be thorough, to document my progress methodically in order to ensure accurate citations, and to take legible photographs for reference when I return to the US. These steps were crucial for Dickinson’s papers at HALS, as the only extensive study of the materials, Joan Evans’s The Endless Web (1955), predates Victoria Brunton’s systematic catalogue. Unlike the Longman Archives in Reading and the Strahan Papers at the British Library, the Records of John Dickinson and Company have not been reproduced in microfilm. As I plan out my monograph, the trip to Hertfordshire has made it possible for me to write a dynamic account of the interactions among all three firms.

My first priority was to study Dickinson’s financial accounts, which comprise 40 volumes across the period 1801–1840. Of these records, the most actionable—though unfortunately not always the most legible, owing to faint ink and occasional water damage—were Dickinson’s Company Accounts of 1821–1840 (HALS D/EDi/1/3/1/1–16), prepared during his successive partnerships with T.N. Longman’s brother George and son Charles. These accounts contain detailed inventories of the paper held at Longman & Dickinson’s stationary business at 65 Old Bailey, including the numbers of reams of various sizes and grades they had in stock and their valuation by cost. These records make it possible to trace the growth of Longman & Dickinson’s stationary business, which included the wholesale distribution of paper made at Dickinson’s mills alongside the output of other mills. The financial statements also include outstanding debts to Longman & Dickinson from their customers, the largest of whom were prominent London publishers and retail paper merchants.

Other aspects of Dickinson’s accounts have proven more challenging to interpret. Although the Company Accounts include valuations of the operating capital at Dickinson’s mills, they do not seem to proffer a clear record of Dickinson’s papermaking machines and other equipment. Dickinson’s Cash Books (D/EDi/1/3/9/1–16) and Bank Pass Books (D/EDi/1/3/13/1–4) are similarly vexing: they contain day-by-day accounts of Dickinson’s transactions, but most of the records only give a name and a numerical sum without further clarification. To be sure, these records are instructive, especially in the case of Dickinson’s large interest payments to Strahan on his loans and the mortgages of two of his mills. Although I expect to find much useful information in these records, it will take some effort for me to make the most of them. Another area in which HALS’s coverage proved somewhat mixed was in the documentation of Dickinson’s inventions. For instance, I had been intrigued to see that the collection included an 1804 manuscript of Dickinson’s patent for the cylinder-mould papermaking machine (D/EDi/1/4/1), but this turned out to be a fair copy of the patent: it contains some interesting marginal notes and revisions, but no original diagrams or other materials absent from the patent filing itself.

These mild frustrations were offset by troves of information that I had not expected to find on Dickinson’s partnerships, mill properties, and dealings with book tradespeople. Of these records, the most arduous to read were the many parchments containing deeds, copyholds, and leases for the various properties on which Dickinson operated, some of which contain detailed colour maps of the properties and their outlying areas. Before visiting HALS, I had also failed to appreciate the quantity and depth of Dickinson’s surviving correspondence, especially with his later partner Charles Longman (D/EDi/1/10/35) and with various of his customers in the book trade. In one particularly instructive 1818 letter to Lepard & Smith apologizing for delays in the manufacture of post printing paper (sheet size c. 19 × 15 in), Dickinson gives one of the clearest statements of the productive capacity of one of his cylinder machines: “the machine . . . turns out full 300 reams per week.” (D/EDi/1/10/34).

In addition to Dickinson’s records, HALS also proved to hold other materials relevant to the history of early machine-made paper. The most important materials I found were a collection of business records from Henry Fourdrinier, whose entrepreneurship of the Fourdrinier papermaking machine helped to spur Dickinson’s invention of the cylinder-mould machine. Besides housing Fourdrinier’s letters to Christopher Thomas Tower, who leased him Frogmore Mill (80623–80690), HALS also holds a complete inventory of Frogmore’s machines and equipment prepared by the engineer Bryan Donkin in 1810 (80856). For the purposes of my monograph, this discovery was a welcome surprise. Besides clarifying the relationship of the Fourdrinier family’s manufacturing operations to their stationery and patent business, these records offer a rare glimpse of Henry Fourdrinier in his own words, outside of the ponderous legal proceedings that followed from his financial ruin in 1810.

I would like to reiterate my thanks to the Willison Trust, whose generosity has helped me immensely during my transition from graduate school to professional scholarship. When the Trust accepted my application during the last weeks of my doctoral studies, I had not yet conducted any sustained archival research apart from consulting microfilm reproductions. Having completed my project, I feel far more confident in my ability to make independent use of primary sources. For the purposes of my monograph, the research I have conducted at HALS will furnish material for two chapters: one on the Longman-Strahan Dickinson triumvirate, and another discussing the entrepreneurial contexts of Dickinson’s and Fourdrinier’s inventions. My analysis of Dickinson’s mills has also provided crucial context for a separate project in analytical bibliography, for which I am measuring variations in the machine-web seam marks left on printing paper that Dickinson sold to Longman. I hope that the scholarship I am able to write thanks to the Trust’s grant will help to advance book historians’ understanding of the interactions between the book manufacture and publishing during a period of rapid change in the British public’s engagement with print.

Reports from 2020 Projects

Please note that, because of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 and its aftermath, those holding grants for 2020 were faced with many and continuing problems. For this reason, some of the reports below are interim ones.

Hyei Jin Kim, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

‘The World According to PEN and UNESCO: Literature as Patrimony and Property from 1920s to the Present’.

In January 2020, the Willison Foundation Trust generously provided me with a grant to visit the UNESCO Archives housed in its headquarters in Paris and I was able to conduct two weeks of research here in late February 2020. The main Archives hold documents produced before 1966, including those pertaining to the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in the 1920s and 1930s; Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME), and UNESCO Preparatory Commissions in the 1940s. The Annex Archives, in contrast, hold documents between 1967 and the present. As the Annex Archives were open only in the mornings and by appointment, I spent the mornings in the Annex and afternoons in the main Archives. I examined mainly the correspondence files (divided into three series), publication files, and UNESCO’s own printed collections held in its Library. Except for the publications in the Library, the files were all individually labelled by their subject and for this reason I spent some time looking through the card catalogues and compiling a long list of relevant materials. I am grateful to the archivists, who kindly assisted me in searching the printed catalogues and online databases to locate the exact files I wished to consult. Overall, I did not have much difficulty accessing the material; however, there were a handful of files that were inexplicably missing or unfortunately destroyed by fire, while the documents dated after 1999 were still under embargo. I shall detail three select findings, namely on translation, literary publications, and PEN International.

1. Translations

I initially indicated in my application that I wished to consult materials on UNESCO’s book and translation programmes throughout the 20^th century, including its efforts to promote the Universal Copyright Convention. When I consulted the folders related to copyrights, it quickly became clear that these consisted mainly of administrative and/or technical documents that were largely irrelevant to my research. Instead, I was intrigued by the documents of the IIIC (those that have not been digitised on UNESCO Archive’s website), CAME, and Preparatory Commissions that recorded various projects promoting translated books between 1922 and 1946, the most notable of which were the IIIC’s Ibero-American and Japanese Collections published in the 1930s. The entire collections were available in the UNESCO Library and these books provided a useful comparison with UNESCO’s own Collection of Representative Works and insights into its early history. While many of the early ideas did not come to fruition, these were significant findings for my thesis as they illustrated the origins of UNESCO’s book programmes and, more broadly, the intricate connections between these entities and their successor, which are not widely explored in critical studies. Discovering this early history enabled me to trace the organisation’s own intellectual history and more fully to understand its central ideal that promoted translated books as a means of mutual understanding and world peace.

The Archives also held considerable materials on UNESCO translation programmes that were active from 1950s onwards. I was familiar with the early stages of the Collection of Representative Works, which translated literatures around the world mainly into English and French, but I could not find much information about the project in its later years and hoped to discover how it changed (or did not change). I was thus delighted to find many correspondence files and other documents in the Annex Archives that revealed the project’s increasingly complex inner workings. For instance, the project on the one hand endeavoured to expand its geographical reach in the 1970s and 1980s but on the other resisted modifying its original policy. This tension was soon increased by significant budget cuts. I was equally delighted to find many folders on the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (ICPHS), one of UNESCO’s own NGOs, which provided valuable information not only on the role of ICPHS but also on the actual makings of the Collection in the later years. I unexpectedly came across some files on UNESCO’s literacy projects wherein the organisation produced reading materials, including the literary ones, for its member countries via translation. While these literacy projects were by no means specific to literature, I gained a better sense of UNESCO’s overall translation programmes that ranged from producing booklets for the ‘new literates’ to publishing books for more educated readers. Overall, these materials answered my numerous questions about the project and confirmed that the Collection indeed remained as the literary translation project throughout the 20^th century, this despite the financial difficulties and the organisation’s increasing interest in literacy and cultural development.

2. Literary Publications

The UNESCO Library holds most of, if not all, the physical copies of the Collection and other literary publications, many of which are not easily available in other libraries. Using this vast resource, I was able to examine the paratexts, including the book covers, blurbs, prefaces, and/or forewords, of various books from the Asian and the European Series, and study how these books were circulated to English-speaking readers, mainly in Britain and the United States. While the designs were vastly different depending on the publisher, the paratexts generally did not mention the name ‘UNESCO’ in an explicit manner, indicating American and British commercial publishers’ cautious approach to presenting books sponsored by the (Western) multistate body.

The Archives’ publication files further complemented these investigations. The Archives kept a number of files on the books published by UNESCO or jointly with external publishers and, while a handful of files were missing or lost, I was delighted to find some publication data about the Collection as this information was not easily available, and could only be speculated on. The data I gathered included contracts, copyright arrangements, royalty payments and, on occasions, sales figures, which showed the actual outcomes and reception of these publications. Except for a few bestsellers, the books did not seem to be popular or as widely circulated as I had assumed, providing a new insight into the reality and afterlife of the Collection in the international book market.

3. PEN International

The files on PEN International, the second organisation central to my overall thesis, were very illuminating. There were only a few relevant documents in the 1940s and 1950s, which were scattered across different folders and thus difficult to track down. Those from 1960s onwards, however, were substantial and organised by date. There was not as much information about PEN’s literary publications as I had hoped but the files instead illustrated a rich, entangled history of the two organisations, ranging from their numerous collaborations, failed projects, debates, and conflicts. While it is difficult to summarise the findings of this considerable and varied collection, it primarily showed how the differences between a non-governmental organisation and a multistate body greatly impacted their collaboration in promoting and publishing literary translations. UNESCO and PEN each had their own ideas of the nation, state, language, and literature, which at times came into conflict and (unexpectedly) shaped the final result of their cooperative programmes. The constant negotiations over the subventions for literary projects further showed how the two organisations influenced, or attempted to influence, each other in making their own versions of world literature. The files overall provided detailed insights into UNESCO’s relations with PEN, which gradually evolved from simple collaborations to a dynamic and at times (in)tense partnership, and various translation initiatives that reflected and addressed the broader debates on decolonisation, cultural developments in the so-called ‘Third World’, and even literacy.

This invaluable, in-depth research would not have been possible without the generous grant from the Willison Foundation Trust. The materials I gathered from this trip significantly improved and expanded my doctoral thesis; I wrote a new chapter that examined the heritage of UNESCO’s book and translation projects. I am currently working on another chapter about UNESCO’s complex relations with PEN. I have as well revised and updated the pre-existing chapters on the Collection based on this new research. I also relied on these new materials for my conference paper, which I presented at ‘Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture’, a conference that was unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic but revived in a digital format in August 2020.

Professor Rachael King University of California, Santa Barbara

‘Improving Literature: The Textual Forms of Eighteenth-Century Progressive Thought’.

Interim report provided 10^th November 2022.

In August 2022, I was able to complete the archival research that had been postponed since August 2020 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. I travelled to Oxford and Cambridge to conduct research at the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library. During this trip, I undertook archival research for Chapter Four of my in-progress monograph, Improving Literature: Media, Environments, and the Eighteenth-Century Improvement Debate. This chapter, ‘Keeping an Account: Improving Women and the Spaces of Self-Improvement’, examines how the debate on what constituted ‘improving literature’ for women highlighted the material forms in which women wrote and read. The archival research for this chapter discusses pocket diaries, a hybrid manuscript-print genre that encouraged women to keep an account of their daily activities with blank spaces for entering expenses and memoranda. I argue that this form explicitly supported conservative emphasis on women’s ‘improvement’ while implicitly offering a space for subversion of those standards.

Both the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library hold examples of pocket diaries that provided valuable support for my argument. At the Bodleian, I viewed the more than two dozen pocket diaries of Julia and Anne Woodforde, which span the 1830s to 1870s. These diaries feature two sets of handwriting, one of which uses the diary for its usual purpose of recording social occasions and the other of which uses it to keep a gardening calendar. They also show how people would switch between different diary titles, as the sisters did not purchase a particular diary each year but alternated between Rees’ Improved Diary or Memorandum Book, Pennys’ Annual London Diary and Almanack, Poole’s Select Pocket Remembrancer, The Ladies’ Pocket Book, and other titles. Some of the diaries, such as Marshall’s Ladies Fashionable Repository, include fashion engravings. At the Bodleian, I also viewed a printed Almanach de Lausanne, which the owner had used to keep a diary of travels in Europe, and William Stukeley’s notebooks, which he also entered on blank pages of printed almanacs. These diaries help me show how users turned printed annual books to their own purposes.

