{"id":281,"date":"2023-05-15T20:33:06","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T20:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/?p=281"},"modified":"2023-05-15T20:33:06","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T20:33:06","slug":"ralph-brookes-catalogue-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/ralph-brookes-catalogue-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Ralph Brooke’s Catalogue: Audience"},"content":{"rendered":"

For any readers just joining me, this is my third and final blog post about Ralph Brooke\u2019s 1619 Catalogue<\/em>. My first is a general introduction, and my second combines analysis of the book\u2019s origins and afterlife. Here, I turn to the book\u2019s provenance.<\/p>\n

When Dickinson acquired the Catalogue<\/em>, any papers establishing its provenance did not come along with it. While we do have some of the receipts from Edwin Willoughby\u2019s purchases between 1943 and 1949, none of these documents mention the Catalogue<\/em>. That has made the job of reconstructing the book\u2019s provenance rather difficult. What follows is my best attempt; I have had to make several key inferences even to get to this point.<\/p>\n

I think I have gained two writers for the price of one. In an earlier post, I identified the inscription on the title page (fig. 1) as a single name, \u201cSir Samwell Thomas Newman,\u201d but this mystery knight seemed not to exist. Recently, though, I noticed that the ink, the alignment, and the letterforms appear to differ subtly but significantly between the phrases \u201cSir Samwell\u201d and \u201cThomas Newman his booke 1640.\u201d While I have received conflicting second opinions about bifurcating \u201cSir Samwell Thomas Newman,\u201d I think it is worthwhile to entertain the possibility that the two parts of this inscription refer to two separate people, and I have chosen, not without evidence, to treat them as such for the purposes of this post.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 1: the inscription on the title page.<\/p><\/div>\n

Christopher John Edwin Newman, a modern-day member of the family, has made a website cataloguing the family history of the Newmans of Fifehead in Dorset, and when we consider the possibility that there are two inscriptions, first by Thomas in 1640 and then later by Sir Samwell, a coherent timeline of family ownership emerges. Two Thomas Newmans, in fact, were alive in 1640, one who died in 1649, and the other, his son, who died in 1668 (C. Newman). Our Thomas Newman could be either; regardless, the timeline works. Sir Samwell Newman, on the other hand, lived from about 1696 to 1747 (C. Newman). His first name, Samwell, is his mother\u2019s last name, and the Samwells and Newmans had not intermarried before then, so it is very unlikely indeed that a yet-unrecorded Samwell Newman even could <\/em>have existed in 1640. His title \u201cSir\u201d only makes the possibility of some shadowy 17th<\/sup> century Samwell more unlikely: the Newmans were only granted a baronetcy under the real Sir Samwell’s father, Richard, in 1699 (C. Newman).<\/p>\n

The binding also offers clues. Both the front and back covers have been blind-stamped with the letters \u201cTN,\u201d who (if these are initials) very easily could be one of the two Thomas Newmans I have already mentioned (fig. 2). Thomas Newman was certainly not averse to marking up his books. Since the Newman Family Tree\u2019s catalogue only lists two Thomases under the first initial T, identifying TN as Thomas Newman would conclusively date the binding to the seventeenth century. This timeline also raises a major question, though: why are the many annotations throughout the text cut off by the edge of the page? There are, I think, two possibilities. First: the book may have already been annotated by a prior owner in a cheaper binding before it came secondhand into Newman\u2019s possession. Second, Newman could have annotated it himself prior to sending it to a bookbinder. My examination of the book yielded none of the telltale holes that stab-stitching leaves, but these can be difficult or impossible to find in a book that has been rebound.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 2: The back cover, blind-stamped with \u201cTN.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

This book\u2019s binding has also helped me fill in the gap after the Newman family and before Edwin Willoughby. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, and certainly after 1831, our book came into the possession of Robert Dundas Duncan, 1st<\/sup> Earl of Camperdown, whose gilded armorial stamp can clearly be seen on the front cover (fig 3). How this book made its way from the West Country to Scotland eludes me, and any efforts to establish whether the Newmans and the Duncans intermarried have been unsuccessful. While my dating of the binding to the seventeenth century is tenuous without expert opinion, the presence of the Camperdown stamp on the front cover definitively dates the binding to the mid-nineteenth century or before.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3: The front cover, stamped both with \u201cTN\u201d and with the seal of the Earl of Camperdown.<\/p><\/div>\n

