Lines from the Library

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

I have spent the past week digging into our holdings of penny dreadfuls. I am delighted to report that we have at least two dozen titles in what appear to be complete runs.

Here, for instance, are some images of Vice and Its Victim:

That's some quality illustration work.

Much better than this example from The Smuggler King

But the important thing is that I have been adjusting the BobCat records for all the titles I have uncovered so far. You can find things by title, you can find things by author, but the one thing I'm doing to make it easy for people to pull up ALL of our penny dreadfuls in a single search is adding Genre/Form Headings.

Thus, if you select "Genre/Form Heading" from the pull-down menu on the BobCat search screen and type "Penny dreadfuls" in the search box, you will pull up 20 titles. More will appear soon, but these things take time. Some of our penny dreadfuls aren't in BobCat at all yet, so those will soon be added.

Over the last couple of weeks I have identified 57 penny dreadfuls in the Fales British collection

57!

That's a whole lot of pennies and a whole lot of dread.

But let's talk a little more about exactly what these things are and how they differ from other cheap formats of the 19th century.

Here is a picture of the front page of part number three of Red Ralph, or, The daughter of the night : a romance of the road in the days of Dick Turpin by Percival Wolfe.

The most obvious feature of these publications is the lurid illustrations -- that's what I emphasized in the last entry. But there are two other fascinating characteristics on display here.

First, note that the page number at the top is 17 and that "No. 3" is found at the lower left corner of the page. That "No. 3" is the only clue that this is the third issue of this story. Parts 1 and 2 are 8 pages each, which is the standard length for penny dreadfuls. A penny (although there is no price printed on most of our items) bought 8 pages of text plus an illustration or two.

Most serial publications had continuous pagination -- penny dreadfuls, novels in monthly parts and standard magazines. Almost all the penny dreadfuls in Fales are bound as single volumes, which partly disguises their origins. There's usually a title page and table of contents at the front, but these would have been included in the LAST issue. If you saved all your penny parts, it was a simple matter to have them all bound together to form a complete book with continuous pagination.

So that little "No. 3" in the corner is an important clue. Some of our titles don't have "No.", just a small number in the lower left margin.

It might not be clear from this image, but the text of this installment begins mid-scene. Unlike monthly parts by Dickens and Thackeray, a penny dreadful might cut off abruptly in the middle of a chapter. Sometimes the breaks come mid-sentence or even mid-word. Dickens and his monthly part fellows never cut the reader off like that.

Generally, the reader of monthly parts paid a shilling (that's twelve pennies) for two illustrations (quality engravings rather than lurid woodcuts) and two full and complete chapters. A monthly part usually contained 32 pages of text, but often came bundled with another 32 pages of advertising. Sometimes more.

Here's another example:

That's some quality penny dreadful!

Coming up next: Penny Dreadful vs. Dime Novel

This fine rendering of St. Nick is from the 1872 Christmas number of the magazine Once A Week.

Happy Christmas to all.

And without further ado...

I really can't tell you much about this fascinating item. Here's what it says in the BobCat entry:

"Thackeray is shown among the spectators in the 1st plate & perhaps assisted in drawing them."

which explains why this thing is in Fales and shelved under Thackeray. There is one full page of text, which I haven't had time to read, and four illustrations (in addition to the cover illustration shown above).

Here's the first plate:

and here's a detail of that plate:

I guess that's Mr. Thackeray in the crowd there, head and shoulders above all the other primates. What's up with that?

I leave it to you, the eager researcher, to come in to Fales to pore over this oddity of Victoriana and come up with some answers!

Another one of my very most favorite reference books is this beauty:

You can browse the author index and table of contents for this one on the publisher's website: Monkey Brain Books

Reference books like this one are essential for navigating a collection as large as Fales. For instance, the article on "Future War" pointed me to the entry on "Jack O'Halloran" which led me to this book:

A Modern Daedalus (1887) by Tom Greer. In the novel Jack O'Halloran, a patriotic Irishman, invents wings that enable him to fly. He is soon caught up in an Irish uprising against the English and trains a group of fliers to use his invention to bombard the British.

I had never heard of this author or title before, but there it was on the shelf in Fales.

The entry on "The Yellow Peril" was very informative about this title:

The Yellow Danger (1898) by M. P. Shiel. In this instance, I knew of the book -- I had read a couple of Shiel's short stories and investigated the holdings in Fales. The encyclopedia article on "The Yellow Peril" placed this title within the broader context of Victorian fiction based on Asian stereotypes. Shiel's character, Doctor Yen How, is the first instance of an Asian threat that is military rather than magical or fantastic. As the encyclopedia points out "he reflects the Western fear of the 'limitless hordes' of Chinese overrunning the white countries of the west." (p. 981) The article also identifies several other titles on this theme, many of which are in Fales.

As much as I love all the online reference books -- check out Oxford Reference Online for a heap of great reference books -- there's still much to be said for sitting down and flipping through the pages of a book like The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana.

Regardless of how you browse your reference books, they can be an excellent means of identifying items that are likely to be on the shelves in Fales.

I am freshly returned from the RBMS Preconference in Los Angeles and the ALA Annual Meeting in Orlando -- I mean Anaheim. My head is full of ideas and fond memories of all the good friends I get to see at these things. I'll be using this space to air some of these thoughts in the near future, but today I'm still catching up.

Catching up and having a little fun, too. I spent some time surfing around the librarious blogosphere this morning and I found a site that makes these:

That's a word cloud generated at this website:
wordle.net which I learned about from this blog: Collections 2.0

I cut and pasted the text of the exhibition labels from the Victorian bestsellers show I did back in Spring 2007 and it generated this nifty image. So that's a bit of summer fun.

My other summer fun revolves around sorting through the Kishi Collection -- you can read about this collection here: Archivist of the "Yellow Peril" which is an online exhibit about Yoshio Kishi's collecting philosophy. We have already added over 1,000 Kishi books to Fales and more will be added soon. My project for the summer is to sort through the remaining 136 cartons of Kishi materials and get it all organized so people can use it. Yesterday I struck a vein of Victorian-era materials about Japan. Photos will appear here soon.

Here are two more examples of circulating library labels in Fales books. Unlike the example in the previous entry, these labels are on the inside front covers, so they were harder to find.

Here's a specimen that's quite similar to Sam's:

John Carpenter offers an almost identical selection of merchandise -- no genuine medicines and no specific mention of magazines, however. Carpenter also offers more actual printing services than Sam.

This label was in a copy of Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd -- that's Mr. James Hogg.

[Apologies for the lousy image here.]

Here's a nice American example:

B. Huling in Saratoga Springs, NY kept his label short and sweet. Remember that Saratoga Springs in the nineteenth century was a very swank vacation spot -- comparable to Bath in England.

This label is in a copy of Master Humphrey's Clock by Charles Dickens.

This is just one of ELEVEN editions of Master Humphrey's Clock held in Fales. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more labels.