Of Vincent Stuckey Lean (with contribution from a satyrical puppy)

Slight change of modus operandi - instead of retiring to the stacks to catalogue in the post-lunch sopor of the early afternoon, I am buzzing over in the post-elevenses rush of caffeine and glucose!

Today's subject: four volumes (in five parts) of proverbs, folklore and superstitions collected by Vincent Stuckey Lean and published posthumously in 1902-4. Now, Mr Lean seems to have been A Good Thing, especially from a librarian's point of view, as he left a bequest of £50,000 to build a new public library for Bristol. However, as a folklorist he doesn't seem to have made his mark: he doesn't appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, nor does he have his own Wikipedia entry - possibly because his method of compilation seems to have been to sit in the British Museum reading through everything from Chaucer onwards, rather than working 'in the field'. He therefore proffers such gems as the following, under 'Oxford' in his section on 'Local Proverbs': 'They hold scholars to be as it were Bl' Oxford men - unnecessary guts that study only to grow hungry', from Thomas May's The life of a satyrical puppy, called Nim, who worrieth all those satyrists he knowes, and barkes at the rest, published in 1657 (it being a joke at the time to refer to Oxford as Blocksford, as in blockhead).

And now, as lunchtime approaches, I too grow hungry - and I've spent so long trying to find out about Mr Lean that I don't have time to catalogue the books!

A bit of heraldic cant

Today's subject: a set of the works of William Paley, D.D., with armorial bookplates of Samuel Tombs. Whose arms are: on a field sable, three tombs. Not the most inspired or wittiest instance, perhaps, but nevertheless an example of "canting arms", in which the the images used refer, in an allusive or punning way, to the name of the bearer. Who Samuel Tombs was, other than probably the inhabitant of The Hollies, Droitwich, I have failed to establish. Much more fruitful, and even more tangential, is investigation of the etymology and ramificating meanings of the word cant, from French chant to thieves' cant to ski boot canting ...

From a Cardinal to Quakers (via Uganda and chocolate)

I have progressed to Theology, and works by John Henry Newman, given by some of Somerville's early benefactors -- Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Henry Nettleship, a classical scholar and Fellow of Lincoln, and J. (John) Theodore Dodd, a lawyer who was particularly concerned with poor relief -- and from the bequest of Alice Burnet, who read Modern Languages (French) at Somerville 1928-1932 and ended up as Warden of Mary Stuart Hall, Makerere College (now University), in Uganda. Next on the shelf is The Soul, her Sorrows and her Aspirations, by Francis William Newman, John Henry's younger brother; this was given to the College by Margery Fry and bears her bookplate, on which is written "From the library of J. S. Fry, 1913" -- presumably Joseph Storrs Fry (1826-1913), her father's elder brother and head of the family chocolate firm from 1886, who was a devout and active Quaker.

The perils of a new system

After a hiatus of several months, due to it being too cold in the depths of winter to sit around cataloguing in the stacks and to the arrival of a bequest of a large number of music scores which, for the benefit of our music students, it seemed more urgent to get catalogued and in circulation, I returned to the stacks and to the exactitudes of antiquarian cataloguing. Today's first subject: a 1697 copy of the French translation of Descartes's Principia philosophiae. Since my last visit, Oxford has changed its Library Management System, which is the software running all its cataloguing, circulation and other library services, to Aleph, which means getting to grips with a whole new way of doing things -- took me about half an hour to work out how to get a superscript o (as in 8º for octavo). After two hours of careful cataloguing, I hit Save -- only to be told that I don't have permission to save antiquarian records! (Fortunately, I can save records locally, onto my computer, even when I can't save them on the Oxford system.) So I've sent off a polite request to the powers-that-be for antiquarian permissions, and live in hopes that I shall be deemed worthy!

Unlucky vol. 13

Purchased from the Gerrans Fund in 1929 -- a rather splendid set of the works of Descartes, published in thirteen volumes in Paris, 1897-1913. We have twelve quarto volumes handsomely bound in marbled paper-covered boards with leather spines -- but no vol. 13, containing the index.

Gerrans Fund, then and now

The Works of Immanuel Kant in eleven volumes. In German (but not black letter). Purchased from the Gerrans Fund, 1930. These days, we tend to spend the Gerrans Fund on books on art, architecture, bibliography, and women's studies. The rubric states that the Fund is for the purchase of 'luxury' items, outside the normal subject allocation. Has there been a 'dumbing down' of our idea of luxury? Or has the cost of books risen less, relatively, than our purchasing power, so that we can now afford to buy Kant from the subject allocation for Philosophy, and genuinely luxuriously-produced items from the Gerrans Fund?

Fraktur - that's rather how I feel myself!

I've reached nineteenth-century German philosophy, all in black letter. Not ideal when you're feeling all bunged up with the tail-end of a cold!