At Cambridge University Library, I also viewed diaries and journals, including Quaker teenager Mary Howard’s copy of The Minor’s Pocket Book, for the Youth of Both Sexes from 1813, in which Howard created her own symbol system to track her progress in reading as well as her continuing inability to live up to her own standards. In addition, I examined a handwritten book titled Writing and Arithmetic with Merchants-Accompts, an elaborate workbook mimicking print for the study of handwriting and penmanship exercises. Although it is directed to merchants, the book is inscribed ‘Rachell Tapper Her Book’. These materials will be crucial in bringing actual women’s diaries into conversation with the advice of conduct literature as well as proto-feminist responses in the later eighteenth century. The Willison Trust Fellowship allowed me to fund travel to England to complete this research as well as to begin writing the chapter, which is now about 50 percent drafted.’

Suzan Alteri, Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature – Special and Area Studies Collections University of Florida .

‘Guiding Science: Women-Authored Science Books for Children, 1790-1890’.

Interim Report

I was able to complete the first of my proposed research trips to the UK in late February 2020 just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. During this trip, I was able to visit five different archives to collect and analyse documents relating to the following writers: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson, Mary Pilkington, Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Lee, Maria Hack, and Mary Somerville. From these initial sources, I have been able to ascertain two networks of women writers. Those connected to social circles of Maria Edgeworth, Mary Somerville, and John Herschel, and women writers linked through the Society of Friends active around the London area. This last network is of particular interest because it connects women who were aware of each other’s work though the Society rather than through personal friendships or correspondence. Barbauld connects through both networks, but it appears that she is the only link between the two. By studying the correspondence and notebooks of Mary Somerville, Maria Edgeworth, and Priscilla Wakefield, I was also able to identify the patterns of scientific research undertaken to write their books, as well as their reliance on connections to scientists to review manuscripts and offer scientific advice.

In addition to the research and writing networks above, I was also able to work in-depth with the Royal Literary Fund papers at the British Library. The case files of two writers – Mary Pilkington and Sarah Wilkinson – from the late eighteenth century reflect the perilous life of a female author who is unmarried and makes her primary income from writing. Both writers wrote many heartbreaking tales to the Royal Literary Fund for subsistence while trying to finish a number of manuscripts for publishers. The files of later nineteenth century writers, such as Agnes Giberne, illustrate progress made both by science and children’s writing through the intervention of Lord Balfour, then Lord of the Treasury.

The onset of the pandemic made further research trips impossible. Currently I am working on an article relating to my findings from the Royal Literary Fund papers. I have been able, from this early research, to update and significantly revise seven biographies of women writers who are part of the Guiding Science project. The chaotic academic environment in the US due to the pandemic meant that progress was slow.

Once international travel resumes, I hope to complete my research trips funded from this generous grant and submit a manuscript for publication to the Elements imprint at Cambridge University Press. I will be able to update the Trustees as to further progress made on the project and with dates for further research.

 

Professor Nicholas Mason, Brigham Young University

‘The literary periodicals of Britain’s Romantic age’.

In late 2019 I was awarded a generous fellowship from the Willison Trust to conduct research for an ambitious new history I am writing on the literary periodicals of Britain’s Romantic age. As outlined in my fellowship application, my original plan was to use funding from this award to help pay for trips to the Newberry Library in Chicago and the National Library of Scotland during the summer of 2020. But as COVID lead to travel restrictions and the closure of most major archives through the latter part of 2021, I requested and received permission from the Willison Trust to extend my timeline for using this award through the end of 2022.

In the interim, I used a small portion of the fellowship to subscribe to the British Library’s British Newspaper Archive, a remarkable database that includes near-complete runs of all major newspapers from the period I am studying. While newspapers factor less centrally in the narrative I am telling than magazines, annuals, and quarterlies, this resource allowed me to develop a clearer timeline for when literary reviews, gossip, and news began appearing in both local and national newspapers.

By the time travel restrictions were lifted, I had found alternate ways to conduct much of the bibliographic research that I had intended to do at the Newberry. So, while on sabbatical at the start of this year, I instead made two separate trips to the UK, where I spent a total of three weeks at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Here is a brief review of the research I conducted at each site:

Wordsworth Trust (late February 2022): While my visit to Grasmere was primarily connected to entirely different research project on Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, I spent part of my time there studying manuscript letters in which members of the so-called ‘Wordsworth Circle’ comment on the reviewing practices of their age and register their opinions on Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and various other leading periodicals of the 1810s and 1820s.

National Library of Scotland (late March/early April 2022): Most of my time in Edinburgh was spent browsing the NLS’s remarkable archives of such major Romantic-era publishers of both books and periodicals as John Murray, Archibald Constable, and William Blackwood. Specifically, I focused on their ledgers (which provide crucial information on the economics of launching and maintaining a literary periodical) and correspondence (which are indispensable for understanding everything from relationships with contributors to back-room deals to secure favourable reviews to the grind of producing high-quality issues every month or quarter).

John Rylands Library (early April 2022): From Edinburgh I travelled to Manchester, where I spent two days at the Rylands studying the correspondence of Maria Jane Jewsbury, a young writer of the 1820s and 1830s who, before dying young, was considered one of Britain’s most promising ‘poetesses’ as a result of her prolific contributions to Manchester papers and literary annuals.

Neither of these trips across the ocean would have been feasible without the Willison Trust’s generosity, and I am immensely grateful to both Ian Willison for funding this award and the Foundation’s trustees for administering the programme. Although the pandemic postponed my research and, by extension, the projected completion date for this book (which now likely won’t be ready for submission until 2024 or 2025), the final product will be significantly better thanks to this funding, and I fully intend publicly to thank the Willison Trust in the acknowledgments page.

Ian Stuart Morrison, Libraries Tasmania

‘Completeness and Authenticity in Early Twentieth-Century Book Collecting’.

This project grew from my research into the Allport Library’s copy of The Description of a Voyage of Certaine Ships of Holland into the East Indies (1598). (‘A Description of a Voyage: The “Allport” Copy of STC 15193’, Script & Print 44.2 (2020): 69-89; and ‘An Addition to a Description: Further Notes on John Wolfe’s Houtman Narratives, STC 15193 and STC 11747’, Script & Print 45.2 (2021): 105-111.) That volume is ‘completed in facsimile’ and I became interested in larger questions: how were facsimiles made? How common was the practice? How long did it continue? What effect did it have on the desirability of the book so ‘completed’?

To clarify the boundaries: this project focusses on the practice of completing printed books in facsimile. It does not explore the practice of repairing manuscripts by inking in missing or damaged letters. Nor does it address commercial publication of facsimile reproductions of entire works. There are instances of facsimile publishing that shed light on the practice of completing in facsimile, but they are fundamentally different activities. A commercial reproduction involves making multiple copies, with all the attendant marketing and publicity. ‘Completing in facsimile’ is generally done to one particular faulty copy.

There are two main strands to my research: an examination of the records of the leading British bookseller Maggs Brothers, and an analysis of booksellers’ catalogues from the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis of booksellers’ catalogues is ongoing. Some suggestive patterns are emerging but it is too early to report in detail.

Maggs records from 1914 through to 1978 are held in the British Library. Funding from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust and Tasmania’s State Library and Archive Trust enabled me to spend a block of weeks working through them. I samplied files at intervals from 1914 through to 1950. This paper is my first attempt at digesting findings from that research.

1. ‘Everything that a flower should have’

A little way into my time at the British Library, I opened a file that presented a startlingly apposite metaphor.

On 30 September 1926, Liverpool businessman Leslie Fairrie wrote to Maggs:

I shall be greatly obliged if you can assist me in tracing an old story.

An Eastern potentate had among his subjects some wise men of exceptional wisdom, and some artificers of exceptional skill. Working together they produced a bouquet of artificial flowers so wonderful in texture, colour, perfume, and everything that a flower should have, that they regarded it as impossible to differentiate between them and the flowers they had imitated….

They took the real and the artificial bouquets to their king, told him what they had done, and asked him which was which.

He took a bouquet in each hand, and going to that corner of the palace gardens which was under the care of the chief Bee-Keeper, he planted them in one of the flower-beds …. Soon the bees came and hovered round them both, but only into the flowers of one bouquet did they creep in search of honey. ‘There,’ said the King, ‘is your answer’.

(BL Add MS 89311/1/546)

2. How and when were facsimiles made?

In the mid nineteenth century the finest facsimiles were made by hand, a process involving tracing another copy. Photography was used as early as the 1850s, and by the end of the century was capable of results equal or superior to all but the most accomplished hand facsimilist. (David McKitterick, Old Books and New Technologies, CUP, 2013; Nicolas Barker, Forgery of Printed Documents, Ancora, 2016; Sarah Werner, “Pen Facsimiles of Early Print” https://collation.folger.edu/2013/05/pen-facsimiles-of-early-print/.)

From the mid-1920s to the early 1950s Maggs worked with Riviere and Son, bookbinders, and the Courier Press, Leamington Spa, printers and engravers. Other firms appeared occasionally, but Riviere and the Courier Press were regulars. No single document sets out the process in detail, but piecing together individual comments in various letters a fairly clear picture emerges.

The first step was to photograph an original, usually in the British Museum. From this, the printer made a block. Maggs supplied paper matching as closely as possible the original. The book to be completed was also delivered to the printer, enabling them to work to the exact page dimensions and ensure that the colour of the paper matched the original, dyeing it if necessary. The book with its new facsimile leaves would then go to the binder.

3. Restoration or sophistication?

From the mid-1920s through to the early 1950s, when Maggs were offered a book completed in facsimile they invariably rejected it. They had good reason. Even if a facsimile was of an insignificant element, the aggrieved buyer could and did return the book and expect a refund. The sums involved could be substantial, as when the Cambridge bookseller Heffer paid £86 for a first edition of Humphry Clinker, and within a fortnight sought to return it ‘on the grounds that the half-titles of two volumes are in facsimile and that the other appears to have been substituted from another edition’. Heffer had purchased the book, presumably for a client, at a Sotheby’s sale; Maggs were liable because they had catalogued the books. (Sotheby to Maggs 13 Nov 1928, Add MS 89311/1/639.)

Analysis of dealers’ catalogues is so far tending to support the hypothesis that books completed in facsimile were becoming less attractive to wealthy collectors by the late 1920s, and continued to decline in value over the following decades.

This eminent, long-established, widely respected bookseller actually completed books in facsimile. Usually, Maggs would offer a recent or prospective purchaser the chance to have an incomplete book completed in facsimile; in most instances the book was exceedingly rare. When it was unlikely that another copy could be obtained, and the book was sought as much for its information content as its iconic status, the argument for completion became compelling. In 1951, Ken Maggs wrote to a client in Uruguay:

I have acquired recently a copy of the first edition of Buenos Ayres Truth and Reason 8vo 1807. I have had the second edition once in my life time but this is the first time I have had the original issue. Unfortunately, the last page which only contains a few words of print is missing and I am having it replaced by an exact facsimile, in fact, I doubt the difference will be discernible. (Maggs to Alberto Dodero, 8 June 1951, uncatalogued file 1683 Part 1.)

4. Relics and replicas: instruction and wonder in public collections

Museums have long used replicas in their displays, to protect precious original artefacts, and to illustrate and instruct. But museums also display relics, ancient objects that offer a tangible connection with another time, and instil a sense of wonder. The British Museum’s Sutton Hoo display includes a reconstruction of the shield, a replica that both improves understanding and enhances the wonder of the original artefacts displayed alongside it. Many of the V&A’s replicas, especially of medieval artefacts, have acquired such a patina of age that they now have the status of original artefacts themselves, albeit illustrating a different story from the one they were created to tell. Likewise, the facsimile leaves in the Allport Description of a Voyage perform their original function of filling a gap in the text, and also have their own story.

This is not to deny the importance of distinguishing original elements from later interpolations. The stakes can be high, for example the forgery of early editions of Galileo and Columbus in the early 21^st century (Nick Wilding, ”Forging the Moon”, Papers of the American Philosophical Society 160.1 (2016): 37-72). My point is simply that every element of a book, every accretion, every loss, is part of its history. There are so many situations where a complete book is preferable to an incomplete one that the fastidious collector’s horror of facsimiles is really quite odd. If you want a first edition of Humphry Clinker because you are working on a critical edition, say, you can probably cope with a replica half-title. Maggs’ records show that by the 1920s, a mainstream commercial printer was able to produce facsimiles of such fidelity that the question of their ‘authenticity’ quickly becomes mired in abstruse philosophical arguments.

One last thought. Which is more authentic: a facsimile drawn by hand, or one produced by a complex industrial process? In the Treasures Gallery at the British Library I saw many wonder-inducing objects, not least a Shakespeare first folio. Intriguingly imperfect: the title page was supplied in hand-drawn facsimile, doubtless an accurate representation, but – perhaps it was the lighting in the gallery – somehow seeming to lack the density and gravitas of print. Yet in that ‘imperfect’ copy there is a work of art executed hundreds of years ago, a loving attempt to complete a famous book.

Reports from 2019 Projects

Ms Trude Dijkstra (PhD candidate in Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam)

The Production and Reception of Chinese medicine in Early Modern Europe.

