The Conveyor

The Library has recently acquired an album of 89 coloured prints dating from the early 1820s. It may have been issued by William Darton Jr. (1781-1854) and his firm at Holborn Hill during the mid-1820s as a sample album to show potential customers examples of his work. It contains a small number of sheets originally issued in 1800 by William Darton Sr. (1755-1819);  11 harlequinades in unfolded sheets with the imprint of B. Tabart & Co., and some sheets bearing Darton Jr’s imprint with dates ranging from 1821 to 1824. This mix of imprints suggests that Darton Jr. inherited some of his father’s old stock upon his death, including some of Benjamin Tabart’s publications which William Sr. possibly acquired in 1811 when financial difficulties may have forced Tabart to sell off some of his stock.

The harlequinades are especially interesting as very few examples survive generally, and four of the eleven Tabart examples in this album are currently untraced elsewhere. There are certainly difficulties locating harlequinades in library and museum catalogues around the world as they can be treated equally as toys, books, ephemera or prints, but as some titles were not located by Marjory Moon in her bibliography of Tabart’s Juvenile Library it seems likely that some of the Bodleian copies may be unique survivals. It is also possible that these eleven titles represent Tabart’s entire output of harlequinades, but that is pure speculation.

Blue Beard. Sold by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robinson Crusoe. Sold by B. Tabart & Co. June 1. 1809.
Veroni or the novice of St. Marks. Published by B. Tabart & Co, June 1. 1809.
Mother Goose. Published by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st 1809.
Hop o’ my thumb. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 1st. 1810..
Black Beard the pirate. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st. 1809.
Parnell’s hermit. Published, by Tabart & Co., Jany. 31st. 1810.
Exile, as performed at the royal theatres. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Robin Hood. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809.
Polish tyrant. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., Aug. 1st. 1809.
A tale of mystery. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 25th, 1810.
Shelfmark: Vet. A6 c.118

The entire album will be available online in Summer 2009 as part of the John Johnson Collection’s Electronic Ephemera Project. Full records for the harlequinades are available now via OLIS.

The thirty Russian cartoons in the Curzon Collection are indicative of the prints favoured by collectors. From the collection of the Grand-Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail Mikhailovich, grandsons of Nicholas I, they passed into the hands of A.M. Broadley, whose collection was built initially from the sale of W. Fraser in 1901 and augmented by the finds of the Parisian art dealer Godefroy Mayer. Broadley’s collection was finally sold in 1916 to George, Marquis Curzon of Kedleston (1859-1925) who bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library.

In the Curzon prints, the palm of victory always belongs to the Russian peasant, distinguished by his moral values, guarantors of an empire ruled by divine right. A close second to him is the Cossack, symbol of Russian invincibility. These two are the standard bearers of patriotic glory, national unity, and Russian supremacy.

Importantly, the dating of images, made possible by publication announcements in the press and by permissions of the censor, allows us to detect a continuation of the caricature campaign throughout the period: the threat of a new invasion in 1813 and the uncertainties of the German campaign were exorcised by constant references to the victory of 1812. The body of the Curzon collection, which is in an optimal state of conservation, is partially composed of later impressions, from 1815 to 1818 judging by the watermarks.

– Dr. Marina Peltzer
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Sometimes the old things in the cellar come in handy after all.  I was just chatting to a colleague who asked, “Is there a way of finding out whether we have a picture, anywhere in the library, of William Wake?  There’s one at the National Portrait Gallery, but surely we have even an illustration in a book …?”

There is a way, but it is an old-fashioned one.  Periodically librarians go through the collections with an eye to their visual treats.  Someone had taken this to the extreme of having slips printed up with sections for the subject of the picture, the title of the book it is in, and the page.  They went through (how much of the collection? I can’t tell) and completed these slips, in beautiful blue fountain pen script.  The slips are arranged in two sets: topographical views and portraits. They are kept in boxes, about the size of a shoebox, stowed up on some high shelves in the bookstack.  So this is one of our Image Management Systems.

A reader was looking at a volume of broadside ballads, Wood 401, with a view to confirming whether the copy of “The wandering Jew’s chronicle” was really from 1634 as labelled in our main online catalogue (converted record).  This got me thinking again about the opportunities we might have to update the ballads database; so far we’ve investigated using a web service, mnemosyne, to link our ICONCLASS codes to a general index of codes, so linking our ballad woodcut material with emblems from other collections. But equally nice would be to allow people who are working on bibliographies of a particular ballad to link in to our examples — to form paths through the collection, that the simple browsing and indexing doesn’t really highlight, only exposes.

On Friday the British Printed Images pre-1700 Project and the CSB jointly hosted a workshop at Birkbeck College on cataloguing prints, to get guidance and report on progress of their web database of prints. So far they plan to have all the British Museum pre-1700 British prints in their online collection.

The main question for consideration, as it is for all cataloguers, was ”What are you cataloguing?”  This turns out to be a tricky one for prints. Are you cataloguing the printed page, the image (as a “work”, in the sense of the Platonic idea of the subject), or the uses of a single plate or woodblock? Where do you draw the line between a “variant” and a separate catalogue entry?  The example of the “headless horseman” was shown.  Someone remarked that maybe we should consider this a portrait of the horse!

There were good reasons, based on bibliographic research, for people wanting to know about the uses of a single plate through time, or the uses of each of the separate woodblocks that might be used together, or in different combinations, to create a title page border.

I visited the Ashmolean Museum print room today and saw an engraved animated alphabet, by the Master E.S. These are very large letters, and each has a theme; sometimes real but exotic animals (a leopard–a chimpanzee — how did this German fellow see these?) or fantastic animals, or human beings of various occupations and types. It was made about 1460. Apparently no single museum has a complete alphabet, but you could see all the letters if you travel to Oxford, Berlin, and Dresden. The letters are large — too large for a book, which makes you wonder what they were meant for. Also, what was the fascination with letters, such that they provide the theme for a cycle of prints, like the seasons? Anything to do with printing presses?