Bell's Poets Exhibition

Bell’s Edition 

The Poets of Great Britain Complete, from Chaucer to Churchill 

(109 Volumes).

Further to our previous post, readers of this blog now have an opportunity to see Bell's wonderful edition for themselves – at the University of Tasmania Library, Newnham campus – for a limited time. The Library is open seven days a week (afternoons only on Saturday and Sunday) and our exhibition is opposite the enquiry desk on the ground floor.

There are many remarkable things about this edition:

• Their diminutive size (12.5 x 8cm).
• The quality of the typography, printing, binding and illustrations.
• Their significance in the history of the British publishing industry.
• Their survival intact as a rare complete set after nearly 250 years of use, including 100 years on the shelves of a public library.

And a full appreciation of their beauty can only be gained from seeing them.

As an aside, the Bell's Poets are perfectly suited to display in our handsome travelling cabinet so superbly constructed by Tony Mitchell of TJM Woodturning and Joinery. We thank Arts Tasmania, and particularly the Lynne Stacpoole Caring for Your Collection grants program, for funding the travelling cabinet, which has more than earned its keep over the past three years.

We can enthusiastically recommend this grants program as an invaluable support for cultural heritage groups wishing to purchase capital items for the preservation or display of objects within museums and collections. The 2018 Grants round is currently open with a closing date of 1 October 2018.

BELL’S POETS (2)

Bell's Milton volumes

Bell’s Edition – The Poets of Great Britain Complete, from Chaucer to Churchill.

In September 2016 we published a post on what we’d discovered about this set of 109 miniature volumes (12.5cm by 8cm), and promised more of their story: their provenance and what the volumes tell us about their making.

As a result of subsequent exploration we prepared an exhibition, which can now be seen at the University of Tasmania Library in Newnham.

What follows are images and text from that exhibition, and further information kindly supplied by Professor Thomas Bonnell. It was his 2008 authoritative text, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810 (OUP), that informed the earlier post.



Acquisition
First, a little more on their acquisition. No early Account Book of the Launceston Mechanics’ Institute survives, but there is a summary of expenditures up to July 1844 published in the Launceston Examiner (Aug 7, 1844, p.2). It shows £10 being ‘forwarded to England for books and periodicals’ in the March of 1843 and of 1844. These, and some purchases from local sources, were to supplement the donations to the library by a number of the founding LMI members, including Breton, Aikenhead, Henty, Kenworthy, Oakden, Sherwin and Gleadow, as well as by benefactors such as their Patron Sir John Franklin and Lady Franklin. The Annual Report for 1844 shows that Bell’s Poets was among the purchases made in 1843.

Bookplates
Every tiny volume, apart from two, has its LMI bookplate.  These are usually annotated with the LMI librarian’s catalogue numbers, of which there are up to four between 1845 and 1880 as the collection was progressively re-organised according to changing systems. However we noticed that these were pasted over an earlier bookplate, and in the two instance that were missed, the underlying plate was revealed.

Wright's Bookplate

Joseph William Wright, from a wealthy Ulster family whose crest appears on the bookplate, was a successful Dublin solicitor, born in 1754 in County Antrim. Later in his career he appears to have taken up a senior government position and moved to London. Although he died in Dublin (in 1825), we are presuming that this complete set of Bell’s Poets was sold in London by a bookseller to an agent buying books for the LMI. Whether there were owners before or after Wright up to 1843 is still a mystery.

Paper
The little volumes were very well produced, with paper, printing and bindings of which John Bell was justifiably proud.

Watermark

The paper used for these volumes has dark ridges running horizontally and translucent lines running vertically. It has been made by hand from cotton waste. This material was broken down to make a slurry of fibres, a thin layer of which was pressed onto fine wires, and then dried. It was during this process that a watermark and other identifying features were incorporated into the paper.

From these we can learn that the volumes are octodecimo, that is, each printed sheet was folded into 18 before being stitched and bound into the volume, and that the London papermaker Hugh Bennett produced it.




Printing
The volumes were printed in Edinburgh by one of the finest printers in Britain: Gilbert Martin and Sons at the Apollo Press. Apart from remoteness from London and delays in transport caused by French privateers plying the Channel, the Apollo Press disastrously burnt down in July 1778, and many sheets printed for Bell were destroyed.  Bell’s promise of publishing a volume a week fell well behind schedule, but such was his resilience and energy that 109 volumes appeared in approximately six years despite these many setbacks.

Engravings
Each volume carried a fine engraving on its opening pages that illustrates a scene in the poetry to follow. These are highly stylised by modern standards, but some were arrestingly dramatic, or evoked the period of the poet, like this one for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

They were devised by leading artists of the period and engraved by the best craftsmen Bell could employ. These included Edwards, Mortimer, Grignion, Stothard and Heath. (A full list is given in Bonnell’s Most Disreputable Trade.)