A grant of £2890 generously provided by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust allowed me to conduct a six-week research stay in London in November and December 2019, primarily to visit the Wellcome Institute and Library. The project towards which the grant contributed examines how the culture of print affected the introduction of Chinese medicine in early-modern Europe. It examines how the print-revolution met the until then unknown Chinese world and its medicine in the Dutch Republic. The objective is to analyse how producers of print influenced the transmission of medicinal information, and how readers received and applied this new knowledge. Through comparative analysis, this project assesses long-term developments and effects (1595-1750) of publishing strategies, marketing-structures, and the reciprocal relationship between printwork and its intended audience(s). Through systematic analysis of textual transmission in books, newspapers, journals, and pamphlets – together with handwritten ‘recipe-books’ – this research gauges the importance of authors, translators, printers, and publishers in shaping the ‘medical consumption’ of China, and how these representations influenced contemporary cultural and scientific discourses.

Over the course of six weeks I daily visited the Wellcome Institute and Library, the British Library St. Pancras, and/or the Warburg Institute to consult research materials, review literature, and discuss my findings and hypotheses with colleagues and peers. The Wellcome Institute explores ‘ideas about the connection between medicine, life and art’, focussing on the history of medicine in a broad sense. Its Library holds an extensive collection of unique materials. Most relevant for my purpose is their unrivalled collection of ‘receipt’ books, containing European recipes for medical (home) treatments. These show how literate Europeans incorporated Chinese medical ideas and products into pre-existing notions of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. These handwritten materials were supplemented by early modern newspapers, books, and learned journals held at the British Library, together illustrating the close connection between commercial goods arriving from Asia and their practical application in Europe. The book historical approach focussing on both manuscript and print therefore provided the ideal opportunity to study both production and reception of intercultural contacts between China and Europe during the early modern period.

To understand early modern representations of Chinese medicine, I aimed to analyse how texts are related to each other, and how the form in which texts and images are presented influenced the transmission of their content. The innovative character of this project lies in its pioneering a new focus on the materiality of the printed word, through an exploration of the influence of the form and presentation of printwork on the way in which knowledge about China was transmitted. This means that the proposed research methodology was highly interdisciplinary. I used a corpus of different Dutch text types on China, consisting of books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets. The concept of transtextual transmission, derived from literary theory, provided an analytical tool that guided the selection criteria for this corpus. This concept illuminates the relationship between early modern Dutch texts on China and other texts, and how these relationships affect contemporary resonance. The transtextual component was complemented by a focus on paratext – a concept derived from the discipline of book history – which refers to those elements that surround and frame the main text (title-page, illustrations, paper, typeface) together with elements outside of the text (private letters, public announcements, reviews). The resulting data were analysed using an imagological method, derived from the discipline of comparative literature, which studies the ideological circumstances and cultural conventions that determine the emergence of ethnic and national stereotypes. Here, the dynamic of the discourse itself is essential, regardless of whether the stereotype adequately reflects reality. Finally, this research integrates the imagological approach with the book historical concepts of sociology and socialisation of texts and the circuit of communication. Both account for the importance of authors, translators, printers, publishers, editors, illustrators, and booksellers in shaping the medical consumption of China.

The Willison Grant allowed me further to explore academic research in all its forms, and to share my findings and historical curiosity with a broad range of people, both inside and outside academia. Even before the start of my research visit, I was invited to present my findings at the monthly meeting of the Bibliographical Society of London. There I gave a lecture on Chinese medicine in printwork produced in the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth century, opening the door to a publication in the Oxford University Press peer-reviewed journal The Library. Furthermore, I have started working on a peer-reviewed article aimed at the BMGN Low Countries Historical Review (Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap). In the slightly longer term, the grant allowed me to work on a NWO-Rubicon Fellowship which will be submitted in spring 2020, not only as it provided the research foundation for this application but also because it helped me establish useful contacts in the Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Warburg Institute. In the long term, the Willison Grant works towards a NWO-Veni application (Spring 2021). While academic progress may often take place inside the mind, physical travel and the new insights and contacts acquired on the way are of equal importance. A six-week stay in London allowed me to attend lectures by world-renowned scholars, and it made contact with relevant researchers easier to achieve. My research stay at the world-renowned Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Warburg Institute generously funded by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust thereby helped me expand my international network, develop new (historical) insights, and aim at international collaboration and understanding as propagated by my intercultural research proposal.

Dr Shanti Graheli (Udine, and the University of Glasgow)

Making a Renaissance bestseller: The Orlando furioso and the marketplace of print.

Summary of activities and appraisal of outcomes

The Willison Trust award allowed me to make enormous steps forward in my wider project ‘Making a Renaissance bestseller: The Orlando furioso and the marketplace of print’. As proposed in my initial grant application, I spent two working weeks each in Ferrara (Biblioteca Ariostea), Venice (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana) and London (British Library), perusing some of the largest collections of Ariostean holdings worldwide. During these three visits, I was able to inspect around 250 copies of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and related texts (spin-offs, abridgements, continuations, translations and critical texts) – that is, well over a third of the entire corpus I have inspected so far in my project (631 copies in total). One or two copies turned out to be bibliographic ghosts.

My work is heavily based around the description of edition- and copy-related information, as well as photographic reproduction where allowed (this is not possible with some of the British Library strong room copies; further funding will include a small reproduction budget for such cases). This is always helpful in undertaking further comparative work across different collections in highlighting differences and similarities. The collections explored thanks to this award are prominent for the high proportion of unique or particularly rare editions; combined, they offer unparalleled access to the largest variety of editions worldwide and the ability to carry out internal comparisons. This represented the main strategic advantage to the proposed fieldwork, and indeed has yielded a significant body of new material towards my planned monograph on this topic, provisionally titled: A European Bestseller: The Orlando furioso and Its Readers. Nonetheless, full bibliographical descriptions of the editions were not possible to the extent that I would have hoped, as time was simply not enough. I continue to work with the extensive photographic evidence I have been able to collect, and I will possibly need brief follow-up visits to these collections before the conclusion of my project. These will be enormously facilitated by my existing work, and I will be able to target specific materials as opposed to the examination of tens of volumes each day.

Overall, the greatest gain of this research has been the examination and recording of copy-specific information. Even the most detailed catalogue entries cannot be a substitute for the first-hand inspection of materials; in this case, only a large-scale survey can provide the appropriate depth of detail, allowing to develop an awareness even for the least conspicuous features. The more I progress along this line of research, the more revealing the corpus appears to be. Copies are often inter-connected; or else, they display similar but polygenetic uses that highlight patterns of use and survival. My recording of patterns of conservation of individual copies, for example, has justified the time and effort required: for instance, there appeared to have been significant examples of tampering identified in all the most important collections. Many of these date to the nineteenth or early twentieth century, and will in themselves represent a useful point of discussion for the understanding of canonical texts in the antiquarian book trade.

The inspection of multiple copies of course is a strength of traditional bibliographic research. To my mind, it remains unrivalled as an instrument of enquiry, even though today’s research priorities do not make much provision for such a time- and resource-consuming activity. This makes a funder like the Willison Charitable Trust all the more important in this research climate, as it allows for this kind of research to thrive and continue to assert its own value. Many canonical texts have been investigated by means of a bibliographic census: Shakespeare’s First Folio, Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, or Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato are only some examples. The Orlando furioso itself has been investigated widely, with a punctual census of the definitive authorial version in the 1532 edition by Conor Fahy (1989) as well as a cumulative bibliography completed by Giuseppe Agnelli and Giuseppe Ravegnani in the 1930s. The latter was based on the collections of the Biblioteca Ariostea in Ferrara, one of the collections explored thanks to this grant.

In making budgetary considerations, I had given much thought to the possibility of restricting my own research uniquely to peripheral and less-trodden collections, as these more prominent ones have been described to some extent in the past, and are well known. Few assumptions could have been more misleading. The inspection of the materials book-in-hand contributed enormously to my own understanding and appraisal of the existing bibliographic resources in the field. While the work by Conor Fahy remains unrivalled and unchallenged by further examination of the same materials (which is in itself worth confirming, if we are to undertake rigorous bibliographic work and determine what former work can be trusted), understandably the same cannot be said for the older Annali delle edizioni Ariostee. This is particularly the case with copy-related information, which is a central element to my project, and was of little concern for the authors of the 1930s catalogue.

The comparative examination of the three repositories I visited with the support of the Willison Trust has also led me to achieve a deeper understanding of the long history of the Orlando furioso in modern collections. I expected this, though of course I could not anticipate the findings.

Many of the British Library copies are originally from the Grenville collection. The Grenville copies tend to be clean, having often been washed and rebound, and are unfortunately the least useful for work in provenance studies. Conversely, the best discovery of the entire project was made on another (non-Grenville) British Library copy, annotated by a near contemporary reader in English, French, and Italian, and offering a beautiful case study for the translingual uses of the poem. This copy will feature centrally in my monograph.

The majority of the Marciana holdings come from the private library of Apostolo Zeno (though many of these were not yet signalled in the library’s provenance database). These copies were not treated, given that they entered public hands before it became customary to use chemicals to remove marks by former owners, but they usually lost all evidence related to former bindings.

Most of the copies now in Ferrara were purchased under the stewardship of Giuseppe Agnelli (dates of purchase span between 1893 and 1933), in the effort to assemble a full collection and to compile the Annali delle edizioni Ariostee. These copies usually bear Agnelli’s own notes and occasionally a cutting from the catalogue where the copy had been offered, and sometimes bear the further trace of twentieth-century ‘patronage’ through ex-dono notes (e.g. by Tammaro De Marinis or Vittorio Cini). The Ferrara holdings make sense in the context of the regional pride of collecting Ariosto in his home region in Italy. Agnelli search catalogues and prowled auction sales for the best part of forty years during his buying campaign. Compared with the collections in nearby cities, the copies in Ferrara tend to be complete, and many are unique survivors, making it the best collection in the world in which to carry out edition-specific research.

Concluding thoughts

As ever when employing a bibliographic census as a means of investigation, final outcomes include both expected and unexpected information. The comparative element intrinsic to a census is in itself an instrument of learning. The transversal insights I developed thanks to this award provided useful considerations about the collecting patterns of the Orlando furioso beyond the Renaissance, and the formation of collections in later centuries subject to the trends of the antiquarian trade.

In my work, I usually focus on the intersection between cultural, material, and economic factors that led to the production, dissemination, and consumption of books in the Renaissance. In fact, this combination of influences continues in the afterlife of books, albeit in new forms. Canonical texts such as the Orlando furioso, which enjoyed continuous interest since their production, allow and demand that we continue our tracing of these expressions over a long period. The critical examination of extant copies naturally requires an appreciation of trade and collecting practices across the board and over time.

My monograph will contribute to the history of publishing, learning strategies, and reading, and the afterlife of texts. It will propose a holistic interpretive perspective that brings these factors together into a case study of bibliographic enquiry.

Dr Anne Marie Hagen (Associate Professor of English, the Norwegian Defence University College, Oslo, Norway)

Reading Hygiene: Health, Print Culture and the Child Reader in Britain, 1880-1915.

The project investigates how scientific, medical and medico-pedagogical ideas influenced the field of children’s books in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is particularly focused on the impact that the widespread concern that print was damaging to children’s eyesight had on the design and publication of reading material for children. My proposal to the Trust involved visiting UK archival collections and examining published printed material available in UK libraries in order to situate key actors in the debate and establish their role in this print culture.

The primary material I investigated consisted mostly of printed publications by and for school medical officers, ophthalmologists, public health specialists, teachers, psychologists, publishers, printers, and the professional bodies that furthered their interests: textbooks, handbooks and manuals, government reports, trade and professional periodicals. In addition, I examined material in four archival collections: the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) collection; the Royal Society for Public Health; the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene and Society of Public Health; and the National Union of Teachers donation to the Institute of Education, UCL. Building on my previous research into this topic, I had prior to the start of my trip selected key years for closer attention during this research trip, which proved to be a useful strategy, although my enquiries did not always meet with success (which was to be expected). Further, the secondary literature on organisations such the BAAS, and on topics like psychology of reading, printing and typography at the Wellcome Library and the British Library was a valuable addition to my project that I would not have been able to access without this award.

My first stop was the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) collection, which is held on deposit at the Bodleian Library Oxford. This archival collection proved, as expected, to be a rich resource. I have been able to establish how specific topics of interest rose to prominence within the BAAS more generally and within Section I (Physiology) and Section J (Education) specifically. Debates over whether education could be considered science were particularly illuminating. The internal correspondence has further shed light on how Section J promoted its work on eyesight, which led to the publication in 1913 of The Report on the Influence of Schoolbooks upon Eyesight, to external stakeholders such as publishers and local education authorities (LEAs), such as the London County Council. In addition, material relating to the BAAS yearly meetings, each year in a different location: a vast machinery that required a year’s preparation, was revealing for insight into how the BAAS impacted on local economies, and the press coverage of these meetings, preserved in the collection, also suggest the influence of this organisation on contemporary scientific debates.

At the Wellcome Library and University College London, I examined the archives of the Royal Society for Public Health; the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene and Society of Public Health; and the National Union of Teachers donation to the Institute of Education, UCL. At the Royal National Institute for the Blind, there was no relevant information, something that was most useful to have confirmed, as I could then focus on other sources. The NUT donation yielded useful information regarding school medical inspections, but mostly my investigations into these collections confirmed the impression that the relevant discussions took place in the organisations’ outward-facing material such as The Schoolmaster and other professional periodicals.

