A 1711 Collection of a Politician's Poems, with a Salem Pedigree

After a nine-month hiatus to deal with the crescendo of work associated with the final stages of my dissertation and the first stages of going on the job market, I’ve decided to return again to Tarquin Tar’s Bookcase.

This week I’m looking at a good copy of an antiquarian book that was part of a lot that I acquired from New England Book Auctions in Northampton, MA, back in June. The book is a late edition of Edmund Waller’s Poems, Etc. Written upon several Occasions and to several Persons…To which is Prefix’d The Author’s Life. The book was published in 1711 by the formidable Jacob Tonson of London and sold at his shop, “Shakespear’s Head,” opposite Catherine Street in the Strand.

The first two editions of Waller’s collected works were published in 1664 by Henry Herringman, with subsequent editions from Herringman in 1668, 1682, 1686, 1690, 1693. In 1694 Herringman and Tonson co-published the eighth edition, but it was described as the sixth edition – presumably because beginning with the edition of 1668 the text had been substantively expanded with new material by the author. Herringman died before the “seventh” edition (ninth true edition) appeared in 1705 and so it was published by Tonson and the “assignes” of Herringman. My copy is of Tonson’s “eighth” edition (tenth) in 1711. He published further editions in 1712 and 1722. The book was, in short, quite popular and remained in demand through the Restoration. This was probably more a factor of the author’s political celebrity than his poetic skill.

Waller was an outspoken royalist in Parliament in the waning years of the reign of Charles I and was banished from England when Cromwell came to power; however, he was eventually allowed to return to political life and temporarily reconciled with the Puritans, even writing a poem of praise for Cromwell. When Charles II was restored to the throne, he again returned to the royalist side and was reconciled also with the king’s party (he wrote a poem of praise for Charles, too; when the king demanded to know why Waller’s poem to Cromwell was better than his poem for the monarch, Waller – ever the artful politician – observed, “Sir, we poets never succeeded so well in writing truth as in fiction.”) Beside his considerable success as a politician, Waller wrote a range of poetic styles and is generally recognized as one of the poets responsible for the return of the heroic couplet to fashion in English verse.

The book begins with a frontispiece showing Waller at age 23. After the title-page there are two prefaces from the printer (both are evidently from earlier editions) and then the biography of the poet (i-lxxxii). This is followed by an engraving of Waller at age 76 and a rather macabre engraving of his tomb, complete with black cloth and skulls. There is then the table of contents and the contents of the book (poems, translations, lyrics, prologues and epilogues, a play, political speeches, etc., paginated 1-423 with several errors in numbering). It includes laudatory poems on various English aristocrats and writers, such as Ben Jonson (whose poem is marked by inky thumbprints, perhaps hinting that someone was holding the book open to that page while copying from it). Beside the portraits of the author and his tomb, it also includes a portrait of the Countess of Carlisle (facing p. 23), General Montague, the earl of Sandwich (facing p. 192), the lady Morton (facing p. 169), and one of the woman whom Waller fell desperately in love with, the Countess of Sunderland (facing p. 98). None of the plates are integral to their gatherings.

The pages measure 12cm x 19cm and are of a fairly cheap stock typical of the turn of the century. There seems to be no watermark on the paper, but there are 3cm vertical chainlines. It may be described collationally as 8o: [A4] a8-f4 B8-2E4: $4. I’m quite pleased that the book is in its original binding of paneled calf with decorative blind tooling, with only moderate wear on the boards and some pulling and chipping on the spine. Inside the front cover are pasted two descriptions of the book; neither bears a date. One of these is clearly cut out of an undated dealer’s catalogue and offers the book for $25.00 (a later dealer has penciled $200 on the facing blank). The second sticker turns out to be from the Catalogue of the Library of the Honorable William C. Prescott of Salem (published by George A. Leavitt & Company, 1881).

Prescott’s library was auctioned by the George Leavitt Company at Clinton Hall in New York in December 1881 and the catalogue was prepared to advertise the items available. Prescott had served as a Justice of the Peace, Salem’s “counselor” to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of the Commonwealth, Salem’s representative in the state legislature, where he sat on the education committee (fitting, then, that he owned a copy of Waller’s poetry), and had been appointed special justice of the Police Court of Salem. He needed to liquidate his possessions, and raise some cash, in advance of moving to Europe.

