The Railway Series Pre-Cut Model Engine Book No. 2 – Percy with Clarabel the Coach.
Update (14 May, 2012): Reader Justin A. Olsen has kindly replied to our request for additional information on these models; you can read his comments here. We’re still interested in purchasing the two models we don’t have, Thomas and James, so please contact us if you have any you’re willing to part with.
Can you help? We recently acquired two lovely items from W. Awdry’s The Railway Series. These “Pre-Cut Model Engine Books” each contain a story and the parts and instructions for making two toys out of card. We have Number 2: Percy with Clarabel the Coach and Number 3: Gordon the Big Engine & His Tender (click to enlarge the images):
Percy Pre-Cut Model.
Percy Pre-Cut Model Instructions.
I believe these were produced in the late 1950s, as The Eight Famous Engines, the final story book listed on the back of each volume, was published in 1957. Four different titles in the pre-cut model series are described as being available (with more in production), and we would love to know more about these and possibly locate copies of the other two, Thomas the Tank Engine and James the Red Engine.
Please do get in touch if you know more about these sets and their sales records, and especially if you have copies to sell. You can leave a comment on this post or contact us by email or phone.
Below, a few more photos of the model books. If you have a good printer you could even construct them yourself!
Clarabel Pre-Cut Model.
Percy & Clarabel Story.
The Railway Series Pre-Cut Model Engine Book No.3 – Gordon the Big Engine & His Tender.
Over the weekend a group of librarians, academics, and book dealers had a great twitter conversation about rare book dealer descriptions and their use in library cataloguing.
It started with Mike Widener’s post at the Yale Law Library Blog about his love of dealer catalogues and his practice of including their content in library catalogue entries. Mike listed the rules he follows and wrote that “The description adds value to our catalog. It records a wealth of information about the book that would be impossible to include in the online catalog record”.
This caught the attention of Jeremy Dibbell, who included it in his weekly Links & Reviews post, as well as John Overholt, and Sarah Werner, who began a twitter conversation hoping to get more input from other librarians and book dealers. I noticed the conversation about half-way through, and was about to chime in when Sarah kindly asked me and fellow dealer Brooke Palmieri for our input.
My reaction was very positive. My colleagues and I put a huge amount of work into our cataloguing, including original research and very careful consideration of how we present books, manuscripts, and other objects. They aren’t just things to be sold, they carry historical and cultural meanings of which we’re the temporary caretakers. Our goal is to do these justice, and it’s nice to know that our institutional colleagues appreciate it when we do a good job, and that they find our work useful in the larger context of academic librarianship.
Additionally, as dealers we often use library catalogues to do research, and anything that could enhance the experience appeals to us. Dealer descriptions often include provenance and bibliographical information that might be difficult to include otherwise, and they can provide excellent search terms for those browsing a catalogue. I also love the idea of searching library databases and being able to see what other dealers have said about a book over the course of time. In the absence of a comprehensive database of dealer catalogues (which will probably not happen in the near future!) this is the best idea I’ve heard for making available this type of information.
One of the main points at issue during the discussion was that of credit. We all agreed that it’s essential to credit the dealer in the same way that you would cite a source in an academic article. Mike Widener also directly asks the dealer for permission before posting, and while this is definitely the polite (and legal!) way to proceed, my colleagues and I agree that it’s less important than giving credit (as long as there is no unique content in the cited catalogue entry, which it was pointed out, would require more careful consultation with the dealer).
Much of the discussion also hinged around the capability of various library systems to accommodate this type of information, and the procedures for cataloguing at different institutions. I hope that despite the differences between systems and philosophies, more institutions will follow Widener’s lead and find ways to incorporate dealer descriptions in their online catalogues. As well as being practical, it’s a wonderful way to foster closer ties between institutions and dealers. If any readers are librarians or rare book dealers with an opinion to contribute, please do chime in, either her, or at the blogs of the various contributors.
Tradition holds that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, in 1564, though it’s impossible to know the date for sure. What is known is that he was baptised at Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, on the 26th of the month, so was probably born sometime between the 21st and 23rd. The 23rd of April is also recorded as Shakespeare’s date of death in 1616, and it is this untimely event that we have to thank for the preservation and promotion of his works in the First Folio, and ultimately his enshrinement as one of England’s great geniuses.