These were examined at the Wellcome Library and the British Library and included The Schoolmaster, The School World, The Publishers’ Circular, The British Printer, and The Printer’s Register. Publications such as School Hygiene: A Monthly Review for Educationists and Doctors demonstrated the extent to which narratives of print and eyesight crossed professional boundaries. Being on site at the Wellcome Library and the British Library, I was also able to access certain digitised resources such as The Lancet, which reported extensively on the subject during the period I am researching. Official reports such as the London County Council annual reports and the annual report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education were likewise extremely instructive. Through my examinations of these materials, a clearer picture has emerged of the driving forces and influential individuals in this debate. Of course, the search did not always run smoothly; volumes and sometimes entire years of periodicals turned out to be missing, misplaced or otherwise unavailable, and I am extremely grateful for the expert help of the librarians at the Wellcome Library and the British Library in my search. Delays and the vast amount of material I found on school hygiene made me decide that, due to time constraints, it would be most prudent to focus on publications on school hygiene instead of examining schoolbooks from this period as originally intended.

At the Wellcome and the BL, I examined thirty-nine ‘school hygiene’ handbooks, with more waiting to be researched via the digital collections to which I now have access via the Wellcome Trust. Studying these handbooks has made the key actors in the debate emerge more clearly, and through comparing intertextual references, citations, discussions etc., the question of eyesight and print as it evolved during the period in question has become much more firmly established. To be able to examine print copies of these books has also been valuable because of the ownership history of some of the books, which turned out to have belonged to significant individuals such as Dr. James Kerr, a prominent figure in school medicine, or were included in the libraries of organisations and institutions which participated in the debate.

My visit to the St. Bride Foundation Library is evidence that serendipity plays a not insignificant role in archival and library research. While I had initially approached the library with a question about one well-known printer, I instead ended up focusing, thanks to the encyclopedic knowledge of the librarian, on amateur printers. The periodical he located illustrated the extent to which the question of print and eyesight permeated the print and medical communities in Britain also at local, amateur level.

While there are a few digital resources that remain to be examined, the majority of primary research is now concluded, and I will shortly be able to start sharing my findings. The results of my research will be written up for publication in a monograph that extends my doctoral and post-doctoral research on publishing for children. My work will advance research in the history of reading by outlining evidence for ‘reading hygiene’ as a topic of wide concern that influenced medicine, teaching, printing and publishing for children.

Mr Matthew Payne (Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey)

The books of Robert Fabyan (c.1450-1513).

My study aims to explore the circumstances of production, the wider context, and the reception of the two surviving texts of the London alderman and chronicler, Robert Fabyan (c.1450-1513). These are the Newe cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce, better known as Fabyan’s Chronicle, and the second half of the Great Chronicle of London. These works provide fundamental pieces of primary source material for 15th century England, as well as making significant contributions to, and developments in, the chronicle form, particularly the particular genre of London chronicle which became widespread in the 15th century. The particular context and source of his works have largely been overlooked.

As part of this work, my research has also explored the early reception of Robert Fabyan’s work. This has focused on the first two editions of Fabyan’s Chronicle, that printed by Richard Pynson in 1516, and that by William Rastell in 1533. I have also tried to examine surviving copies of the books that he himself used as source material, in the hope of adding to the discovery of his own (heavily annotated) copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle. Unfortunately, no further copies of books from his own library have been uncovered. Nonetheless, the process of inspecting as many copies of the Pynson and Rastell editions as possible has enabled me to produce a survey of all known surviving copies of these two editions, in the UK, North America, and Japan, which focuses on provenance, annotations, and evidence of use.

This survey has revealed the survival of seventeen copies of the Pynson edition (plus one leaf at the Huntington Library), and forty-six copies of the Rastell edition. There may, of course, be more copies still unidentified in private hands. Of the former, ESTC lists fifteen surviving copies. However, I have been able to show that some of these are listed in error: Glasgow does not hold one; and the Huntington copy is in fact only a single leaf. Copies missed include a private copy, recently sold in San Francisco, and now in the collection of a London bibliophile; more than one copy held at the Bodleian; an unknown copy at Somerville College, Oxford, and at Keio University in Tokyo. Of the 1533 edition, ESTC lists only twenty-seven. Those listed include errors: the copy at Trinity College Oxford is in fact a 1542 edition, with 1533 title pages (to both vols. 1 and 2) inserted. The survey has uncovered many previously-unknown copies: at Bowhill House in Scotland, the Spalding Gentlemen’s Cub in Lincolnshire, at Wells Cathedral, two copies at Chetham Library, and another at the Society of Antiquaries, an additional copy at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and other copies at The Schulich-Woolf Rare Book Collection at Queen’s University in Ontario; Urbana-Champagn, University of Illinois; as well as important examples in private hands. Many library catalogues are being updated as a result of this.

I have now, thanks to the generosity of the Willison Trust, been able to examine a large proportion of these copies. This has revealed a considerable amount of information on the early ownership of the books, their use and circulation, prices of the books, and many other subjects of interest to my study. Examples of the most interesting copy-specific discoveries made include the class of readers of the 1516 edition. Early owners included Sir Thomas Knyvet (1539-1618) of Ashwellthorpe (Cambridge University Library); John Lingham, clerk to Capt William Martin, and author of A True Relation of all Captains and Liuetenants as have been killed in the Low Countries, 1584 (Lichfield Cathedral); Sir George Lawson (c.1493-1543), receiver general and treasurer for the garrison of Berwick (1517-43), Resident of York by 1523, alderman of York from 1527 (Somerville College, Oxford); William Wynter, (d.1589), naval administrator (Bodleian Library); John Hall (d.1528), of Kynnersley, Shropshire, grocer and merchant of the Staple, and father of the London chronicler Edward Hall (Beinecke); William Sulyard (d.1540) lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn (Princeton); and Sir Anthony St Leger (c.1496-1559), Lord Deputy of Ireland (private ownership). This class of owner, their geographical spread, and the notes they made on their own copies, give a much greater understanding of how this edition was received and used. For example, it is notable that a large proportion of the owners were of military or legal backgrounds.

The 1533 Rastell copies have also provided a huge amount of information. For example, the previously-unknown copy at Bowhill contains very extensive early annotations and indexing by someone (unnamed) with very keen antiquarian interests. Other copies display similar antiquarian interest, although the owners of these copies are usually anonymous. I still hope to identify the hands at work. In addition, the 1530s binding of the King’s Cambridge copy by John Reynes, who went on to publish the third 1542 edition of Fabyan’s Chronicle, precisely matches the binding of a similar copy in Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. This appears to supply evidence of his close association with, or interest in, the work long before he jointly published the third edition. Ownership marks are also of enormous interest. The research has revealed the copy owned by John Bourchier (1499-1561), Earl of Bath, styled Lord FitzWarin 1536-9 (Society of Antiquaries); that by William Fairfax, c.1504-1558, of Steeton, High Sheriff of the County of Yorkshire 1535 & 1540, and then by his son Thomas Fairfax, who inscribed an interesting poem into it (Balliol College Oxford); the book owned by the Henrician courtier John Poyntz (c.1485 – 1544), of Alderley, Gloucestershire (Wells Cathedral); Henry Wotton, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, 1556, Greek reader, Fellow of the College of Physicians (UCL); William Wytherton (BA 1525, Proctor 1536) of Magdalen College Oxford (Magdalen); John Scory (d.1585), bishop of Hereford, English courtier and politician (Ann Arbor); and Mountfort(h) family (Manor House of Kilnhurst, in Rawmarsh in the West Riding, near Doncaster (private ownership). This suggests a more scholarly or aristocratic readership, presumably reflecting the growth in private libraries and antiquarian interests. All of these details are of considerable value, and have been incorporated into my text, as well as being fully captured in the survey.

In addition, I have been able to inspect closely the surviving manuscripts of Fabyan’s own work. These are remarkably complete in their survival. Apparently holograph manuscripts survive at Holkham Hall, the British Library (the two parts of Fabyan’s Chronicle); and at London Metropolitan Archives (the Great Chronicle of London); and what appear to be Pynson’s working copies, used for marking up the first edition, at the Houghton Library, Harvard, and York Minster Library. A close examination of all of these manuscripts has enabled me to draw up arguments on how the texts were used, circulated, and printed.

I am profoundly grateful to the Willison Trust for enabling me to undertake this research, which I hope will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the circulation and reception of these late medieval texts, to early 16th century book ownership more broadly, and to the placing of, and changes to, the chronicle tradition in London and wider in the late medieval period.

Stephan Pigeon (Ph.D. candidate in History at McGill University)

News Copyright in the British Press at the Turn of the 20th Century.

Overview

In my application to the Willison Trust, I explained the importance of research on the political and legal consequences of widespread reprinting in the newspaper press and its impact on the media landscape in Britain throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After my successful research trip to the United Kingdom, I continue to approach this project through the life and letters of Charles Frederic Moberly Bell.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the Willison Trust for granting this research funding. The funding I received was instrumental in beginning this second book project and advancing my research agenda.

Libraries and Archives Visited

• British Library, London
  • Parliamentary Archives, London
  • News UK Archive, Enfield
  • National Archives, Kew
  • Weston Library, Oxford
  • National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
  • The Keep (University of Sussex), Brighton

Summary of Work Undertaken

This research trip was about tracking down the letters of C. F. Moberly Bell. I also investigated the personal papers of some of the journalists he employed as members of the Foreign Correspondence Department at The Times and some related material published in periodicals. As an understudied figure in media history and British history more generally, there is no comprehensive list of where Bell’s correspondence is located and most of the collections holding materials related to Bell do not provide summaries. Moreover, photography of these research materials is generally not permitted. I was aware of these details as I planned my trip, and as I expected, my time abroad was primarily occupied with the work of reading and transcribing. I cannot overstate how important this time was to getting better acquainted with Bell as the focus of this study. The materials I consulted at the British Library, the Parliamentary Archives, the National Library of Scotland, and The Keep in Brighton were essential to understanding how Bell discussed and presented the issue of copyright to his colleagues and peers. Not all of the materials I consulted were directly relevant to my research, but it was necessary to verify their contents. Taking advantage of this time to engage fully with the archive materials,  helped me better understand Bell’s world, his way of thinking, and his personal networks.

The main challenge I faced was access. I was unable to examine the records for the Chartered Institute of Journalists, which are held in the organization’s private collection. I made several unsuccessful attempts to get in touch with the Institute. However, this was not a total loss. While this is a research avenue I would like to pursue in the future, not working with this collection allowed me to focus my mind entirely on material directly related to Moberly Bell.

I also had a limited amount of time at the News UK Archive, which only allows one researcher at a time and by appointment only. As a result of busy scheduling, I was permitted one week of research there. Nevertheless, this archive was extremely fruitful. It was here that I made my most important discoveries. I examined Bell’s personal papers and the managerial records for The Times. While Bell was one of the most vocal advocates for copyright in news between 1890 and 1911, as early as 1865 he had worked as an agent for The Times, shipping newspapers from across the British Empire to London. This was a major research development. In 1864, while he was working in the commercial shipping industry in Alexandria, Egypt, he contacted Mowbray Morris, then general manager of The Times, with a plan to receive newspapers and ship them on his commercial vessels. This replaced a much slower system in which newspapers traveled around the Cape of South Africa. While the technical aspects of this process are important, the correspondence and shipping logs reveal that Bell’s attitude towards the value and ownership of news had a much longer trajectory than I had first anticipated. Additionally, this material convinced me that the project should focus on how Bell responded to the absence of a copyright in news, rather than provide a more general history of news copyright in the British press. I now understand the development of the Foreign Correspondence Department at The Times in 1890 as a reaction to the existing laws and attitudes towards the circulation of news in the newspaper press. Bell decided to pursue exclusive information in the far-off corners of the globe that would have protection from unlicensed reprinting in the newspaper press.

My work at the National Archives was also especially productive. I examined a large amount of material from the Foreign Office’s collection of Lord Cromer’s papers in Egypt, including his correspondence with Bell. This material was essential to understanding the ways that Bell connected himself with influential men within the British empire and viewed the role of the newspaper press as informing Britain’s political and commercial interests.

Results and Next Steps

The research I conducted will continue to have significance in my scholarly output for the foreseeable future. It provides the foundation upon which I am developing my second book project. My intention is to examine Bell’s place in developing a political economy of news that shaped Britain’s perception of globalization and imperialism. I plan for the book to have two sections. The first will focus on 1865 to 1890. This section will center on Bell’s life in Egypt and examine the burgeoning work of foreign correspondence in the British newspaper press. It will pay particular attention to his work collecting and shipping newspapers on behalf of The Times and how he developed a reporting style that leveraged his personal and professional connections. The second will focus on 1890 to 1911. This section will explore Bell’s work as The Times’s general manager, how Bell developed the Foreign Correspondence Department, the journalists he employed in key centers of empire, and the types of news he encouraged them to collect.

In October 2019, I presented a paper at the Northeastern Conference for British Studies (NECBS), “C. F. Moberly Bell’s Pursuit for a Copyright in News, 1890-1911”, which relied heavily on materials examined during this trip.

Mr Matthew Wills (PhD candidate, Department of History, University of California, San Diego)

Mediating the Message: Book Culture and Propaganda in Mao’s China.

Funding from the Trust directly supported significant research that will appear in my doctoral dissertation due to be defended in June 2020. I intend to take the data on paper thickness and transform it into a research article separate from my final dissertation. As for the descriptive bibliography compiled during my research trip, this will form the basis of my post-dissertation project to catalogue modern Chinese propaganda. I plan for this catalogue to become an Open Access online resource incentivizing historians of modern China to look at printed sources in new ways.

