British Library Journal (volume 6, number 1, spring 1980)

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The Ayrton Papers: music in London, 1786-1858
(1980-04)
Willetts, Pamela
RECENTLY acquired papers of William Ayrton (1777-1858), musician and critic, sometime Director of the Italian opera at the King's Theatre, and editor of the Harmonicon, proved to be the residue of the collection of Ayrton's correspondence and papers presented by Miss Phyllis Ayrton, his great-granddaughter, in 1964. The new collection consists mainly of family papers, but, owing to the wide social and musical connections of Ayrton's father and those of the Arnold family into which he married, these touch on many notable personalities and events. The centre is mainly London, but there is interesting material concerning Cambridge and other places mentioned in a travel journal of 1786 written by Ayrton's uncle, William Ayrton of Ripon.
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Reflections on librarianship: observations arising from examination of the Garrick Collection of old plays in the British Library
(1980-04)
Anderson, Dorothy
IN April 1980 it will be two hundred years since David Garrick's Collection of Old Plays was transferred from his house in the Adelphi to the British Museum. On a hand cart, so it is said, the volumes in their special binding, with the initials DG entwined on the spines, were carried, with an escort of two Museum Trustees and the Keeper, the Reverend Samuel Harper, in attendance. From the special bookcase in which it had been housed, where Garrick had preserved its integrity for some thirty years, the Collection passed as a bequest to the nation into the care of the Trustees and staff of the British Museum.
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Woodcroft's heritage: the collections at the Science Reference Library
(1980-04)
Hall, R. M. S.
ANY considerable library has a character all its own, a character usually reflecting the disproportionate influence of a few outstanding men who have shaped its development. The Science Reference Library, which celebrated its 125th anniversary on 5 March 1980, is no exception for, primus inter pares, it is the library of Bennet Woodcroft. Woodcroft was an extraordinary man even by the standards of the mid-Victorians. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he had been a manufacturer, a patentee, and Professor of Machinery at University College, London, before joining the Patent Office in 1852. He then stage-managed the evolution of the Patent Office into its modern form, established the published series of British patents, collected and encouraged others to collect historic technological material which helped to form the nucleus of the Science Museum, was responsible for the deposit of sets of British patent specifications in regional libraries, and built, equipped, and was the first librarian of the Patent Office Library. Most if not all of his later public life stemmed from a central belief that the record of invention was an invaluable source of technical information. He was a tireless advocate of the free and immediate availability of this technical information to all who could use it.
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Department of Printed Books: acquisitions from the Broxbourne Library
(1980-04)
Archibald, Jean
;
Hellinga, Lotte
;
Paisey, D. L.
;
Rhodes, D. L.
;
Simoni, A. E. C.
Albert Ehrman was born in London on 6 February 1890. He was educated at Charterhouse and served as a Territorial in the Royal Fusiliers during the First World War. He succeeded his father in the family business and became a merchant in industrial diamonds. During a holiday at Eastbourne in 1920, Ehrman started to assemble what was to become one of the most important private collections of books in this country, with the purchase of a 1472 Venice book in its original binding. Albert Ehrman was for long in the habit of giving the British Museum a book every year on the occasion of his birthday. His son has proved no less generous. In 1977 John Ehrman presented the British Library with a superb collection of incunabula and sixteenth-century printed books, and allowed the Department of Printed Books to acquire several more treasures from his father's collection at, for the Library, advantageous prices.
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A new account of Waterloo: a letter home from Private George Hemingway of the Thirty-third Regiment of Foot
(1980-04)
Waley, Daniel
ACCOUNTS by participants of the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo are not numerous and most of those written by British ones were elicited some twenty years after the event by the questionnaire of the enterprising Captain Siborne. Surviving accounts of Waterloo written by private soldiers must be very rare indeed. The Department of Manuscripts has recently acquired a vivid description of the battle, written two months later by George Hemingway of Halifax; the letter (Add. MS. 59892 G) is a gift from Mrs. K. Dibnah of Hollym, Withernsea, a relative of the sender and recipients. George Hemingway was an uncle of Mrs. Dibnah's grandmother and the letter had been in her family since 1815.
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Recent acquisitions: Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books: manuscript acquisitions, 1975
(1980-04)
Recent acquisitions: Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books: manuscript acquisitions, 1975.
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Bookbinding practices of the Hering family, 1794-1844
(1980-04)
Marks, Judith Goldstein
THE English poet and essayist Robert Southey, describing, in the guise of a Spaniard, the manners and morals of his countrymen, noted in 1807, that 'there is, perhaps, no country in which the passion for collecting rarities is so prevalent as in England.' This passion was turned by large numbers of affluent nobles and gentlemen towards bibliophily and the amassing of large libraries. The collectors were roughly divided into two types: those with a disciplined and scholarly approach and those who collected in the abstract sense, among whom 'there had sprung up a kind mania for purchasing black letter volumes, although the purchasers themselves, from year's end to year's end, did not read, far less write, fifty pages consecutively. Among such people, it must be owned, the bibliographical propensity though it had, indirectly, good results, was nearly as absurd as the ci-devant ''tulip-madness" in Holland. To enhance these treasures there arose a widespread demand for binding and rebinding which native craftsmen were unable to meet, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for according to John Henry Bohn, an immigrant bookbinder from Germany who set up shop in London in 1795, 'at this time bookbinding in this country had fallen to a low ebb, and the advent of the German workmen was generally welcomed'.
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Department of Printed Books: Halthasar Bekker: some recent additions
(1980-04)
Simoni, Anna E. C.
In the 1978 Spring issue of this journal Dr. Hans Henning recalled that executions for witchcraft continued in Germany and Switzerland until 1782. If they came to an end then, and well before that date in England and some other countries, this is due in no small measure to Balthasar Bekker and his epoch-making book De betoverde weereld, first published at Leeuwarden and Amsterdam in 1691, 1693. It was translated into English in 1695 as The World Bewitched, into French as Le Monde enchante (1694), and into Germanas Die bezauherte Welt (c. 1695). It also caused a storm of controversy and cost Bekker his position as minister of the Dutch Reformed Church at Amsterdam - though without loss of income. Yet in the end his compassion for persecuted old women and his defence of God-given reason as a necessary part of religion, of equal importance with faith itself, carried the day.
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Vignettes in early nineteenth-century London editions of Mozart's operas
(1980-04)
King, Alec Hyatt
ON 21 June 1737 the royal assent was given to a measure entitled: An Act to explain and amend so much of an Act, made in the Twelfth Year of the Reign of Queen Anne, intituled, An Act for reducing the Laws relating to Rogues, Vagabonds, sturdy Beggars, and Vagrants, into one Act of Parliament: for the more effectual punishing such Rogues, Vagabonds, sturdy Beggars, and Vagrants, and sending them whither they ought to be sent, as relates to common Players of Interludes.' Such an Act may seem rather remote from the subject of this article. But it was a long-lived measure, and some seventy years later had two important indirect results in connection with Mozart's operas. For the Act ensured that, when these operas began to receive their earliest professional performances in England, they were originally staged in the finest opera house in London, and consequently were accompanied by an edition of the music which matched the social milieu and is of considerable historical, bibliographical, and iconographical interest.
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British Library Journal (volume 6, number 1, spring 1980)

British Library Journal (volume 6, number 1, spring 1980)

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