Shakespeare was only 52 when he, Ben Jonson, and the poet-playwright Michael Drayton “had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted”. As a memorial, his friends and fellow members of The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to produce a collected edition of his plays.
Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had been published during his lifetime, individually in cheap and probably unauthorised quarto editions, some of which became bestsellers. These often error-riddled editions are described in the First Folio as “stol’n and surreptitious copies”, and some seem to have been reproduced solely from the memories of actors trying to make a little cash on the side. This continued after his death, and in 1619 the publisher Thomas Pavier and printer William Jaggard produced ten quarto plays ostensibly by Shakespeare (though two were not actually his work), and this may have spurred Heminges and Condell to complete their own collected edition and reassert the King’s Men’s authority over the texts.
It wouldn’t be an easy process. Though the King’s Men held the copyrights to many of the plays, it took years to negotiate for others, which remained with the publishers of the quarto editions. Though these publishers did not have what we today would consider intellectual priority over the works, they had been the first to enter them in the Stationer’s Register, which gave them the copyrights. Some even had to be brought in as partners, earning shares of the proceeds of the First Folio based on how many plays they contributed. Willaim Jaggard himself served as the head printer on the project until his death in 1623.
The printing began in early 1622 and took around two years to complete, with the earliest known sale of a First Folio occurring in December 1623. The choice of the imposing folio format was vital to the book’s success, “giving the volume the instant status of a classic: it is a weighty tome, a book for individuals’ libraries, a collection perhaps to be owned rather than read… It was also expensive, probably not less than 15s. a copy and often costing £1 or more”. Prior to this, theatre in England had been considered low-brow, and no collection of plays had been published in such a lavish manner. The First Folio elevated not only Shakespeare’s reputation but that of playwriting in general.
Most importantly, the First Folio included 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 known plays, 18 of which had never before been printed and would probably have been lost to history if not included. And the texts, edited by Shakespeare’s close friends and his fellow writers and actors, are considered the most authoritative of all early printings. Shakespeare’s reputation today rests largely on the publication of the First Folio.
Despite its expense, the book sold well enough that a second edition, the Second Folio, was required in 1632. Published by a syndicate of five firms, copies appear with one of five different imprints depending on which publisher sold them. Our copy, pictured above, has the scarcest imprint, that of the publisher John Smethwick, who owned the rights to four plays: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the importance of these titles, Smethwick’s small contribution of four plays meant that his share of finished copies was relatively low, and his imprint correspondingly scarce. Also of note–the second Folio contains the first appearance in print of John Milton, who contributed a poem to the Effigies leaf that did not appear in the first edition.
Two more folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays were published by the beginning of the eighteenth century, followed by a number of important editions edited by authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Today, though, the most highly sought-after editions are still the early folios, with the First Folio becoming one of the most valuable books in the world. Around 750 copies were printed, but only 230 survive, and of those only 40 are complete. Most extant copies are held in libraries, and in the last decade, only three have been sold at auction, all achieving prices in the millions of dollars. As much as we hate to have second-best books here at Peter Harrington, the Second Folio is a second-best we’re glad to have, as it is the earliest edition of Shakespeare that is practicably obtainable on the market.
First edition of The Loch Ness Monster and Others by Rupert T. Gould (1934).
Today we often laugh about the myths that have grown up around the Loch Ness Monster. Recalling all the hoaxes, we wonder how people could be so gullible. But when the first widely-reported sightings stoked a media frenzy in 1933 it was unclear what was happening and many people, journalists and scientists alike, believed it possible that some type of unusual animal could be living in the loch.
This led to the first ever book on the monster, The Loch Ness Monster and Others (BOOK SOLD), a 1934 collection of eyewitness accounts gathered by Rupert T. Gould (1890–1948), a renowned horologist and former Lieutenant Commander in the British Navy.
Rupert T. Gould, horologist and author of The Loch Ness Monster and Others.
