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 VI – Astronomy books (paperbacks and journals) that were not included in Catalogue XI is now available.
Also Bulletin VII, a collection of thirty-seven eighteenth and nineteenth century receipts is also now available
We hope you find something of interest…
Bulletin V is now available, click on the cover below – Costume, a prison memoir translated by Thomas Holcroft, flogging, selling hogs, militia, rioting, orphans, idiots, an extraordinary collection of ‘warning notices’ and more…
The latest bulletin is now available – click on the cover below – it consists of fifty printed handkerchiefs, (well forty-nine and a bib), with a range of subjects covered.
Often quite large, these handkerchiefs record many of the major events of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though they originated in the seventeenth century, with the earliest dated surviving plate printed handkerchief being John Adam’s map of England, produced by William Berry in 1685/6 (Schoeser, pg 4).
The advantages of a map printed on silk versus a map printed on paper are obvious, especially for a large city like London, where size would be an important issue. Travellers in London could also purchase handkerchiefs showing Hackney cab and coach fares (Schoeser, page 7).
Printed handkerchiefs also had a number of other roles. As well as being decorative and informative they were also educational, entertaining, often with children’s nursery rhymes and caricatures, satirical, political (there is a wonderful example commemorating Peterloo – alas not available here!) and also as souvenirs (Royalty being particularly popular).
Schoeser’s Printed Handkerchiefs, a booklet published to accompany an exhibition of handkerchiefs at the Museum of London in 1988, is an excellent short introduction to the subject.
The best collection of recent times was Christopher Lennox-Boyd’s, some of which was sold at Christies in March 2008, including a copy of the London map in the bulletin and the Peterloo handkerchief mentioned above
Bulletin III – More recent acquisitions, including an A.L.S by Florence Nightingale, a cheque signed by Charles Dickens, a complete set of the first series of Anarchy and much (well a little bit) more!
In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the York book fair, we present Bulletin II, nine items, (all purchased at the fair), including a broadside on the treadmill (the original one in gaol and not the the modern one in the gym), a prescription signed by Guillotin (better, but incorrectly, known as the inventor of the Guillotine) and a warrant signed by George IV and Melbourne committing a patricidal vicar to a mental asylum
Possibly too lazy to compile full catalogues, (which compared to many in the trade are only short lists anyway), here at ZHQ we have decided to embark on a new feature – which we have decided to call ‘Bulletins’.
These will be short lists, (yes, even shorter than the catalogues), of recent acquisitions and possibly some brief thematic lists (presuming we do actually acquire some books in the near future), which we hope will appear regularly and be of some interest to someone… With that in mind, behold the link to the first one!
Including food stamps, broadsides (one unrecorded), Shakespeare and Garibaldi and documents organising Somerset with fears of Napoleonic invasion
