Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
That title is Anglo-Saxon, of course: “Book hord.” A collection of book treasures (as in our word “hoard.” One of my favorite Ango-Saxon words is “word-hord,” which means “vocabulary.”) I thought I would share with you some of the volumes that made their way into our collections yesterday as we celebrated Christmas. I am kind of amazed how the gift-giving has evolved in our family over the years. We seem to have settled into a rhythm of finding well-nigh perfect gifts for each other, some of them so nice you’d never guess we are people of rather modest means!
I start with this beauty, gifted to me by my eldest. It is an 1887 copy of The Compleat Angler, compiled by Izaak Walton (1593-1683) and Charles Cotton (1630-1687). You may remember that this year I’d obtained a facsimile of one of their 16th century source books, The Arte of Angling, which didn’t teach me a whole lot about fishing Montana’s blue-ribbon trout streams, but did teach me a lot about English religion and piety in that century.
Keeping with the antiquarian theme, Bailey received this jaw-dropper from 1866, in spectacular condition!
I’ve always wondered at the practice of omitting the first “e” in Shakespeare’s last name, as it is on the spine here. I have a copy that also does that. Was it just a space-saving technique? I’ll have to ask Claude if he knows. [Answer: Standardized spelling is a pretty recent phenomenon and Shakespeare himself signed his name six different ways in the surviving signatures we have! “Many prestigious editions from the 1700s and 1800s used ‘Shakspeare,’ so if your antique volumes are from this period, they're reflecting the publishing conventions of their time rather than doing anything unusual.”]
Not to be left out, Mary got a beauty from Longfellow:
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