Category Archives: Bindings

Marks in Books 7: Owners Repair Their Books Published by the Newberys

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The Toy-Shop. London: E. Newbery, [ca. 1791]. (Cotsen 5610, copy 2)

This copy of The Toy-Shop is a good example of a book that has almost been read to death.  Who was responsible?  It’s natural to pin the blame for the book’s poor condition on the owners who wrote their names in it.  But H. and John Beague were probably just two in a succession of owners.  It’s possible that the damage was done by one of the owners who didn’t identify him or herself or whoever scribbled in pencil throughout the book–possibly as late as the nineteenth century.  Maybe it was more than one bad actor.The binding of the The Toy Shop should be a wreck, but the Dutch gilt paper over boards is in better shape than the text. Really well read copies of eighteenth-century juveniles bound this way often have naked spines, exposing the stitched signatures below.  Where the paper covering the spine is torn away, you can see how thin it is..

Front board and oversewn spine. Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales. London: E. Newbery, 1790. (Cotsen 5505)

Some young readers actually cared enough about their books to reinforce the bindings, but there’s no way of knowing whether it was the owner or a kind sister or mother who stopped what they were doing and repaired the book.  This binding is so worn that it’s impossible to tell what the original color of the paper covering the boards was.  The spine is completely gone, although some of the original stitching holding the two boards together is still intact.  Someone did a rough-and-ready job of securing them so they wouldn’t fall off.  The repair is not neat or precise, but the collection of then popular fairy tales by Mme. D’Aulnoy and others can still be opened and read.

The book is a 1790 reprint of a title issued nearly twenty years before.  The engraver’s signature is long gone and the images are so worn that they have been touched up in places. On the inside there have been additional repairs to keep the pages from falling out.

(Cotsen 5505)

(Cotsen 5505)

The first owners of Cotsen 5505 that can be traced lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.  In 1854 this copy of Mother Bunch’s Tales was signed by  G. M. Richmond  (George Martin Richmond, a businessman in Providence, Rhode Island) and he gave it to his adult daughter Ellen in 1857.  Nearly twenty years later Ellen presented it to her married daughter Alice.   Did one of them sew the boards back on or had that been done long before it came into the family?  There must be a story about this book, but it is impossible to tell from the information Jill Shefrin discovered in the course of researching the people who owned Cotsen’s collection of Newbery juveniles.The third example below must have been read until the boards had fallen off, but someone cared enough about it to oversew the binding with stout thread with an interlocking stitch.   Other eighteenth-century children’s books in the collection have been repaired the same way, although I don’t have a list of them.

Front board and spine. Histories, or, Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose. 5th ed. Salisbury: B. Collins, 1769. (Cotsen 25150)

.You can get a glimpse of the stitching on the inside as well.

(Cotsen 25150)

This Mother Goose’s Tales belonged at one time to a Mary Barrett and we know from the number of books surviving with her signature that she must have had a pretty large nursery library.  You can see that the pages are in danger of coming detached from the text block and that someone has neatly pinned them together near the gutter. Other groups of pages have been treated the same way.  Pinning pages is another homemade repair I’ve seen more than once, but I have no idea how to date or localize the pins.  I assume they are too short to have been the kind of pins women used to attach pieces of their clothing together.  If only I could find a passage in some eighteenth-century children’s book that describes an eager little reader using her needle to fix up an old favorite…

Picture Bibles for Children from the 1760s: John Newbery versus Edward Ryland in the Marketplace

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Everyone has heard of John Newbery, the first publisher of the modern children’s book and namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.  It is more or less taken for granted that he set the gold standard for children’s books of his own times because of his success in associating his name with quality.

There was someone who made more elegant and expensive books for young readers than John Newbery,  but his career is not discussed in the standard histories of English children’s books.  Only a few collectors know the name of engraver Edward Ryland, whose shop was at No. 67 in the Old Bailey and his beautiful books are highly desirable and expensive when they come on the market.  This post will highlight his first publication for young readers: An Abridgement of Scripture History Designed for the Amusement and Improvement of Children: wherein the most Striking Actions in the Old Testament are Made Plain to the Youngest Capabilities (1765).  Cotsen is lucky enough to have two copies: a rebound one with plain engravings and another one with hand-colored engravings bound with its companion volume on the New Testament in an edition binding of gold tooled red leather.

The front board of Cotsen 1907. The volume with both titles illustrated with a total of 124 engravings was available for 5 shillings. Newbery’s little Bible abridgment had sixty-four relief metal cuts, was half as tall and cost six pence.

Each of the Ryland Bible abridgments also boasted a handsome “book plate”  for a young owner to proudly inscribe her name, as Miss Elizabeth Bentham did.

Here is the title page spread, with an allegorical frontispiece designed by the well-known artist Samuel Wale and engraved by the equally famous Charles Grignion.  The description below the picture explains that Science, the lady in the cloak, is leading the young Bishop of Osnaburg to Wisdom seated on the dias.  The toddler bishop was the second son of George III, Prince Frederick, Duke of Albany and York.  The book’s dedicatee, he was twoish when it was published.  He was intended for a career in the military…

Wale and Grignion’s engravings measure 75 x 88 mm or 3 x 3.5 inches and there is one on every page.

Plate II “The History of the Fall.” This and the following image are more or less actual size. (Cotsen 1907)

Plate VII “The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah.” (Cotsen 1907)

For purposes of comparison, here are two additional plates from Cotsen’s other copy, whose engraved plates are not hand-colored.

Plate IV “The History of the Flood, or General Deluge.” An Abridgement of Scripture History… London: Edwd. Ryland, MDCCLXV [1765]. (Cotsen 357)

Plate V “The Confusion of Tongues” (aka the tower of Babel). (Cotsen 357)

Put John Newbery’s History of the Holy Bible Abridged (1764) next to Ryland’s and the differences in production values are immediately obvious.  Newbery’s volume measures just 10 x 7 centimeters as opposed to the 18  of Ryland’s.  Newbery’s History has 61 soft metal relief cuts, but they are tiny.  At just 45 x 35 mm, the quality of the cutting is workmanlike.   Reproduced larger than actual size here, their shortcomings are cruelly exposed.

The Fall of Man from The Holy Bible Abridged. London: John Newbery, 1764. (Cotsen 34087)

The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Cotsen 34087)

Then as now, consumers got what they paid for.  But far more people in the 1760s could afford six pence for a Newbery Bible abridgment that would fit in a pocket.  The Newbery was cheap enough that some families could put down the money for a copy for each of their children (subscribers’ lists often reveal several children with the same last name at the same address).   Far fewer could invest in a children’s Bible designed to flatter a little prince.  And that may go a long way to explain why Edward Ryland’s children’s books survive in so few copies that almost no one knows how splendid they were…