The first major Loch Ness sighting was reported by a London man named George Spicer who claimed that on 22 July, 1933, while driving with his wife along the east side of Loch Ness, something like a “pre-historic animal” crossed the road ahead of them “carrying a lamb or small animal of some kind” in its mouth. Spicer’s detailed account was reported in the Inverness Courier a few weeks later and more sightings (many of which were anonymous) began pouring in. The first photograph purporting to be of the creature was taken by Hugh Gray in November of the same year. It was published in the Daily Record and Mail and reproduced as Plate I in Gould’s book:
The first photograph ever taken of the Loch Ness Monster.
The most famous photograph was taken the following spring, when a London gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson snapped what became known as “The Surgeon’s Photograph”. Though later revealed as a hoax, this image fueled the mania surrounding the sightings, and is used on the dust jacket and as the frontispiece to Gould’s book.
The Surgeon’s Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster (1934).
Spurred on by these media accounts, Gould took it upon himself to investigate the mystery. He was already a well-known horologist: in 1923 he published The Marine Chronometer, “a book so thoroughly researched and well written that it still had no equal seventy-five years later” (ODNB), and in his free time he restored the Royal Observatory’s Harrison timekeepers, which had solved the problem of how to determine longitude at sea. (Gould was was played by Jeremy Irons in the 1999 television adaptation of Dava Sobel’s Longitude.) He amassed a large collection of typewriters, and extensive notes for a possible history of the machines. But he was also interested in mysteries and monsters, having written three books on similar subjects: Oddities (1928), Enigmas (1929) and The Case for the Sea Serpent (1930).
One of the first to systematically investigate the Loch Ness Monster, Gould set off from Inverness on a motorcycle on 14 November, 1938 and circled the Loch twice over a period of days. He interviewed as many witnesses as possible, including the Spicers, and investigated various theories for the sightings, such as the idea that the monster was a prehistoric creature, or perhaps a normal sea animal that had swum into the loch by accident.
The book which resulted from his travels is highly detailed and includes reports on all known sightings, including some that occurred prior to 1933. It’s also copiously illustrated; all three of the photographs then believed to be of the monster are included, in addition to numerous sketches based on eyewitness accounts:
The Loch Ness Monster as described by the Spicers.
Unfortunately, many of the sketches are more humorous than illuminating:
Others are tragically unconvincing:
One of the best things about our particular copy of the book is that a previous owner left annotations.
There’s a section of photographs of unidentified animals that have washed ashore on beaches around the world–Gould argued that these might be specimens of the same creature that was living in the loch. Below each image our anonymous, and skeptical, reader has scrawled “almost certainly basking shark” (though some appear to me as giant squid or other types of animals):
But their best contribution is this charming illustration in the conclusion:
As you can probably tell from the text in the photo above, Gould’s conclusion was that there was a creature living in Loch Ness. Though he was almost certainly incorrect, he should be remembered as one of the earliest and most thorough of Loch Ness investigators, whom we have to thank for the preservation of much information relating to the creature and the people who saw her.
I’m sorry to say that we don’t have a “Mysteries” section on our website, so I’ve put Nessie into the “Sciences” category, which you can browse here.
First edition of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility in the original boards (1811).
In spite of becoming a twentieth-century pop-culture phenomenon, the inspiration for numerous romantic films and chick-lit publications, Jane Austen remains one of literature’s most significant novelists. Today, in honour of International Women’s Day, we’ll push aside the accumulated sentiment to look at Jane Austen as writer and author, and examine the publishing history of her novels.
Austen was born in Hampshire, England in 1775, the seventh and youngest child of George and Cassandra Austen. George was an Oxford-educated rector, and the family was comfortably middle-class, closely-knit, and engaged with literature and culture. George saw to it that his daughters, Cassandra and Jane, were both educated, and Jane developed her taste for reading and theatricals from activities within the family, including the influence of her older brothers, as well as the libraries she had access to during several years at boarding school. Influenced by authors such as Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Richardson, she began writing stories and poetry at a young age, and many of her early pieces parodied the dramatic popular novels and histories of the era.
