Category Archives: Books

Bulletin XXIV

Bulletin XXIV arrives – mainly letters by some of the protagonists of some of the revolutions of 1848, including Kossuth and Louis Blanc. Also included are interesting documents relating to British volunteers for Garibaldi and a document for Italian political prisoners which attracted the attention of Mazzini. Click on the cover below to view

Bulletin XXIV

Bulletin XXI

We haven’t posted here for a long time, as nobody reads it, but will endeavour to post more regularly. A new bulletin is available, now up to number twenty-one, a short one with twenty recent acquisitions including mining disasters, shipwrecks, riots, demonstrations and gold printing – click on the cover below…

Bulletin XXI – Recent Acquisitions

New Year – New Bulletin

Happy new year to everyone

The first Bulletin of the year, on the first day of the year, is Bulletin XVIII, a collection of trade cards and tickets, illustrating the commercial and cultural life of mid-nineteenth century Glasgow.

Bulletin XVIII

Almost from the cradle to the grave, we find amongst others, trade cards for tailors, sail makers, shoe makers, boiler makers, taverns, cabinet makers, confectioners, lithographers, painters, paper hangers and undertakers.

Cultural pursuits include musical concerts, art exhibitions, soirees, educational classes, philosophy and art classes.

Glasgow was effectively the Second City of the Empire, with several industries at varying times employing large numbers of people, including the linen industry, locomotive manufacturing and of course shipbuilding (See Meighan, Glasgow – A History)

Catalogue XIII – William Morris

Catalogue XIII – The Politics of William Morris and Related Items is now available. Ninety items, with some rare Morris forgeries and sophistications by Buxton Forman, including items known in only a single copy to LeMire.

The story of Forman and Wise is well known within book circles, with the classic expose, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets  by Carter and Pollard, followed (much) later by Barker and Collins’ Sequel to an Enquiry and then Collins’ biography of the two, The Two Forgers.

One example of a Forman sophistication is item 45 in the above catalogue, Morris’ Chants for Socialists. This is a Buxton Forman wrapper forgery.

Forman states that copies “are occasionally found in a red wrapper … but they were not originally issued in wrappers”. Quaritch catalogue 926, 1973, item 88, offered two copies of this pamphlet (one with the forged wrapper and one without), and a three page autograph note by Buxton Forman explaining the history of the wrappers; the wrapper and this note are reproduced in Collins’ The Two Forgers (plates 37 and 38). Barker and Collins state that “no copies thus bound have been located except one of the two sold in the last Forman sale at Sotheby’s, 12 April 1972, with the note quoted above” (Barker and Collins, A Sequel to An Inquiry, page 204) [and subsequently appearing in the above Quaritch catalogue]

The same two copies and Forman’s note (now owned by John Collins) were sold at the Schimmel Forgery Collection sale at Bonhams on the 23rd May, 2012 (Lot 208, selling for £437).

Barker and Collins conclude that this is “a chimaera, with a false wrapper, intended to ‘improve’ a genuine pamphlet”

So a very uncommon pamphlet, probably only the second known copy

Bulletin VIII

Bulletin VIII is now available – to view please click on the cover below. A short bulletin of ten items made up of membership cards and tickets, including a ticket to the coronation of George IV and a membership card of O’Connell’s Repeal Association.

We are hoping to have a new politics catalogue ready soon, as well as a cartes de visite catalogue

Bulletin VIII