Lines from the Library

Time now for a quick lesson on finding books in Fales through BobCat.

I assume everyone has BobCat bookmarked. For those who don't, click here:

http://www.bobcat.nyu.edu/

Which takes you here:

Click on the big blue ball to begin your journey.

Step One to finding things in Fales is to use the pull down menu to select "Fales/Special Collections" from the list of library locations.

From this point on your searches will only turn up items held in Fales. There may be copies in other library locations in addition to the copy in Fales -- we have some overlap with the New-York Historical Society, whose holdings are also listed in BobCat.

Step Two for the quick and easy finding of things in BobCat is to enter something in the search box. If you're looking for a specific title, go ahead and use the default Phrase Search. For instance, if you want to know if Fales has a copy of The Bending of a Twig by Desmond Coke, just do a Phrase Search and you will discover that we have six copies from various years.

If you are trying to figure out what we have on any given subject, I suggest doing a Keyword Search. Click on the blue box on the left side of the screen that says "Keyword Search" and you'll end up here:

To prepare for a talk I gave to a class working on Uncle Tom's Cabin I wanted to find out what other relevant materials we have in Fales, so I plugged in "slavery" in the search box and chose "All Keywords" from the menu.

By choosing All Keywords, BobCat will turn up items that have the word "slavery" anywhere in the record, whether in the title, the author, or a subject heading. Here's what this basic keyword search turned up:

This search turned up 163 records. The first one in the list is from 1968, but I'm most interested in items from the 1840s and 1850s, which leads us to...

Step Three: Sort your results.

In the image above, I drew a red circle around one of my favorite functions in BobCat, the Sort Results button. I use this all the time.

When you click on that button you get a screen that gives you a few sort options. You can sort your results by Title, Author, or Date and you can sort your results in Ascending or Descending order. The only drawback is that you cannot sort a list of more than 3,000 records. Alas!

After instructing BobCat to sort my slavery records by Date in Ascending order, it was very easy to skim through the records until I hit a rich vein of 1840s material. Here's just a small sample of that sorted list:

This is the method to follow if you want to find out what, if anything, Fales has on your topic. This is how I discovered that the earliest book on cheese in Fales is A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons (1820).

It is somewhat absurd that I have gotten this far into the blogoshphere without talking about the greatest strength of the Fales Library -- our astonishigly fabulous collection of Victorian novels.

The Fales Library holds an astonishing collection of Victorian novels.

Here are some pictures:

We have at least 20 different editions of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, including at least 2 sets in original parts.

And who doesn't like Vanity Fair? Here it is in its original parts publication in yellow paper wrappers. We also have everything else Thackeray wrote.

While you might be able to find copies of these first two lovelies in other libraries, you would have a harder time tracking down this one:

Handy Andy? In parts, even! Handy Andy was the best-known novel of Samuel Lover (1797-1868), an Irish Protestant born in Dublin who later moved to London and published everything from satirical fiction to collections of Irish folklore to plays and poetry. Fales has copies of his Legends and Stories of Ireland (1831), Lyrics of Ireland (1858), and Rival Rhymes in Honour of Burns (1859) to name just a few.

In addition to novels in parts, we have heaps of novels in three volumes -- Triple Deckers, as they're known. Some of these have marks and bookplates from circulating libraries, some have other sorts of ownership marks. I don't have any good Triple Decker pictures handy, but I'll take some soon.

In addition to parts and Triple Deckers, Fales has an abundance of reprint formats. Reprinting and repackaging texts in the Victorian period is a fascinating and vast area. One of my favorite reprint formats is the Yellowback in which Triple Deckers would be reduced to a single volume, generally with a full color illustration on the cover and low price. William St. Clair calls this "tranching down." Here's a fine example:

You can do a keyword search for "Yellowbacks" in BobCat to turn up about 40 examples in our collection. There are more, of course. There's always more...

While we do have a small selection of Victorian magazines, it's not nearly as comprehensive as one might wish. Lucky for you, NYU now subscribes to this full-text database:

British Periodicals