I mischaracterized Edwin E. Willoughby as a mere collector in my previous posts. Dickinson’s archive possesses many of his private documents and his publications, and these make it immensely clear that he had far more than a passing interest in the Catalogue<\/em>. Willoughby, in fact, returned to the Catalogue <\/em>several times in his publications, particularly because the Brooke-Jaggard dispute affected the schedule of the printing of the First Folio. In 1928, in graduate school, he wrote a five-page piece entitled \u201cAn Interruption in the Printing of the First Folio,\u201d where he tracks the delays in the production of the Folio; a relevant section concerns the delay that Brooke caused (fig. 4). Four years later, Willoughby wrote The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare<\/em>, which expands on the themes in \u201cAn Interruption\u201d and discusses the difficulties between Jaggard and Brooke (fig. 5). Finally, in 1934, he published a biography of William Jaggard entitled A Printer of Shakespeare: The Books and Times of William Jaggard<\/em>. I have had the opportunity to study both his handwritten drafts (fig. 6) and a printed copy (fig. 7).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4: The section of \u201cAn Interruption\u201d covering the Jaggard-Brooke conflict.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Fig. 5: A mention of Brooke in The Printing.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Fig. 6: Willoughby\u2019s handwritten draft of the beginning of Chapter 13 of A Printer.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Fig. 7: The printed first page of Chapter 13 of A Printer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Brooke\u2019s Catalogue<\/em> was clearly relevant to Edwin Willoughby\u2019s research interests, and that is evidently why he owned it. What remains unknown to me, however, is when <\/em>the Catalogue<\/em> actually came into Willoughby\u2019s personal possession. While it seems possible that he purchased it to aid his research while working on one of his pieces written during the 1920s and 1930s, I\u2019ve noticed an inscription in in the back of the book: \u201cF. 11.1.43\u201d (fig. 8). To me, that indicates a date: either 1 November or 11 January 1943. Inscriptions of this type or in this hand are nowhere in all other Willoughby books that Special Collections Librarian Malinda Triller-Doran and I checked in the archive, which leads me to believe that Willoughby may not be the writer; he would have purchased the book, then, at some point during or after 1943. We do have a book order from November 1943, addressed to Willoughby from The Export Book Company in Preston, Lancashire, but this mentions only two Bibles from the turn of the 17th<\/sup> century (fig. 9).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 8: The mysterious 20th-century writing in the back of the Catalogue.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Fig. 9: An invoice from the Export Book Company to Willoughby regarding two Early Modern bibles.<\/p><\/div>\n

Edwin Willoughby died in 1959, having never married. His sister, Cmdr. Frances Willoughby\u2014an extraordinary figure in her own right, whose achievements included becoming the first woman to permanently achieve the rank of commander in the United States military\u2014donated many of his books and papers to Dickinson after his death (fig. 10), and the College held an exhibition of his collection in his honor. The book has remained in our archives since then. I hope that some of its yet elusive mysteries are eventually solved, but I am grateful to have filled the amount of missing information I have.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 10: A letter from Charles Coleman Sellers, Librarian of Dickinson College, to Frances Willoughby.<\/p><\/div>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Brooke, Ralph.\u00a0A CATALOGVE and Succe\u017fsion of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marque\u017f\u017fes, Earles, and Vi\u017fcounts of this Realme of England, \u017fince the Norman Conque\u017ft, to this pre\u017fent yeare, 1619<\/em>. London, William Jaggard, 1619.<\/p>\n

“Duncan, Robert Dundas, 1st Earl of Camperdown (1785 -1859).” British Armorial Bindings<\/em>, University of Toronto Libraries, armorial.library.utoronto.ca\/stamp-owners\/DUN002.<\/p>\n

“Edwin Eliott Willoughby (1899-1959).”\u00a0Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections<\/em>, Dickinson College, 2005, archives.dickinson.edu\/people\/frances-lois-willoughby-1906-1984.<\/p>\n

“Frances Lois Willloughby (1906-1984).”\u00a0Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections<\/em>, Dickinson College, 2005, archives.dickinson.edu\/people\/frances-lois-willoughby-1906-1984.<\/p>\n

Newman, Christopher John Edwin. Newman Family Tree<\/em>, 25 Dec. 2022, www.newman-family-tree.net\/.<\/p>\n

Sellers, Charles Coleman. Letter to Commander Frances Willoughby. 28 December 1959. Edwin E. Willoughby file. Archives and Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Carlisle, PA.<\/p>\n

The Export Book Company. Invoice to Edwin Willoughby. 2 November 1943. Box 4, folder 12. Edwin E. Willoughby papers. Archives and Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Carlisle, PA.<\/p>\n

Willoughby, Edwin E. A Printer of Shakespeare: The Books and Times of William Jaggard.<\/em> London: Philip Allan & Co., 1934.<\/p>\n

—. Handwritten draft of A Printer of Shakespeare<\/em>. Box 1, folder 3. Edwin E. Willoughby papers. Archives and Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Carlisle, PA.<\/p>\n

—. The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For any readers just joining me, this is my third and final blog post about Ralph Brooke\u2019s 1619 Catalogue. My first is a general introduction, and my second combines analysis of the book\u2019s origins and afterlife. Here, I turn to the book\u2019s provenance. When Dickinson acquired the Catalogue, any papers establishing its provenance did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audience","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}