It was a tremendous auction with thousands of works of fine art, exquisite rare and antiquarian books from the 14^th through 19^th centuries, and other exceptional items. Included in his collection were numerous collectible works on the occult and witchcraft, dating back to the Renaissance, as well as (for example) a first edition of John Smith’s General History of Virginia and of Audubon’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. As the auctioneer puts it in his catalogue, “Surely after such an array of bibliomaniacal nuggets and gems, words are utterly useless to enhance the value of the lots, one and all, in the Prescott Library.” It was a pleasant surprise to discover, in the course of preparing this week’s blog entry, that this copy shares my own roots in Salem, MA. It was particularly apropos given that this entry was largely researched and written while visiting my family back in Salem for the post-Thanksgiving weekend.

That my copy was, indeed, Prescott’s own copy (lot 1279 in the auction, up for sale on Tuesday, December 20 – the last night of the six-day auction) is confirmed by a reference in the description to an “Autograph signature of ‘Lucy Greene’ on the title.” This inscription does indeed appear on the title page of my copy; aside from this signature, there is no marginalia in the book. It’s not extremely rare to find a book from this period with evidence of a woman’s ownership, though it is relatively uncommon and certainly a rarity in my collection. The handwriting seems to be of the late eighteenth century, though it is impossible to say for certain. The name is, of course, so common as to be virtually – alas – anonymous.

More Shakespearean Pseudoscholarship

This past summer I wrote about a book by Mark Twain that attempted to use some highly dubious and subjective evidence to argue that the plays of Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon. This week’s book offers another take on the same argument -- just as spurious as Twain’s, but from a (loosely) textual studies perspective.

The book is a slim but tall folio by Frank A. Kendall, a man about whom I can find little information except that he was briefly President of the National Amateur Press Association in 1913 (he died that year and his wife, Jennie M. Kendall, was appointed to complete his term). This is apparently his only book. The title is William Shakespeare and His Three Friends: Ben, Anthonie, and Francis, published by W. A. Butterfield of Boston in 1911 and printed by George L. Clapp of South Framingham, MA. No subsequent editions appeared, though it is available as a print-on-demand title from some modern POD firms.

Taking the first page of the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost as his main starting point, Kendall engages in an extensive, slightly obsessive, highly erratic examination of what he claims to be the hidden “acrostics” encoded into the play. Using a truly speculative methodology first outlined by William Stone Booth in his Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon (Houghton, Miffling, Co., 1909), Kendall claims that it is possible to identify various permutations of the Latin phrase “Antonious Baconus et Ben Ionsus et Franciscus Baconus scripserunt” hidden in the text of the page.

He traces out sixty-one randomly drawn patterns linking initial letters of words on the page to spell out messages related to this claim (that Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon, and Ben Jonson collaborated to write the play). Kendall never attempts to explain the logic of his choice of geometric patterns (except for the general “rule” that acrostics can only use the first letter of a word) nor does he justify how he settles upon what words to include in each pattern (except for the repeated phrase “We are struck by the word ______” -- whatever that might mean.

The contents of the book run as follows: two blank leaves, the half-title, the full title-page with copyright on verso, epigraph, and the contents of the book (pp. [7]-56). There are a few illustrative plates of the first page from the quarto and facsimiles of contemporary passages by Herbert. Perhaps most clever in the construction of the book is the inclusion of a fold-out illustrative plate on the penultimate leaf (the final leaf is blank); this illustration is a facsimile of the page from Love’s Labour’s Lost, allowing the reader to keep the facsimile before him or her while still being able to turn the pages of the book, making use of it to follow along with Kendall’s torturous argument.

The pages measure 19.5cm x 28cm and are of a nice stock with 2.5cm horizontal chain-lines and a watermark reading “Berkshire Text” above an eagle straddling the letter “A”. Interestingly, this was the watermark of the western Massachusetts firm American Writing Paper Company (Holyoke, MA), not far from where the book resides today. It’s bound in light brown papered boards with a brown buckram spine. My copy is damaged in a few ways, including water damage on the back board and what seems to be a very large bit taken out of the top outside corner.

This copy is signed by the author (“Compliments of Frank A Kendall”) and bears an owner’s inscription as well (“Gift of Joseph D. Leland”). Leland may have been the same man who was architect of Hilton Village, an English-village-style planned neighborhood in Newport News, Virginia from 1917-1921. On March 25, 1921, Leland apparently donated this copy to the library of the western Massachusetts town of Hancock: pasted inside the front cover are the “By-Laws of Hancock Town Library”, along with a penned addition of the book’s call number (822.33.7; also appearing in white ink on the lower part of the spine), the date it was donated, and the accession number (7462).

Pasted inside the back cover is a circulation card envelope. The card is still inserted and it reveals that Kendall’s work of pseudoscholarship was, perhaps not surprisingly, never checked out by any patron.