The Trustees may also be interested to know that my broader work collecting modern Chinese propaganda (and cataloguing some of my collection) earned me first place in the 2019 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest run by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and the Library of Congress. My work at the Bodleian Library helped me sharpen the skills which I then used to write my winning collection essay and descriptive bibliography:

(https://www.abaa.org/images/newsletter_pdf/Wills_Matthew_first_prize.pdf)

Data Collection

Over my research period, I spent time in the Bodleian Library working with its collection of modern Chinese propaganda books. For each book – 38 in total – I compiled a descriptive bibliography of standard bibliographic information, collation, aesthetic design, printing techniques, notable production characteristics, and binding information. When I encountered designs or features not easily described, I took photographs to supplement my textual record. I also recorded 60 paper thickness readings using a micrometer for each title, sampling 6 pages and running the thickness test 10 times per page at random points on the paper. Finally, I made observations about the quality of the paper used in each title. Besides this work with primary sources, I also compared my observations with my findings from other copies of the same titles to investigate reveal discrepancies between titles (especially with respect to the printing process).
When testing the paper thickness in each title, I changed my data collection methodology. While still sampling randomly, I decided to measure six leaves per title from as many different signatures as possible rather than sticking with my initial decision to measure just two leaves. I chose to change my plan because it became clear that there could be significant paper thickness variation within titles, and so measurements of just two leaves might elide such variations. This was the right decision because I found notable variation in thicknesses within copies.

Bringing years of experience working with Chinese propaganda publications, nearly all the techniques acquired bore fruit. Having carefully studied editorial and printing manuals from Chinese publishers, I possessed the background knowledge required to identify and describe typefaces, printing methods and other bibliographic features. Investigating collation and binding, however, proved impossible at times because the Bodleian Library had rebound titles in hardcovers or had bound multiple titles together in larger volumes. In these instances, I could make few inferences. Sadly, the library does not keep records of how titles were originally bound, and titles were often rebound in ways that prohibited closer examination of the gutter or spine for clues.

Selected Findings

I expected to see significant variation in the quality of publications emerging from different geographic regions, but the Bodleian’s books show that geography cannot be treated as a guiding analytical category. Presses, even those in the most well-provisioned publishing cities, produced a range of items with their appearance and characteristics heavily dependent on idiosyncratic material and technical factors. Close observation unearthed some curious printing decisions indicative of work that was either rushed or poorly planned. In a selection of propaganda songs, for instance, I found variations in the sinkage applied at the beginning of each song, as well as differences in the width of the header margin. Individual songs often spilled over onto two pages but widowed lines or short blocks of text on the second page were equally common. This created oddly-spaced double-page spreads contravening the kind of balanced aesthetic publishers wanted typesetters to create. I took these features as evidence of typesetters working under pressure to set text and de-prioritize the experience of readers. At other times, I encountered pages printed off-horizontal and with significant blurring, both again indicative of propaganda printing gone awry.

In my proposal, I stated an interest in cross-country stereotyping as a method of replicating the same titles quickly in different areas. In comparing the Bodleian’s collections with other research data, I found no evidence of this. Further work is needed to establish how prolific stereotyping was and what kind of titles received this treatment.

Paper thickness data across the 38 titles sampled ranged from around 0.05mm to 0.1mm, and variations also appeared within copies. This data implies that paper production in Mao’s China lacked consistency, and this finding is significant because variable thicknesses would have created problems for calibrated printing machines. Variable thicknesses within volumes provides evidence for presses using paper from many papermills concurrently, rather than relying on a consistent supply from one or two providers. When partnered with archival evidence, this paints a picture of sporadic, atomized paper production and delivery rather than strong supply chains. In the future I would like to sample other copies of the same titles to draw an even more detailed picture of the paper used in one print-run. My work at the Bodleian, however, proved that sampling broadly across books yields statically meaningful data.

Finally, the books I sampled shows how leading was a publisher’s and typesetter’s first go-to tool for changing the appearance of books and distinguishing more important titles. The shape and styles of popular typefaces, including the Songti face, made the distance between lines crucial for shaping the legibility of a page. Many books displayed a standard leading to produce well-balanced pages, and these acted as foils for titles where larger or smaller leading created pages noticeably brighter or cramped. This finding accords with other research I have conducted using my own book collections in the past year.

Broader Implications

Firstly, the most immediate implication of my research with the Bodleian’s collections is also the most ignored: propaganda publishers were more similar to than different from 20th century publishers in other markets and contexts. My observations bear out the idea that a range of editorial, design, and production decisions lay behind every title, with publishers having to balance or prioritize competing factors (cost, readability, etc.) While popular opinion (and often academic opinion) imagines production of hackneyed party lines as an extensive and mundane enterprise, closer examination of books reminds us that propaganda publishing was nonetheless a profession requiring expertise, judgement, and experience.

Secondly, my research only furthered my commitment to a materialist history of propaganda production. Alongside the role writers, artists, and editors played in shaping the content of these books, we need to recognize the role resources, labor, and other material elements played in modern state communication. These directly shaped how state narratives reached and appealed (or not) to state subjects. Since conducting my research using Trust funding, I have leaned even further toward this materialist perspective and it now sits at the center of my dissertation. I look forward to finishing a thesis which provides other historians with a toolkit for rediscovering how materials molded the medium and the message.

Reports from 2018 Projects

Dr Catherine Delano Smith (Hon. Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London)

Richard Gough’s British Topography (1780): The first reproduction of the medieval map of Britain (the Gough Map).

It is a pleasure to be able to report that the Willison Trust grant has greatly enriched Gough Map scholarship for map and book historians to an unexpected degree. Research supported by the Trust has extended the map’s relevance both chronologically and thematically, by connecting the ‘ancient map’ with the development of the facsimile—the word is first recorded for 1691 and it seems that Richard Gough’s reduced facsimile for his British Topography (1780) was the first cartographical facsimile, certainly in Britain—with a new attitude to the topographical print in contemporary learning, and with the experimental techniques of making glass negatives for photo-zincograph printing (for the Ordnance Survey) in the 1860-70s.

The unexpected diversity of our findings has meant that, although the primary task of transcribing place-names and compiling the comprehensive gazetteer of the map’s place names has been done, following-up of the new lines of inquiry is still ongoing.

Personnel

(A palaeographer, Dr Katie McKeogh, was selected on interview from four applicants to transcribe and record all place-names and corrections on the printed proofs of the reduced facsimile, and appointed in February 2018 to carry out the work in Oxford independently, with occasional visits from me. It was hoped that she would complete all the tasks allocated to her (as listed in the Application) by October 2018 over the estimated 23 days. She proved an assiduous and meticulous researcher, but in the event completed only the two palaeographically most demanding and intensive tasks, those relating to the manuscript annotations and the logging of all place-names on the reduced drawing (MS 12) and the annotated proofs (MSS 13–19). She produced a database amounting to 57 printed A4 pages.   Her material has now been incorporated into the main Gough Map database, as planned, by Damien Bove (Technical Assistant in the Application). She was unable, though, to complete the other tasks assigned to her in time.  Accordingly, I asked Damien Bove to take over the outstanding work. Mr Bove has been the GMP’s Research Assistant since its inception in 2012. He is a skilled investigator and a capable user of online documentary resources.

For the additional Willison work he visited the Bodleian twice to inspect all the facsimiles, make working scans and liaise with Dr McKeogh. He visited the British Library twice to compare their copies of the printed maps with those in the Bodleian. With me, he met the Director-General of the Royal Photographic Society (Dr Michael Pritchard) when we were seeking a lead into the technical procedures of the production of the 1871 photographic facsimile and its derivatives.

Besides supervising the above, my own work is focused on the context of Richard Gough’s personal and professional (as Director of the Society of Antiquaries) interest in his medieval map, and on following up the new leads. I located Samuel Pegge’s correspondence with Gough in the Society of Antiquaries, from which I discovered that it was Gough himself (not Pegge as stated in our 2017 article) who applied the reagent that was already damaging the place-names they were trying to decipher. Having learnt from the general literature that the obliterating effect of such reagents is progressive, we propose now to see if we can recover at least some of the now illegible toponyms by using the database to facilitate a systematic comparison of their rendering in the 1770s (for Gough’s reduced engraved facsimile) with their transcription for the 1871 to 1958 facsimiles before legibility is totally lost. I have learnt much more about the engraver James Basire but who actually drew the reduced manuscript draft (MS 12) and even who engraved the copper plate (Basire himself as generally assumed, or his workshop) is still unclear. This last point involves a fresh look at all maps reproduced in the British Topography and at his signed engravings in his Sepulchral Monuments (1786). 

Outcomes of research to date

(1) A new understanding of the emergence of facsimiles as book illustration in the later 18th century and the technical processes of the production of the 1780 facsimile.

(2) An appreciation of Richard Gough’s pioneering promotion of reproductions of early maps at a time when antiquarian study began to shift (not without opposition from some at the Society of Antiquaries) from drawing objects in order to enhance the rising interest in Britain’s historical heritage, to ‘tasteful’ depictions of ‘place’ as fine views (topographical prints), and to the reproduction of ancient maps as ‘useful’ information for the learning about places in the past, Gough’s own interest.

(3) The exposition of certain peculiarities on his facsimile, such as the disproportionate lack of engraved place-names in Wales on the published version in his British Topography. The puzzle is not only that out of 74 settlement signs in Wales, 70 were not provided with a full name (many were left with a single letter or two and the usual pecked line that indicated where the name was to be engraved once deciphered), but also why Gough appears not to have corresponded with any of the admittedly few Welsh members of the Society of Antiquaries listed for the 1760s and 1770s in an attempt to discover the identity of the place and decipher its name, as he did with conspicuous vigour for Scotland and, to lesser extent, for England.

(4) The uncovering of new light on the experimental use of photography for making facsimiles of early documents in the 19th century. Most rewarding in this respect has been the study of 27 Annual Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1846–73), which has also allowed us to see why the Gough Map of Britain was included in Vol. 3 of the Ordnance Survey’s ‘Facsimiles of National Manuscripts of Scotland (1870-72) rather than the earlier volumes of the National Manuscripts of England. We can point too to the remarkable ‘editing’ of a range of details on the glass negatives (black, red, green) as well as some fanciful doctoring of place-names (London for, probably, Llandow in South Wales). We shall suggest to the Bodleian that two of its Gough Maps facsimiles might need re-cataloguing in the light of our study of their unique (as far as we know,) exemplar of the ‘rough proof’ map by R. Appel (kept as part of C16 d.40) and the transcription map (kept as part of C16 b.3) and conclusion that both are proofs from the 1871 issue. The Annual Reports have also allowed us to follow W. B. Sanders’ career and comprehend the scale of the task of editing the documents for the English and Scottish volumes and other works, and to place the commissioning of that facsimile into a wider context, that of the government’s desire both to preserve documents and to make them available to the public.

(5) From our studies to date of the integrated gazetteer of the toponyms on the original medieval map together with all variants suggested by our eighteenth and nineteenth predecessors from their reading of a less damaged manuscript than the one available to the modern student of British local history and place-names, we have been able to note:

— where toponyms appear to have been read from the facsimile rather than the original (indeed, Sanders complains that he does not have the original to hand);

—where a previous identification appears to have been accepted without recourse to the original;

—where identification of a place was made without reference to a modern map (due to shortage of time? The 1871 facsimile was made when the Ordnance Survey was supposed to be producing the second series of the 1 Inch map of Britain); for example, barnes for Barnet and abergaveni for Aberdovey;

— where no attempt has been made to read a toponym even where the letters are reasonably clear;

—and concentrations of unidentified settlements (e.g. S. W. Midlands). 

Dissemination, Publication, Impact

The unexpectedly fruitful outcome of research for the Willison Trust means that research is still in active progress. We are awaiting the formal start (if our application to the Leverhulme Trust is successful) of the second stage of the Gough Map Project before starting on drafting chapters for the projected monograph (which should, according to the Leverhulme schedule if this materialises, be in press in 2023/4). The place-name gazetteer from the Willison work is largely ready for the new Bodleian website, but this has not yet been activated; a link to this will be provided at the earliest possibility. Meanwhile, any opportunity to disseminate our findings at conferences, online, or in published notes, will be taken and the Trust informed. The breadth of our interrelated findings will mean some rewriting of the narrative of maps as book illustration in general and, most certainly, a new appreciation of the significance of the Gough Map not only in the history of Britain’s national heritage but also as part of the history of the Ordnance Survey’s nineteenth-century map production.

Dr Peyvand Firouzeh, (Max Planck Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence)

Research on several fifteenth-century illustrated manuscripts written in Persian at the Chester Beatty Library (Dublin), The British Library (London), and the Bodleian Library (Oxford).

In January 2018, I received a generous award in book history from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust for the purpose of conducting collection research in London, Oxford, and Dublin. The research proposed falls within the framework of my new book-length project, provisionally titled Constructing Legitimacy along Sea Routes: Things and ideas between fifteenth-century Iran and Deccan India, for which I am currently supported as a Post- Doctoral Fellow in Art History by the Getty Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. The project explores the power of objects and knowledge in motion in the eastern Islamicate world. Set in fifteenth-century Deccan India under the Bahmanids, the region’s first independent Muslim dynasty from 1347 to 1528, it focuses on image circulation and perceptions of the built environment that materialized temporal and geographical distance across the Indian Ocean. The project examines how this circulation connected the dynasty simultaneously to a pre-Islamic past and an Islamic present. My proposal to the Willison Foundation involved research into the history, provenance, and transmission of three extraordinary manuscripts held in collections of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Chester Beatty Library, all of which will feature as case studies or comparative examples within my project.