And at the opening of the first volume ascribed to each of his chosen fifty poets there was a portrait of that poet. Some of these were modelled on busts in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, and others on paintings in the library of the Earl of Chesterfield.

This one, of Dryden, was representative of the way Bell attempted to associate his series with was most prestigious in the literary and artistic world.

Binding
The fine binding of these volumes, ornamented in gold leaf, is characteristic of the period. This set’s covering is known as ‘tree-calf’ because of its distinctive pattern. The gold design, a vase with four circles framing it, was individually hand stamped on the leather, as was the running number in the sequence of 109 volumes. On the volume illustrated here there is evidence of the numbers and the decoration not being stamped squarely. Perhaps the work of an apprentice?

On the red leather squares the lettering is more even; these were block stamped separately, then pasted onto the spine. Gold leaf lines between designs and around the cover were applied by patterned wheels. Gold leaf was even scored diagonally into the edges of the covers.

Endpapers
Purchasers paid extra for marbled endpapers (coloured sheets inside the covers). These attractive patterns are made by stirring patches of paint on a liquid ‘size’, then placing the endpaper sheets on it to pick up a pattern unique to that volume. The original owner, Joseph William Wright, pasted his bookplate on the opening endpaper, and the LMI pasted one over it.

Editions
The publication of the whole series was spread out over a period from April 1777 to May 1783, by which time Bell was already bringing out second editions to replace sold-out stock. He continued reprinting his very successful series until he sold the business in 1795.

Typically, sets of Bell’s Poets include a mixture of editions. The LMI library’s set includes first, second and later editions, the latest volume being dated 1788. At this stage Bell was still in control of maintaining the range and quality of his editions. Below are the title page and half-title for Dryden’s works, showing that it is the second edition of 1784 (with the LMI stamp obscuring other publication details), while the half-title remains as the original purchaser saw it.

Sources

The creators of this blog wish to acknowledge Professor Thomas Bonnell as their most significant source of information, especially The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810 (OUP).

This book also pays tribute to numbers of other British publishers who participated in an upsurge of national spirit in the re-evaluation of English poetry as rivalling the Classics of antiquity.
Professor Bonnell has also confirmed in private correspondence that this LMI set is bound by Bell’s own binder, and gave valuable information about the printing of Bell’s Poets from a friend, Professor David Vander Muelen of the University of Virginia.

Post contributed by Mike McCausland

The Treasure Within 1 : Bell’s Poets

Among the LMI Collection’s treasures is a cluster of little gems, a set of very small, uniformly bound volumes: all 109 of them. 

Ten of LMI’s set of 109 pocket-sized Bell’s Poets volumes; 30cm ruler resting on top.

They have an intriguing past, not only in the history of London book production and bookselling, but in the air of mystery surrounding their acquisition by the Launceston Mechanics’ Institute in the second year of its life. Their collective name is Bell’s Poets, or as their richly illustrated title pages announce: Bell’s Edition – The Poets of Great Britain Complete, from Chaucer to Churchill.

Vignette of the author and half-title page for #52 in the series: Jonathan Swift, Vol I

(the quotation from ‘Corinna’ reads: ‘But Cupid with a Satyr comes; Both softly to the Cradle creep.’)

The ambitious goal of its founders for the Mechanics’ Institute was to make it a force for enlightenment that would attract the general public, and most particularly artisans, tradesmen, practical working men who might otherwise spend their time and money on frivolous entertainments, or worse still, drink. The greatest emphasis initially of these nineteenth-century social reformers was upon lectures and intellectually stimulating activities for larger audiences, but an accessible library was an essential component too. Scientific apparatus, natural history specimens and museum items were soon to follow.

In the few months following its founding meeting in March 1842 the Institute came to include many of Launceston’s leading citizens: Police Magistrate WH Breton, the Rev Charles Price, Rev John West, Rev. Dr Browne, Dr Grant, VW Giblin, James Robertson, Thomas Button and William Henty among others, whose donations put together an initial collection of books and periodicals. In the report from the Board of Management at the end of 1842 the Secretary (and Librarian) Mr TJ Connor noted 170 volumes. By October 1843 this had risen through donations not only by members but by others such as its patron Sir John Franklin, Lady Jane Franklin, and James Aikenhead, the proprietor of the Launceston Examiner. To these were added periodicals, including current newspapers from within the colony and elsewhere and by the purchase of the Penny, Blackwoods and Family Magazines and Chambers Edinburgh Journal.

It is in the Annual Report in October 1844 that alongside the donation by members Dr Kenworthy (of Lardner's Encyclopedia, 109 vols.) and Mr Oakden (8 volumes of Shakespeare’s works) that the first purchases of books are recorded. They are headed by: Novels of Sir Walter Scott (48 vols.), Bell’s Poets (109 vols.) and British Essayists (40 vols.) The cost altogether does not appear to be great, as the financial summary for the year has two listings of ‘Books as pr acct’, for £12.6.0d and £1.1.6d. By whom these accounts were presented, and whether they were local, wider colonial or London-based is not known. The partial unfolding of that story will wait for another post.