In the early 1790s Austen started composing full-length novels, beginning with Sense and Sensibility. It was not yet finished when, in 1796, she began work on “First Impressions”, the book that would become Pride and Prejudice. The first of her novels to be completed, this became a family favourite and was offered by her father to the publisher Thomas Cadell in 1797, but was turned down. Undaunted, Austen in 1798 and 99 completed her third novel, first titled “Susan”, and then “Catherine”, but renamed Northanger Abbey when it was later published posthumously. The rights to this third novel were sold to Richard Crosby & Son in 1803, though they failed to publish it.
Despite this setback, Austen and her family persisted in seeking publication, and they offered Sense and Sensibility to Thomas Egerton, who had previously printed James and Henry Austen’s Oxford periodical The Loiterer. As was common during the period, Austen was asked to pay for publication on a commission basis: Egerton fronted the money and the author was only paid after the printing costs and publisher’s commission were recouped. Henry Austen wrote that Jane was so concerned about the book not meeting the printing costs that she “made a reserve from her very moderate income to meet the expected loss” (Gilson p. 8). Austen, as she would be with each of her novels, was heavily involved in editing and preparing the text for publication, and wrote to her sister in spring of 1811 that, “No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S. & S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child… I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to W.s. first appearance. Mrs. K. regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June” (Gilson p. 8).
Sense & Sensibility finally appeared in October 1811 as a three volume set in a print run of fewer than 1,000 copies, priced 15 shillings each. Despite Austen’s fears, it was a success, selling quickly and garnering positive reviews. The copy pictured above is a first edition in the original boards. This is a truly rare survival, as the board bindings produced by early nineteenth-century publishers were relatively flimsy and not originally intended to be permanent. Those who could afford it usually preferred to have the book bound in leather. Below, an example of the title page, with the anonymous attribution “By A Lady”:
Title page of the first edition of Sense & Sensibility.
The first edition was sold out by July 1813, and a second edition was published by Egerton in October of that year, with some corrections and changes, but also a number of textual errors, and it sold only slowly.
Austen’s second novel, Pride and Prejudice, was first published in January of 1813, also in three volumes by Egerton, in a print run that was likely 1500 copies.
Five copies were sent to the author, and on 29 January she wrote that “I have got my own darling child from London” (Gilson p. 24).
Below, an example of a first edition bound in contemporary tree calf, along with the title page. Pride and Prejudice was Austen’s bestselling book during her lifetime, and a second edition was published by Egerton in 1813 (it’s easy to tell the difference between the first and second editions because “second edition” is stated on the title page), as well as a third edition in 1817.
First edition of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (1813).
It is clear from her letters and other primary sources that Austen was serious about her writing and eager to be published. She established a routine for writing and was freed from much of the burden of housekeeping by her close female relatives. Austen also “dealt directly and firmly with her two publishers, Thomas Egerton and John Murray, complained when they were dilatory, and took a close interest in the progress of each of her publications, the costs of printing and paper (for which she was liable), and the copyrights and subsequent editions. She was not ashamed of meaning to make money” (ODNB).
Most tellingly, she carefully planned ahead for an additional three novels, ambitious narratives that would subvert the traditional storylines and sentiments to which her earlier books had adhered. Mansfield Park was begun in 1811 and finished in the summer of 1813, to be published in three volumes by Egerton in 1814. The print run was only 1,250 copies, with the publisher John Murray later expressing “astonishment that so small an edition of such a work should have been sent into the world” (Gilson p. 49). Pictured below is a copy in contemporary half calf with marbled boards:
First edition of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814).
Title page to the first edition of Mansfield Park.
At this time Austen was becoming unhappy with the Egerton firm, feeling ignored and hoping for larger royalties and greater control over her work. Most importantly, she had been unable to make editorial changes to later editions of her previous novels, since the copyrights belonged to the publisher, who could do with the texts as he wished. So she approached another publisher, John Murray, who offered to print the second edition of Mansfield Park along with the first edition of her fourth novel, Emma. This is the only one of Jane Austen’s novels to bear a dedication, to the Prince Regent, the arrangement of which generated a richly comic correspondence between the author and the Prince Regent’s librarian. Both books appeared in 1816, and unfortunately competed with one another, reducing the number of copies sold and forcing Murray to remainder 539 of the 2,000 copies of Emma. Below, a first edition of Emma in contemporary black half calf with marbled boards:
First edition of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816).
Title page to the first edition of Emma.