I spent the whole month of September 2018 in the UK, working mainly on manuscript Or. 1403 at the British Library (a fifteenth-century copy of the eleventh-century Persian epic the Shahnama), and its relation to another fifteenth-century copy of the Shahnama of Ibrahim Sultan, Ouseley Add. 176, kept at the Bodleian Library.

Most of my time was dedicated to studying the British Library manuscript closely in preparation for a journal article. Being based in London for a whole month and having access to the manuscript (and multiple comparative examples) for several hours on a daily basis was an invaluable experience that allowed me to rethink my assumptions about this manuscript and its links to the Bodleian Shahnama. It was a fruitful research trip, the only challenge being how to divide the newly discovered material, discussed below in brief, between the article and the future book chapter. The award from the Willison Foundation covered the cost of housing in London, airfare, trains, visa fees, maintenance, and image rights for the publication of the article.

At the time of writing the proposal, I considered the British Library manuscript a Deccani object, and interpreted it as one that demonstrated how the Bahmanid court of Deccan India located itself in terms of Islamicate and Persianate modes of culture. My month-long study of the manuscript alongside several comparative examples available at the British Library shattered these certainties about the geographical attributions of the manuscript. Although previous attributions regarding the manuscript’s precise place of production and patronage remain have fallen into question, I still believe that India was either the place of production or intended audience of this Shahnama.

My preliminary aim was to examine two important interventions in the preface of this manuscript: first, the way it re-imagines the history of the epic’s production, claiming that the author, Ferdowsi (d. 1019 or 1025), journeyed to India and took refuge there; second, an uncommonly extensive and specifically India-related version of the story of the Iranian mythological king Bahman, one of the heroes of the Shahnama, and a figure from whom the Bahmanids claimed lineage. While conducting this research, my reading of the preface alongside other contemporary examples (especially the Bodleian Shahnama) has shown that these two interventions are not at all unique, contrary to what scholars have assumed in the past. Rather than directly interpreting these interventions as direct markers of the manuscripts’ origin, I have come to place them amidst patterns of reception that were current across Persianate societies and were adopted by the makers of these manuscripts depending on the socio-political and geographical circumstances in which the objects were made or for which they were intended. The Bahmanids, too, made use of these circulating narratives for their self-fashioning. In other words, I now have a bigger picture for what had always been regarded as unique peculiarities.

Alongside these developments, I focused a great deal on the paintings in the manuscript, most significantly on the frontispiece: a double-page depicting a teaching session in conjunction with a Sufi scene, regarded as a rare subject for a Shahnama frontispiece, which would conventionally represent royal feasts, battles, or enthronements. My analysis of the frontispiece in the forthcoming article, which investigates the incorporation of religious rituals into depictions of court ceremonials at the time, also opened a new avenue of research which I am hoping to develop in the book: the frontispiece showcases an interesting and nuanced way of depicting skin colours, unknown to fifteenth-century illustrations, in which the variety of skin tones is not necessarily bound to social hierarchy.

As mentioned, some of these findings on the British Library Shahnama and its relations to the Bodleian Library manuscript are discussed in an article that I have just completed. Titled “Convention and Reinvention: The British Library Shahnama of 1438 (Or. 1403)”, it will be published in a special issue of the Journal Iran in February 2019. In brief, this essay focuses on the text-image relationship in the manuscript’s preface-frontispiece set and how it would have addressed the manuscript’s possible audiences. The rest of my findings about this manuscript will be published in the book, and I am hoping that my research on the question of race, which is currently at its preliminary stage, will result in another article as well. In addition to the Iran article, I have been invited by Ursula Sims Williams, lead curator of Persian collections at the British Library, to incorporate some of my findings on MS. Or.1403 into a blog post on their “Asian and African Studies Blog”, which is currently in preparation. I have also been invited by Dr. Elizabeth Savage, lecturer at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, to speak on the British Library manuscript as a part of their Book and Print Initiative lectures on 7 February 2019.

Looking back at my proposal for the Willison Foundation Award, my questions about the Bodleian Shahnama were concentrated on the unique visual and textual interventions in this manuscript: in particular, a little-known poem written by the fifteenth-century chronicler Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi, which is inserted into the middle of epic proper alongside a double- page illustration of the court of Ibrahim Sultan, the Timurid prince, governor of Shiraz and patron of this manuscript. I interpret these interventions as an episode that can further elucidate the history of portraiture and the reception of Shahnama as an object of cultural heritage in the fifteenth century: a heritage that needed to be updated in order to remain contemporary. While these arguments still stand and have grown as I have examined the poem and the paintings more closely, the opportunity to study this manuscript together with the British Library Shahnama last fall opened more research avenues. I will be examining the preface of this manuscript, as well as the apparently subsequent restoration of a number of its paintings in India, where the manuscript travelled at some point after its completion in Shiraz in the fifteenth century. I am returning to Oxford this February to follow up these questions as I have been offered a month-long residency at the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Libraries. As for the British Library manuscript, my findings on this Shahnama will be published as an article and part of a book chapter.

I am yet to make my way to Dublin to study the Anthology (P. 124) at the Chester Beatty Library. My initial plan was to make this journey in Fall 2018. However, a series of unforeseeable events prevented me from applying for my Irish visa in time. At the end of Summer 2018, I signed a contract to join the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney for their newly-established lectureship in Islamic Art. I will start teaching in Sydney in August 2019, and was fortunate enough to be able to negotiate a late start date for the position so that I could complete my research under the award from the Willison Foundation and the residency at Oxford. This critical research period is allowing me to compile more material for current and future articles and book chapters before I start teaching this summer. I am extremely excited about this new position, and for the opportunity to teach Islamic art in a department that never had a position dedicated to this subfield of art history. However, the complications quickly arose when applying for the work visa to move to Sydney, as well as a visiting visa for an induction week and inaugural lecture that were initially planned for late October 2018, but had to be postponed to March 2019 due to a delay in the visa process. All of this meant that I had to reschedule several research and personal trips. As such, given my upcoming residency in Oxford in February, the planned trips to Sydney in March, and the time needed to apply for an Irish visa, I have rescheduled my trip to Dublin for April 2019.

Dr Marci Freedman (Teaching and Research Assistant, University of Manchester)

Jewish Learning and Censorship in Spain, c.1550 – c.1790s.

 I am pleased to inform the Trustees that I have completed my research trip to Madrid. In my application I stated that I sought funding to undertake primary data collection using the Inquisitional archives located at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Real Biblioteca Escorial. With the assistance of the Trust, I spent significant time in the archives over the course of May and June 2018 with some fruitful initial results.

The beginning of my time in Madrid was spent identifying the authors and works that would warrant further investigation. With the aid of recent scholarship by J.M. de Bujanda, I identified over 150 authors and texts to be examined more closely. I then sub-divided the long list into three categories. There are approximately 130 early modern Christian scholars who either translated or quoted from Jewish sources within their own writings. These authors and their works were then subjected to some level of censure, either through full prohibition or expurgation or, in some cases, both. A preliminary overview suggests that translations of the psalms from Hebrew, works of Cabala, Jewish theology, Hebrew dictionaries and grammars, and Jewish history all attracted censorship. This list of Christian authors is by far the longest and will be rigorously investigated at a later stage of the project.

The second list comprised only three names – these were of people who were identified as Jewish converts to Christianity. These authors’ works were censored in some form and raises the question: was the author’s conversion a contributing factor in the Inquisition’s decision to censor or expurgate the author or text? More broadly, did the Inquisition censor texts based on name alone, or was it the writings of a person which drew the Inquisition’s attention?  These are just some of the questions which arose during my time in Madrid and will be addressed as the project progresses.

The core of my research in Madrid consisted of a study of 15 Jewish authors who were explicitly named in the Indices of Prohibited Books. They range in period and genre from Josephus to the late sixteenth-century doctor David de’Pomi, and seventeenth-century printer Manasseh ben Israel. That these authors and their works are singled out in Indices published between 1583 and 1790 is remarkable. Each of the Indices is guided by a set of rules; invariably, one of the rules always pertains to books of the Jews, including the Talmud and Targum, all of which are explicitly prohibited. From this I have devised a more focused research question: if all Jewish books are prohibited under this more general rule, what is significant about these 15 authors that they warranted either more explicit prohibition, or in some cases, were permitted to be read in an expurgated form?

The above list was then taken to the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) to look for the qualifications (theological decisions) which detail why a particular author or work attracted censure. Using the card catalogue (which is available neither on-line or off-site), I was able to locate some of the Jewish authors. These documents, ranging from a few paragraphs to pages and pages of text, have been ordered as reproductions to allow for a more comprehensive translation. Once this is accomplished, a fuller understanding of the material examined at the AHN will help explain how and why certain authors and works were subject to censure. In addition, this will allow a better understanding of the Inquisitorial process and how the Inquisitors reached their conclusions. Once complete, this research will form the basis for the first article of the project.

The card catalogue also listed numerous files relating to licences granted by the Inquisition which allowed individuals to read censored material. This was an unexpected discovery and an angle of research that I had not previously considered. This may shed light on who, how and why certain individuals were permitted to access otherwise prohibited material. This is yet another area which I have identified for further exploration.

The AHN cataloguing system is not as straightforward as expected, and I will seek further assistance from Spanish contacts to help me navigate the vast corpus of documents produced by the Office of the Inquisition. In particular, I will seek to contact two Spanish PhD students who are specifically working on qualifications. My time at the AHN gave me the opportunity to gain experience in using the archive, to gain a sense of what was immediately available and, most importantly, what required deeper digging to bring to light more documents regarding the Inquisition’s process of censorship.

In addition to the AHN, I conducted research at the Real Biblioteca at the Escorial. The Escorial library was established by Philip II and was one of the places where the censorship of books occurred. Again, using my list of Jewish authors, I was able to consult two works on the list. One author was Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Jewish traveller, whose narrative was translated into Latin in 1575. This edition was then censored. I was able to determine some of the censorship methods used by the Inquisition, and their effectiveness. Individual lines and smaller sections of the travelogue were crossed out with ink making the text illegible. Longer passages, however, were excised by gluing paper over the offending sections of text. The passages remained unreadable if the book were held in a normal fashion; however, if held vertically to natural light from a window with light passing through the single page, the print under the paper covering the censored passage was readable. (I was hesitant to use electric light so that I could essentially re-create the reading conditions of early modern readers.) The second text was a Latin translation of a work by Rabbi Kalonymus. Although the text was examined for expurgation in 1707, only one small passage was excised from the prefatory material: approximately 22 lines have been covered by a piece of paper. The remainder of the text is untouched. This evidence suggests that the censorship process was laborious and, at times, ineffective – and for more intrepid readers, easily circumvented. In which case, the project must now answer more fundamental questions about the Inquisition’s process of censorship and its aims , and whether Spanish intellectual culture was as adversely affected as previous historiography has suggested.

On the whole, my time in Madrid was productive in making initial headway with the project. It has helped to solidify the core research questions and has begun to uncover the textual evidence which will help answer them. The remaining funds will be used to order reproductions.

I am pleased to inform the Trust that the project has been granted a more permanent home at Northwestern University where I have been awarded a postdoctoral position in Judeo-Spanish Studies in the Department of History. I am indebted to the Trust for affording me this wonderful and fruitful opportunity and I look forward to sharing more of the project’s findings in future.

Dr Donald Kerr, (Special Collections Librarian, University of Otago, New Zealand)

The Rev. William Arderne Shoults, a 19^th century clergyman book-collector.

Shoults lived a short life, dying at 48. He lived a bookish life in between his curacy appointments. He married late, and there was no issue. There was no scandal attached to his name. He was not a major book collector, and he seems to have patiently amassed his books, all without fuss. Consequentially, much of what was uncovered was contextual.

Not every book or manuscript is on-line, with holdings in New Zealand on books specifically related to 19^th century English curates, 19^th century Cambridge College life, Anglo-Catholicism, ritualism, and associated memoirs being somewhat sparse. To find and use these publications, and of course the manuscript materials in the various libraries, was another great bonus.

The papers of Stephen Parkinson, tutor to Shoults at Cambridge, are in St John’s College Special Collections. While they did not reveal anything specific about Shoults, they gave a great flavour of the type of content and interests Parkinson had, and which, no doubt, was passed on to a student like Shoults. In addition, Parkinson was a great hoarder and he saved a huge bank of Examinations Papers sat by students of the day, in Shoults’s case, from 1856 to 1860.

In early 1874, Shoults enrolled in a Bachelor of Divinity, sponsored by Parkinson. By June 1874, he had completed it, signing ‘B.D.’ after his name. Apart from certain procedures attached to this degree, it appears from evidence found that a printed copy of the BD was often produced, although by no means, it would seem, was this done systematically. No printed BD item was found relating to Shoults, but old card references indexed in an old catalogue cabinet at Cambridge University Library led to sighting two examples, produced in 1873 and 1875. One was a printed dissertation for the B.D. by the Rev. J Rawson Lumby entitled: ‘The History of the Creeds. 1. Ante-Nicene, 2. Nicene and Constantinopolitan, 3. The Apostolic Creed’ (1873); and the other a printed dissertation for a Doctor of Divinity by F.J. A. Hort entitled: ‘On the ‘Constantinopolitan’ Creed and Other Eastern Creeds of the Fourth Century’ (November 1875). These at least gave a good impression of the format produced, and the sort of topics undertaken by students in Divinity.