The early donations and purchases show a desire to provide a foundation library of reference for members, especially through the Lardner’s Encyclopedia volumes for information and the Bell’s British Poets for the best in literature, where it took its place beside works of Shakespeare, Scott and Byron, the latter two being the towering British literary figures of the earlier Nineteenth Century. 

It is not so easy now to recognise how pre-eminent poetry was in the canons of English literature from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, but there is no doubt that for the citizens of Van Diemen’s Land making connection to the finest cultural artefacts of the mother country, poetry had a central place. To have so encyclopedic a representation of English poetry in their library was a way of ‘covering the field’. It is particularly notable that in the next 20 years, during which the library grew to over 4,000 volumes, Bell’s Poets served as the core, a form of collective anthology to which specifically desired authors were added. The poets included by Bell were not in general represented in future purchases or the increasingly scarce donations.

So when and where did the idea of producing the works of the leading British poets in sets of pocket-sized volumes emerge?  The story is told in a fine history of an aspect of late eighteenth-century publishing, Thomas F. Bonnell’s 2008 study: The Most Disreputable Trade – Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765-1810 (OUP).

A tradition of publishing the most famous of Greek and Roman authors spread almost universally throughout Europe with the dissemination of the technology of printing in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries. Accompanying the exuberant spirit of the Renaissance, too, came a growing pride in national literatures in Italy, France, Spain and, somewhat belatedly, in England for its greatest poets, dramatists and, later still, its prose writers.

Libraries of the aristocratic, the wealthy and the educated became filled with locally produced works, finely printed and often bound by the owners uniformly according to their own tastes, furnished with their family crests and bookplates. It was yet another step taken in the mid- to later Eighteenth Century for British publishers to bring out ‘pocket’ editions sufficiently small for them to be carried while travelling by coach or on board ship. Sometimes the publisher or bookseller would provide a custom-made travelling case for these miniature libraries.

The earliest in this mode of publication came from Glasgow with Robert and Andrew Foulis in 1765, followed soon after by William Creech and John Balfour in Edinburgh in 1773. The market was further stimulated by a change in copyright law in 1774 that no longer gave privilege to the old guard of London publishers who had claimed ‘the classics’ as their own territory.

An enterprising young London bookseller, John Bell, previously shut out by established rivals in the trade, saw his opportunity. Working with probably the best craftsman printers in Edinburgh, Gilbert Martin and his sons at the Apollo Press, Bell began his serial edition of the British poets in 1776. Starting with Milton, and working his way steadily through a further 49 earlier and later poets, he concluded with fourteen volumes of Chaucer in 1783.  Each one was furnished with its own engraving illustrating a few lines from one of the poems included, and a vignette of each poet at the start of the volume or subseries of his works.

Of the 50 poets featured, all but three, Chaucer, Spenser and Donne, flourished from the mid-Seventeenth to the mid-Eighteenth Century. Many of the remaining 47 are now largely forgotten, but at the time were popular and eminent enough to command an audience, and not just amongst the wealthy.  These works attracted sales from an educated middle-class and less affluent readership.

Bell’s terms were:  

Complete sets, 109 vols, neatly sewed and titled, £8 8s

Ditto, bound, calf, gilt and registered,   £13 13s.

Ditto, calf, gilt, elegantly marbled, and registered, £16 16s.

Ditto, superbly in Morocco, gilt edges, £3 3s.

It cost a further £2 2s. for a special case, ingeniously designed to look like two folio volumes (ref. Bonnell, p. 125).

Top half of an original folio case opened to show the first 52 volumes of Bell’s British Poets

Source: The Consecrated Eminence.The Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College

These prices were certainly very reasonable, and opened what was otherwise an esoteric field to a whole new audience. Bell claimed the price of any one volume sewn in its plain wrapper at 1s 6d was a quarter the cost of any other publisher’s. And in the prospectus, like any bold entrepreneur, he vaunted ‘every page of the work may be admired as a typographical picture which displays at once the divinity and perfections in the art of printing.’ A more moderate twentieth-century estimate still praises it highly, however, by saying: ‘the type, though small, was clear and well spaced, the letterpress title-pages handsomely laid out, the engraved half-titles smartly conceived, and the portraits uncommonly well engraved from good originals.’ (both quotations taken from Stanley Morison, ‘John Bell: A Note Addressed to the Members of the First Edition Club, in Morison’s John Bell, Cambridge, Mass.,1960; quoted in Bonnell, p.130.)

It is clear why the LMI members should think of a set of Bell’s Poets to grace their new library. The set they bought has a mixture of the first and second editions, as well as later editions up to 1788, and the quality appears to the next-to-highest available.

So where did they acquire it, and what do the volumes themselves now in the Mechanics’ Institute Collection tell us about this phenomenon of British publishing and what was available to Launceston readers in the first half of the Nineteenth Century?  A later post will elaborate.

 Contributed by Mike McCausland