Unfortunately, this disappointment was the culmination of Austen’s literary career. In 1816 she completed Persuasion, the third of her planned novels, but she also began having back pains, and by autumn was suffering severely from what was probably Addison’s disease. She soldiered on, and in January 1817 began a new novel, Sanditon, though very little had been written by March, when she became too ill to continue. Austen died aged 41 on the morning of 18 July 1817, with her closest companion, her sister Cassandra, at her bedside. Two more novels, the recently completed Persuasion and the older work Northanger Abbey (her brother had recently repurchased the copyright from Crosby), were published posthumously as a set in 1818. This was the first time that Austen was credited as the author of any of her books, and it also included a biographical note by her brother Henry, which was lavish (most have felt overly so) in its praise. The copy below is in a contemporary binding of half calf with marbled boards:
First edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818).
Title page to the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Following this publication, Austen’s novels remained out of print for 12 years until the publisher Richard Bentley purchased the rights to all six books and in 1833 issued the first inexpensive editions, single volumes with an engraved frontispiece as illustration. His market was apparently the private buyer, as circulating libraries still had copies of the originals, and the lower cost allowed him to target the middle class. These early Bentley editions are more easily obtainable than true first editions of Austen’s books, and are very popular with collectors. Pictured below is the first Bentley edition of Mansfield Park in its original binding of purple calico with black labels to the spine. Like the first editions, Bentley’s editions were also available in more robust leather bindings, making these original, relatively fragile, cloth bindings uncommon.
First Richard Bentley edition of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1833).
Frontispiece to the first Bentley edition of Pride & Prejudice (1833). The Bentley editions were the first copies of any of Austen’s book to be illustrated.
Despite the Bentley editions, Austen remained a marginal author through much of the nineteenth century. It was not until the publication of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 that interest in her was renewed and the first serious literary analyses of her novels were published. In 1892 J. M. Dent published the first collected edition of her works to include critical commentary (pictured below is a set of the Dent editions illustrated by C. E. Brock). The first scholarly editions, edited by R. W. Chapman, were published in 1923. These became the standard for future study and placed Austen firmly within the canon.
The insistence from some quarters that Austen’s work is romantic escapism, light reading revolving around unimportant women’s interests such as dresses and balls, is far from the truth. Inspired by a wide-ranging English literary tradition that included non-fiction, serious novels, and dramatic fiction, Austen used her intellect and unique wit to subvert and parody contemporary literary styles. She experimented with a variety of subjects and formulas, constantly innovated, and creatively incorporated a range of earlier material into her own books.
Though she didn’t write directly about what some consider “serious subjects” such as war or politics, she engaged with important social issues from a female perspective, notably class distinctions, the gulf between manners and morality, religion and hypocrisy among the upper classes, and women’s dependence on men. And while she was later portrayed by her nephew as demure and hesitant to be published, she was in fact serious about her role as author, dealing with her male publishers firmly and directly, and involving herself in all aspects of the publishing process.
Her impact on the world of English letters has been justifiably significant, and her books continue to be as engaging, humorous, and thought-provoking as they were in her own time.
The J. M. Dent edition of the collected works of Jane Austen, the first edition illustrated by C. E. Brock (1907).
The standard bibliographies of Jane Austen are A Bibliography of Jane Austen by David Gilson (Oak Knoll Press, revised edition 1997) and Jane Austen:A Bibliography by Geoffrey Keynes (Nonesuch Press, 1929). Both are available from used booksellers on websites such as ABE.
Austen’s letters are available online. The text is that of the 1952 edition of the collected letters edited by R. W. Chapman, and is hosted by the University of Virginia Library.
There are only two conclusively identified portraits of Jane Austen taken from life, both by her sister Cassandra. The most famous is this pencil and watercolour sketch c. 1810, which is held by the National Portrait Gallery. (The other is of the back of her head, probably a joke on her sister’s part.)
The Bodleian recently acquired the last substantial Austen manuscript still in private hands, the unfinished novel The Watsons.
In this amusing clip from her recent documentary From Elegance to Decadance: The Age of the Regency, historian Lucy Worsley discusses Jane Austen, her relationship to politics, and the infamous visit to the Prince Regent’s palace.
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