The Tait Papers at Lambeth Palace Library proved a gold mine. Not only were specifics found, but the raft of letters, documents, and printed materials relating to London parish activities, and those controversies surrounding the goings-on of the eccentric Benedictine monk Father Ignatius (Joseph Leycester Lyne) was enormously fruitful. Indeed, just by flipping through the many Tait volumes and reading the many enclosures, one realises how much unwritten history there is, and how much there is still to do.

Shoults contributed 58 erudite entries to John Julian’s massive Dictionary of Hymnology (1892). Manuscript papers belonging to Julian, his assistant James Meares, and edited proofs and notes to the second edition (1902) are in the British Library. It was hoped that there was some correspondence, or notes about Shoults’s entries. Sadly, not. Shoults never saw his work in print. In relation to Julian, I was fortunate to meet the ODNB biographer of Julian, Gordon Giles.

The student records at St. John’s College Archives proved a gold mine. Records pertaining to admission certificates, terms kept, marks in various examinations, etc, were examined. Obtaining proof of Shoults’s abilities and placement within his classes (1856-60) was especially rewarding.

The Map Department of Cambridge University Library held an auction sheet of November 1859 describing the Shoults family home at Madingley Road, Cambridge, and its close proximity to the principal colleges. Shoults did not have rooms at College; he walked back and forth from home. This aspect – which did not encourage after-hours collegiality with fellows – provides an interesting slant on Shoults, whom I suspect was a bookish loner.

Discoveries at the London Metropolitan Archives were exciting. Firstly, there were Shoults’s Ordination papers, containing testimonials from College and clergy, and job offers; first deacon, then priest. There were also registers dealing specifically with his activities as a curate at St. Peter’s, Walworth; St. Paul’s, Bunhill Row, Finsbury (now gone); St Michaels, Shoreditch; and St. Edmund the Martyr, Lombard Street, City. It was great to find evidence of his input into the local community, evidence of his work rate (especially at St Peter’s); and further information on the vicars and rectors who hired him.

While relying on indexes and key word searching, it is often valuable to trawl, somewhat serendipitously, through materials. This is what occurred at Lambeth Palace Library. Having examined key subjects in each volume of the requested Tait Papers, I trawled through the remainder of each volume. By sheer luck, I came across a manuscript reference to St. Peter’s Walworth, outlined in a specific survey on the condition of the Church and its parish. Shoults was named, albeit mis-spelt: Scholtz. The character reference given fleshed him out.

Just before I left New Zealand, I discovered that Shoults was far more associated with Father Ignatius than first imagined. Indeed, it transpired that Shoults was also known as ‘Father Cyril’ (a monastic name given to him by Ignatius), and that during the years 1870 to 1873, he was non-resident Monastery Chaplain at Father Ignatius’s monastery and convent at Llanthony, Wales.

Some years ago, the Trustees of Selwyn Theological College, who own the Shoults Collection, sold off some incunables and early printed books for cash. Accessing the sale catalogue from the Wren Library, Trinity College, enabled further identification of Shoults’s copy of Dionysius’s Works, printed in 1704.

Typically, many of the collections examined revealed nothing on Shoults, for example, the Benson and Blomfield Papers at Lambeth Palace Library. After much page-turning, they ended up as dead-ends. While this aspect is frustrating, this is as it should be. After all, adopting a scatter-gun approach to researching a minor curate who glided by unnoticed means the examination of much material. The researcher’s hope is that through the trawling through mounds of papers something is found. Fortunately for me, this is what happened. Shoults’s major ‘mark’ remains with the library he amassed.

One major failing was to advance the research into contemporary book collectors, who like Shoults, amassed theological and classical libraries. In some cases, there are printed sale catalogues extant. Time was against me in following up this aspect more fully. Importantly, the few book collectors chosen were not well-heeled ‘high-spot’ ones like Spencer or Greville. Candidates so far include the Oxford educated Joseph Mendham (1769–1856); another Oxford (University College) student, William Maskell (1814-1890), and John Mitford (1781-1859). Three others, all who gave materials to Christ’s College Library, Cambridge, have been added to the mix: the Rev. Charles Lesingham Smith (1806-1878) and his bequest of over 900 early printed books on mathematics and astronomy; the Rev. Peter Lovett Fraser (1773-1852) and his gift of over 3500 books, including many volumes of literary works in languages other than English; and William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), who bequeathed some 2000 manuscripts and printed books in Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages. Such a comparison would place Shoults within a specific collecting tradition. This work continues from afar.

Ms Jennifer Murray (Doctoral student, University of the Arts)

Manuscript-waste Fragments: Identifying the Bindings from which they were removed.

The Willison Foundation Charitable Trust supported my research for the final stages of my PhD studies. The aim of this research was to develop a new method to identify the binding (the source binding) from which manuscript-waste fragments had been removed. To date, source bindings have been identified by the shelfmark or title of the volume written on the fragment or by offsetting from the fragment found on the inner surface of the volume’s cover or the adjacent leaf of the textblock. My PhD research looks instead at the evidence on the fragment for the features and materials of the source binding and uses this to select the binding from the shelves. This method was developed by working on fragments removed from volumes in five different libraries. Thanks to the funding provided by the Willison Foundation Trust I was able to return to undertake further work in one of my case-study libraries, Lanhydrock, the National Trust’s most important seventeenth-century library. During the visits to Lanhydrock, I focused on working with endleaf guards and covers as these fragment-types had not been well represented in other libraries I had visited.

Identifying the source binding for removed manuscript-waste fragments involved

1. analysing the binding evidence on the fragment,
2. building up an idea from that evidence of what the source binding should look like and comparing this to the bindings in the library which were visible and accessible on the open shelves.

In the case of Lanhydrock, Stages i and ii were completed at the Bodleian Library Oxford where the manuscript-waste fragments removed from these books are now held.

Manuscript-waste fragments which were used as endleaf guards

In Lanhydrock I worked with five guard fragments. These fragments were not randomly selected but were chosen to represent bindings of different sizes made with different materials. The aim was to see if the method that had been developed was applicable over a range of bindings. In addition to pairs of fragments (that is, two fragments from the same binding), single fragments were chosen in order to determine if the evidence on one fragment would be sufficient to identify the source binding.

The following fragments were studied:

134ii, 139ii:  a pair of guards (height: 195mm, width: 55mm), sewn on four supports, with no staining from the turn-ins of the cover material, possibly indicating a parchment-covered volume.

29, 30:  a pair of guards (height: 145mm, width: 40mm), sewn on three supports, with evidence of being from a volume covered in tanned skin.

104, 105:  a pair of guards (height: 294mm, width: 104mm), sewn on four supports – with sewing evidence only from one of the guards – and with no staining from the turn-ins of the cover material.

134iii:  a single guard (height: 146mm, width: 23mm), sewn on three supports, with evidence of being from a volume covered in tanned skin.

51:  a single guard (height: 138mm, width: 55mm)), sewn on 4 supports, with good sewing evidence and a distinctive turn-in shape.

The fragment number is taken from the number of the leaf of the guardbook onto which the fragment is adhered. The width of the guard is measured from the fold to the widest stub. The height of the fragment is the basis for the calculation for the height of the binding. The number of supports and their distribution is the key to selecting bindings from the shelves.

Manuscript-waste fragments which were used as covers 

Manuscript-waste fragments which were used as covers are a different issue as in these cases what is being sought is the associated textblock which will have a new cover. In Lanhydrock, new bindings uniformly had five bands on the spine irrespective of how many sewing supports there were. This meant that the sewing evidence from the fragments was of no relevance in the selection of potential matches. There was, however, evidence for the width of the spine, and the height and width of the binding. It was not expected that the method used to identify the source bindings for manuscript-waste fragments which had been used as endleaves or guards would be easily applied to fragments which had been used as covers. For this reason, fragments which had some evidence of the title of the source volume were preferred as, in the event of a failure to identify the source binding via the method developed, it might be possible to identify the volume by other means. This would then still allow the source volume to be examined which could shed some light on the shortcomings of the method.

Four fragments were chosen and, again, these were not randomly selected but were intended to represent different cover-types (lace-attached and stitched) and different sized books. Fragments with a local connection were also selected as it was hoped that it might be possible to gain some information about whether the bindings had been made locally.

The following fragments were studied:

168:  a laced-case cover made from a fragment of a localised document (height: 189mm, width 140mm, spine width: 19mm), without turn-ins, sewn on three supports from a quarto textblock. The fragment is from a lease of a rectory in Cornwall and is from the Elizabethan period.

162:  a laced-case cover made from a fragment of a localised document (height: 187mm, width: 154mm, spine width: 37mm) with turn-ins sewn on 3 supports. The fragment is from the accounts of a bailiff in Devon and is dated 1525.

167:  a laced-case cover from a fragment of a localised document (height:  135mm, width: 95mm, spine width: 20mm), sewn on 3 supports, with no turn-ins used as a cover for an 8vo-sized textblock. The fragment is from the deed of the sale of lands in Essex and is also dated to the Elizbethan period.

52:  a cover stitched over four holes from a leaf of a fourteenth-century manuscript (height: 202mm, width; 144mm, spine width: 15mm), with no turn-ins.

Manuscript-waste fragments which were used as a comb spine lining

It was also possible to visit the Otway-Maurice Collection of St. Canice’s Cathedral Library, Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland now housed at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. This library was selected as it had an example of a comb spine lining. No spine linings were found in the Lanhydrock collection and the inclusion of this fragment type was intended to test further the method that had been developed. In contrast to endleaf or guard fragments but like cover fragments, the comb spine lining also has evidence of the width of the spine.

One comb spine lining that was made up of two fragments CK/MS/3 and CK/MS/9 was selected. Both fragments were from French documents, one dated 1590 (CK/MS/3), the other dated 1603 (CK/MS/9). They measured 360mm in height and the spine was 111 wide.  The source binding had been sewn on six supports and covered in tanned skin.

I am extremely grateful for the grant from the Willison Charitable Foundation Trust which enabled me to test further a new method for identifying the source bindings of removed manuscript-waste fragments by working with different fragment types. The final conclusions on this work will be presented in my thesis.

Dr Vaibhav Singh (Post-doctoral, Early Career Researcher and former Teaching Fellow, the University of Reading, UK)

The project examines the material production of books at the Nirnaya Sagar Press and its typefoundry in Bombay (now Mumbai).

I was able to pursue my research on the Nirnaya Sagar Press and its typefoundry through a trip to India in March 2018. Although originally the plan had been to make two trips to India, my research enquiries over the first trip revealed the limited extent of the Press’s original productions available in various institutional archives across the country. This instigated a major change in my research itinerary as it turned out that the Library of Congress, Washington DC, possessed the largest amount of relevant material, vital secondary literature, and samples of the Press’s published output. I therefore undertook a trip to Washington DC in August, instead of the second India trip initially planned. The secondary literature on the Press available at the Library of Congress was an invaluable addition to the material I could locate in India.

The most useful resources for the project on my India trip were Marathi journals and periodicals housed in a number of Bombay and Pune libraries, includ- ing the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad Library, Asiatic Society Library, Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya, Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth Library, and Heras Institute. The journals and periodicals (Masik Manoranjan, Mudran Prakash, Mudran Vidya, Kesari, among others) constituted a rich – and so  far  largely unexplored – resource that included near-contemporary accounts and reminiscences of personalities associated with the Press, in addition to reports on some of the landmarks in the Press’s history. Some of the more extensive works on the Press and its founder’s life and times, however, could only be accessed at the Library of Congress. I also found out that several of the Press’s books listed on the Library’s catalogue could not be located in physical copy (having been miscatalogued), leaving the option of consulting them on microfilm only. The rarity of informational material related to the Press despite its prodigious volume of production was one of the more confounding realisations in the research process.

The most productive aspect of the research was new information on typo- graphic networks and connections across nineteenth century Bombay print culture. The connections between Jawaji Dadaji, the Press’s founder, and a long line of entrepreneurs and craftsmen, of Indian origin or otherwise, who preceded him constituted a rich line of enquiry into the development of local printing trade.

Notable entrepreneurs such as Thomas Graham who ran the American Mission Press up to 1859, and Ganpat Krishnaji, who founded his own press and type- foundry to publish Marathi-language material in 1843 had a direct bearing on the success of Nirnaya Sagar. Jawaji Dadaji was one of the best-prepared craftsmen, given his prolonged training and apprenticeship at several prominent institutions in the city. Biographical information on Jawaji Dadaji is sparse and often not entirely reliable but looking at primary source material in tandem with biographical accounts revealed that he began his career in the printing trade as a polisher of type at the age of ten. He apprenticed at the American Mission Press that had been established in 1816 in Bombay, and learnt the craft of type-cutting and casting under Thomas Graham, who later became the owner of the American Mission Press. This Mission Press had started initially by producing Marathi-language books using lithography and with a single fount of Marathi type imported from Calcutta but subsequently the press adopted typographic composition, introducing typefounding and typecasting as the mainstay of its activity. This move was largely based on the success of Thomas Graham’s experiments and exploration of new techniques for typesetting Devanagari. His method entailed the division of the overhanging and overlapping portions of Devanagari characters into smaller components, divided into upper and lower tiers: a method that came to be known as the ‘degree system’. The significance and pivotal role of American Mission presses in colonial India is another aspect that my current research highlights.

