Small-print alphabet and sheepskin with St. George, MS Harley 5943, British Library, ibid., both labeled item 53.
Uncut sheet of printed alphabets for hornbooks, ibid., originally item 54.
Printed sheets of large, elaborate letter forms, MS Rawlinson D 384, fol. 75v, Bodleian Library. Unfortunately, the fragment is not dated, and I have not been able to locate this account in Hearne’s voluminous printed remarks and diaries.
John Bagford to Hans Sloane, 1704, MS Sloane 1435, fol. 1r, British Library.
Ibid.; see Nickson, “Bagford and Sloane,” 52.
Uncut sheets of playing cards, MS Sloane 526–27, British Library. Gatch suggests these may be Bagford’s, although they are sometimes associated with Wanley (“Bagford as a Collector,” 97n8).
The outline of these debates are sketched in Johns, The Nature of the Book, ch. 5 (“Faust and the Pirates”).
John Bagford, “An Essay on the Invention of Printing, by Mr. John Bagford; with an Account of His Collections for the Same, by Mr. Humtrey Wanley, F.R.S. Communicated in Two Letters to Dr. Hans Sloane, R. S. Secr.,” Philosophical Transactions, 2402.
Seven prints removed from MS Harley 5934 in 900, now Add MS 57982, fols. 15r–16r, British Library. The composite volume is MS Harley 5938, 5941, 5949, 5959, 5966, and 5978. An insertion in the 1808 catalogue of Harley manuscripts reports that nine fragments were taken out, either in error or one fragment has gone missing.
Gilded Q and woodcut P, MS Harley 5934, items 25 and 24, British Library. Item 25, the Q, has been removed and is now in a separate composite volume of manuscript fragments.
Sheet with bodies in letter forms and workman, ibid., items 26, 27.
Medieval MS leaf with initials, ibid., item 32.
Schoeffer devices, ibid., items 29–31.
Images of Aldus Manutius’s anchor device, ibid., items 51, 52.
Sequence of substrate specimens, ibid., items 77, 78, 79, 80, 81.
Thematic sequence page, ibid., items 73–76.
Block-book fragments in brownish writing ink and facsimiles of Canticum canticorum and Biblia pauperum in black on contemporary paper, ibid., items 37, 61, and 98, and items 36, 62, and 99.
Copy of court hand on ruled paper, ibid., item 55.
Milton McC. Gatch, “Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Routledge, 1998), 51; Helmut Gneuss, “Humfrey Wanley Borrows Books in Cambridge,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12, no. 2 (2001): 145.
Specimen of grotesque Z, MS Harley 5934, item 38, British Library.
Several grotesque letters, ibid., item 50 (from same series as item 38).
Bound sheets of facsimiles, ibid., item 94.
John Hudson to John Bagford at Christopher Bateman’s bookshop, accompanying acquired MS leaf, MS Harley 5906 B, fol. 28r, British Library.
Ibid., fol. 28v.
Proposal proof, MS Harley 5906 B, fol. 3, British Library. Bagford has changed “Livii” to “Lives,” “Naudéus Gab” to “Gabriel Nadeus,” and “Hadram” to “Hadrius”; he seems to have missed the error “Erasinas” for “Erasmus.” One feels for the compositor who may have been setting the type from Bagford’s often incomprehensible hand.
Shorter (likely earlier) version of John Bagford’s proposal, MS Harley 5906 B, fol. 1, British Library. The remainder of the quotes in this paragraph are from this item.
Manuscript copy of Bagford’s proposal found among a specimen collection of Chinese samples and paper samples, MS Harley 5941, fols. 18–19 and 21–22, British Library.
Longer (likely later) version of John Bagford’s proposal, MS Harley 5906 B, fol. 3, British Library.
Translation of Gabriel Naudé, beginning at MS Harley 5893, fol. 74, British Library.
The P specimens are MS Harley 5934, items 24 and 103, British Library. The last is cut from the printed proposal.
To witness how convoluted these exchanges of fragments can get, we might follow this same printed proposal to MS Harley 5995, where three copies (uncorrected) appear in a collection of fragments (fols. 250–55). MS Harley 5995 is a collection of specimens of different types: there are title pages, many contemporaneous advertisements for books, including one seeking a stolen set of books; letters to readers and poems explaining frontispieces; examples of black letter printing; incunables; and pages from mathematical and account books. Amidst these fragments are the three proposals, followed by some other specimens gathered from Bagford’s own life. There is an engraved form letter offering power of attorney, of the sort found in MS Harley 5949—except this form has been filled in by Bagford’s son giving power of attorney to his father. There is also a bill for some binding work that Bagford commissioned, followed by other bills and receipts not directed toward Bagford. While it is possible these fragments simply drifted into this collection, their inclusion alongside similar categories of specimens (the power of attorney form alongside other printed forms, for instance) suggest they are deliberate additions, intended as representative examples of ephemera. Their presence in turn makes the three copies of his printed proposal also seem like specimens, set, as they are, alongside the other advertisements and proposals for book projects included in MS Harley 5995.
Humfrey Wanley to Hans Sloane, May 6, 1707, MS Sloane 4040, fol. 355, British Library (see Nickson, “Bagford and Sloane,” 52).
Ibid.
I believe this is Wanley’s description of MS Harley 5949: “Cuts of Figures in different Postures, as Writing, Reading, Meditation, with all the Utensils used in Writing &c. during some Ages. Cutts of Schools. The Heads of some Arithmeticians; Alphabets; Specimens of Knott-work, & some Great Text & other Letters. Specimens of Letter-Grauing. Heads of Writing Masters, Dutch, French, English. Specimens of Letters Engrauen in Small; as also of Short-Hand, &c. Heads of Shorthand Writers, & Specimens of their Works, & many other things.”
Wanley to Sloane, May 6, 1707, MS Sloane 4040, fol. 355v. The remainder of the quotes in this paragraph are from this item.
John Bagford to Hans Sloane (first letter-version of the Essay), MS Sloane 1435, fol. 1r, British Library.
Ibid., fol. 6v.
Bagford, Essay, 2399.
Bagford to Sloane (first letter), MS Sloane 1435, fol. 6v, British Library.
William King, Useful Transactions in Philosophy, and Other Sorts of Learning, For the Months of January and February, 1708/9 (London, 1709), 1–10.
Ibid., 1–2.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid.
When Wolf began his catalogue, the second edition of the STC had not yet been released. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, eds., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926).
Melvin H. Wolf, Catalogue and Indexes to the Title-Pages of English Printed Books Preserved in the British Library’s Bagford Collection (London: British Library Board, 1974), x.
I am grateful to Professor Wolf for sharing this history with me in a July 2019 phone call.
Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), vii.
Ibid., 3.
Alan Liu takes up this question in Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Anne Burdick, “Meta! Meta! Meta!: A Speculative Design Brief for the Digital Humanities,” Visible Language 49, no. 3 (December 2015): 13–33; Tara McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Epilogue
Quoted in William Andrews, Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs (London: George Redway, 1887), 41.
Ibid.
Woodcut illustration of the 1716 frost fair, PR. V GP.9 p7499528, London Metropolitan Archives.
John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn: Kalendarium, 1673–1689, vol. 4, ed. E. S. de Beer, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 362 (January 24, 1684).
John Bagford’s frost-fair printed scrap, MS Harley 5936, item 19, British Library.
Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 12.
Evelyn, Diary, 362.
Early English Books Tract Supplement, accessed August 14, 2020, about.proquest.com/products-services/film/Early-English-Books-Tract-Supplement.html.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 135.