Several important innovations in the typographic composition of Indian scripts were initiated by individuals associated with American Missionary enterprise. Although I was not able to take this line of enquiry much further, investigating various American Missionary archives would be an important next step in locating new information on the development of Indian typography, and I aim to follow up on this over the next two years.

Jawaji Dadaji’s training at the American Mission Press had spanned over a decade after which he joined the Times of India Press and moved subsequently in 1862 to the newly established Indu Prakash Press. After another short stint at the Oriental Printing Press where he continued his typefounding work, Jawaji embarked on his own venture in 1864. The consequent technical mastery and proficiency demonstrated in Nirnaya Sagar’s typefounding thus derived from what was an extensive and wide-ranging experience in the field. The foundry introduced the ‘akhand’ system of composition which made use of overhanging elements extending from the body of the type – a method that reduced the complications introduced by the ‘degree’ system (i.e. large number of metal sorts that had to be tied together in a forme) by consolidating the components and retaining a simpler full body composition of the type. What A.K. Priolkar has called the ‘veritable revolution in the art of printing and type-casting’ brought about by Nirnaya Sagar consisted not only of these technical innovations, but also of an aesthetic dimension that had previously been a marginal consideration in typographically produced books. The confluence of technical skill and an understanding of typographic detail relevant to Devanagari typesetting in Nirnaya Sagar’s publications represented a significant departure from the prevalent image of crude types and rudimentary text composition in Marathi. It can be argued that it was only after the establishment of Jawaji Dadaji’s typefoundry that the typographically composed book could present a serious challenge to the lithographed book in Devanagari script, as an alternative and expedient mode of production.

My research also revealed the materiality of book production was not an isolated or incidental aspect of Nirnaya Sagar’s approach – the conformity of method, embodied in the codex book and its typographic composition, can also be recognised in the catalogue of titles published by the Nirnaya Sagar Press. The first book printed at the Press was Garud Puran in Sanskrit – a revealing choice of genre situated midway between the religious and the popular. The Press also issued Hindu almanacs (panchang) and compendia of ritual worship as its earliest productions. However, the publication of ‘sacred books’, Vedic texts, and religious works were the foundations of Nirnaya Sagar’s work. Within Jawaji Dadaji’s lifetime, the Nirnaya Sagar Press published 193 books in Sanskrit, 228 in Marathi and 15 in Gujarati & Hindi. A descriptive bibliography of this phase of the Press is in preparation, I hope to make it available online on a dedicated webpage later this year.

The texts published by the Press in its early years also provide an insight   into how deeply the Press may have absorbed notions of Orientalist scholarship. With Manusmriti in 1877 (with a Marathi translation), Kumarsambhava in 1879, parts of the Rigveda in 1880 and so on, Nirnaya Sagar could indeed have been rehearsing the selection and definition of the ‘classical’ canon and dominant texts as established by European Orientalist scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This conflicting relationship could also be perceived elsewhere in the Press’s Marathi publications. With the background of several prominent entrepreneurs – including Jawaji Dadaji and Ganpat Krishnaji before him – in Mission Presses that printed all manner of works but had their raison d’être firmly situated in evangelical activity, a similar engine was conceived and made apparent in the functioning of independent, entrepreneurial presses that had a strong Hindu orientation in response. Ganpat Krishnaji had been inspired to print ‘religious books for the benefit of the Hindoos’ precisely during his time at the American Mission Press, observing the production of its evangelical literature, and Nirnaya Sagar’s publication of Hindu scriptures reflected the same approach.

The research has provided me with new resources in examining how the Nirnaya Sagar Press capitalised on the technical skill and commercial enterprise of local craftsmen to situate the typographic book as an acceptable alternative to other common modes of reproduction, making fewer concessions on a material level in relation to manuscript and lithographic production. The Press’s typographic work also fuelled broader narratives of local technical proficiency and ingenuity that were reflected in journals and periodicals that I was able to consult in India.

In all, I was able to spend a period of three weeks in Bombay and Pune, and two weeks in Washington DC to conduct intensive research for this project. The research grant gave me an excellent opportunity, as an early career researcher, to not only undertake an extended period of work across dispersed sources of information but also to establish links with researchers working on Indian print culture in India, UK, and the United States. I deeply appreciate the financial support provided by the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust’s research grant which made travel to India and the US possible, and which will define the shape that a journal article arising from this material will take (in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society). I will also be presenting a conference paper at the Royal Asiatic Society in March 2019 based on the research I carried out for this project.

Ms Lauren Weiss (PhD Candidate; Universities of Stirling and Strathclyde)

Archival research in the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia and Travel to Sydney to attend the SHARP conference, ‘From First to Last Texts, Creators, Readers, Agents’.

I would like to thank the Trust for generously providing funding for my two-fold project. First, I travelled to Australia for the SHARP conference in Parramatta to present my paper on Glasgow’s Literary Bonds and Literary Bonds, two online bibliographic resources for Glaswegian mutual improvement and literary societies, and Scottish and English mutual improvement society magazines respectively. The conference acted as the official launch for the two websites, which provide a considerable amount of new materials for scholars internationally working in book history and the history of reading. The discussions that arose, particularly between Martyn Lyons and Elizabeth Webby, were significant in offering new perspectives on my work, into the current state of scholarship on Australian reading communities, and the study of these groups more broadly.

Second, I travelled to Sydney to conduct archival research on mutual improvement and literary society magazines housed in the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW). I spent five days there before travelling to Melbourne, where I visited the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to investigate the magazines in their collection. After four days in Melbourne, I decided to change my plans and return to Sydney. Having become more familiar with the historical parlance of these local groups, I discovered that by expanding and modifying my search terms, I found evidence of 10 more societies that produced magazines in the Sydney area, a good indication that more remained to be discovered.

This change of plan turned out to be fortuitous, and the additional five days in the SLNSW were quite fruitful.  A second reason for retracing my steps was the discovery that a local historian and scholar, Ken James, had recently completed work on Victoria’s mutual improvement groups. His locally published, limited-edition book, Victoria’s Mutual Improvement Societies [2016], was then currently unavailable; the library’s copy had apparently disappeared. I then contacted James. He not only provided advice, but also shared electronic copies of his work along with his enthusiasm for these groups. His book gives an overview of over 400 community groups, a surprisingly large network of ‘improving’ readers in just one area of Australia. I resolved to read James’s work in more depth later and return to those archives where materials had yet to be uncovered.

After leaving Sydney (again), I flew to Adelaide, where I spent 13 days in the State Library of South Australia (SLSA). When planning the trip, I organised it such that most of my time would be spent in this archive, as a preliminary search in TROVE (an invaluable resource for conducting research across Australia) had brought up the largest number of records for relevant materials between the three archives I intended to visit. This proved to be a good decision: even with the increase in number of magazines I discovered, it still appears that South Australia had the largest number of literary societies that produced their own periodicals.

While working in Adelaide, I came across evidence for a couple of New Zealand magazines. I decided that, as I might not have another opportunity in the foreseeable future to travel to New Zealand, to visit the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington for three-and-a-half days. I viewed the three societies’ magazines in their collection but was not successful in tracking down any additional periodicals. This was due to the shortness of time in conjunction with the different cataloguing system (as compared with TROVE) that was used. In total, this project lasted just over six weeks (5 July-17 August). When I applied to the Trust, I intended to view four magazines in the SLNSW.

As a result of my research, I discovered evidence for 25 mutual improvement and literary societies in Sydney and 17 groups across the rest of New South Wales that produced their own magazines. In my application, I wrote that I had found three magazines in the SLV. When I visited this archive, I found four societies in Melbourne that produced periodicals and six from across Victoria. In Adelaide, I planned to view eight magazines in the SLSA. By the end of my stay, I had located 12 societies in Adelaide and 45 magazine-producing groups across South Australia. In addition, I found one magazine in Canberra and one in Darwin, along with one in Tasmania. In New Zealand, while I found three societies’ magazines, it is highly likely that there are many more.

To date, I have located evidence for 116 Australian societies that produced magazines from the 1850s until 1914. I estimate that this number will rise significantly as work in this area progresses. The preliminary results are quite exciting. If James’s research gives some indication of the popularity and extent of associational culture in the southeast of Australia (i.e. the most heavily populated region of the country), more generally from about 1850 until the 1910s, clearly we are dealing with a phenomenon that is not only greatly under-investigated, but greatly under-estimated in terms of the number of groups, and in the importance and socio-cultural freight attached to them during this period. Worldwide, the current consensus seems to be that where these ‘improving’ groups did exist in the Anglophone world (at least), they were part of a short-lived, isolated phenomenon involving a relatively small number of groups. Clearly much work remains to be done in other areas in Australia (and beyond). My work on society magazines that were produced by Scottish and England as well as Canadian groups allowed me to make much more informed comparisons with Australian and New Zealand groups. While there were indeed many similarities, there were also notable differences, the most important ones being: one, the differing role of print culture in their respective cultures (which wasn’t too surprising); and, two, the influence of Australian literary societies’ unions on the production, formatting and features of the manuscript and print magazines that were being produced.

The latter was rather unexpected. Australia’s unions appear to have been more dominant than those in Britain, their influence helping significantly to shape the magazines that their member groups produced. I will expand upon these points once I have had more time to sift through the wealth of findings I collected and to investigate the leads they brought up. I will very shortly begin to disseminate the results of my research. I am currently expanding my SHARP conference paper into a co-authored article with Kirstie Blair (Strathclyde) and Michael Sanders (Manchester) to submit to Victorian Periodicals Review in December 2018.

Through the contacts I made in Australia, I will be presenting a paper at the Mechanics’ Institutes Australia 2018 3rd National Conference in Ballarat in November, at which I will discuss the global ‘improvement movement’ – a separate but related movement to the ‘Mechanics’ Institute Movement’ – and share some preliminary results from my trip. The paper will become part of the published Conference Proceedings. Next year on June 7th, I will be participating in the European conference, ‘Industrial Labour & Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, which is being organised by the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ research project (of which I am a part) and the Finnish Labour Museum in Tampere, and will involve academics and museum professionals from across Europe. One of the aims of the conference is to explore how the industrial working classes engaged with literary culture in the long nineteenth century in a European context. My contribution will be unique in that I can place this culture in British and Canadian as well as Australian and New Zealand contexts.

Finally, I am writing up the accumulative results of my research for publication in a monograph. This book will extend my doctoral research on manuscript magazines produced by societies in Scotland and England through a more comprehensive search in smaller, unexplored archives. It will include a chapter on Canadian magazine-producing societies and at least two chapters on Australian and New Zealand magazines, providing important new evidence for literary society culture. The book will act as a starting point for comparisons to be made trans-regionally and trans-nationally in my demonstration that these societies were part of a global network: society formation was prolific and perhaps even diasporic in nature.

Without the support of the Trust, this trip would not have been financially possible for me as a PhD student. The magazines I viewed were only available for consultation in person. Further, due to cataloguing differences, it was not always possible to determine the nature of the materials from their often short or even misleading listings: it was essential to be ‘on the ground’. Most importantly, the Trust’s funding allowed me to conduct ground-breaking research: this is the first study to investigate Australian magazines as a phenomenon per se, mutual improvement society magazines themselves being a new genre that I discovered during my doctoral research. The results of my work will advance research in the history of reading by offering a substantial amount of important new evidence about historical readers, their literary culture, reading communities, and first-hand evidence of reading experiences.

Professor Christine Woody  (Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania; Instructor, Rutgers)

Printing the Quarterly Review under William Gifford’s editorship, 1809-1824

I was able to spend the month of May in Edinburgh conducting research in the Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. During my time in the archive, I worked primarily with correspondence in order to assemble a timeline that tracks Gifford’s geographical displacements, establishing the pattern and rhythms in which he leaves his London publishing base. My timeline covers the full period of 1809-1826, but my findings for a few years in the late teens 1817, 1818 are somewhat thinner. By surveying the correspondence, I have been able to identify the reasons for Gifford’s displacements, tracking in particular the frequent relapses into respiratory illness and paralysis with which he struggled. Alongside this work, I have been able to establish John Murray’s more standard pattern of travelling to and from London to match the fashionable ‘season’.

The correspondence was most useful in establishing a map of the stress points in the periodical’s production and have allowed me to spotlight particular issues and articles as being deserving of more in-depth analysis as artefacts of this production pressure. My survey of proofs and drafts was helpful in enlightening me as to the general workflows of the periodicals production, and to this extent was worthwhile. However, I found that the proofs and drafts that tended to be saved were exceptional cases—for instance the Twiss proofs for “Expenditure and Influence of the Crown” (MS 42533), which were saved by John Murray because Twiss sued him for payment when he failed to publish the article. I have found that proofs of representative articles have tended to be dispersed and will therefore not play a role in the finished project.

By virtue of this research, I have been able to work on an argument that connects Gifford’s editorial practices with the conditions of illness and disability with which he contended. I presented a preliminary version of my findings, “Problems of professional readers: How the pressures of periodical production impact the practice of book reviewing in Romantic Britain – A case study of the Quarterly Review,” to the DFG-funded research group Journallitteratur during their “Interrupted Reading – Follow-on Reading: Reading Journals” conference in Germany this past September. My initial argument was well received and I am now at work on an article draft, which I plan to submit to the journal Book History.