History of the Book 2024

Dickinson Blog for ENGL 222

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The Mystery of E. Biddle

December 19, 2024 / / 0 Comments

There are two inscriptions in Baedeker’s Great Britain. One reads, “EM Biddle, July 6, 1907.” The other, “Aug 1956 EM Biddle – Gift.” The library sticker behind the front cover of the Baedeker reads, “Presented by Edward M. Biddle.”

However, a closer look on the first inscription casts some doubt. Is that “M” really an M, or is it actually a “W”? The other Ms are clearly distinguished from the other letters. Could this mean that the original owner of this Baedeker’s was a different Biddle than the one who gifted it to the Dickinson Archives?

To try and find answers, I asked the archivists for some help in tracking down the possible Biddles. We found a file on one Edward Macfunn Biddle. It included an entry for him in the Dickinson Alumni catalogue; apparently, he was at Dickinson from 1901-1904, after which he attended Yale. There is also a list of Biddle alumni at the college, which included no less than three E.M. Biddles, and one E.W. Biddle.

There is also an article on Edward M. Biddle in the file, written for The Dickinson Alumnus. According to this excerpt, his father was E.W. Biddle, a Judge and former president of the Dickinson Board of Trustees. Edward M. became a legal adviser and was an active member of his community. The most important part of this excerpt reads: “As a traveler he has been in Europe a number of times, has visited South America, as well as extended regions of the United States.” This of course indicates a possible use or ownership of this Baedeker’s guidebook, a fact exacerbated by its publication in 1906, soon after his graduation from Yale. This largely eliminates the possibility of the first inscription in the guidebook being “E.W. Biddle” as opposed to the initially-assumed “E.M. Biddle”… except that E.W. was alive until 1931, when he died unexpectedly at 79. According to the Dickinson College Archives, E.W. was practicing law until 1895, at which point he became the president judge in the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas. I have already noted the condition of my copy of Baedeker’s Great Britain – it has no annotations or inscriptions within it beyond the two at the beginning of the book, and there is very little wear beyond aging. The only clear indication of use is the broken bookmark, which could be because of age but also because of repetitive use. It is entirely possible to consider that E.W. purchased this book as a way to experience some form of travel from the comfort of his home. He also could have purchased the book as a gift for his son E.M. for graduating from Yale, which he did in 1906, and we know that he travelled. Uncertainty abounds.

The other two Biddles in the directory, both ambiguously labelled only “Biddle, Edward M.” could be ruled out, as they graduated from Dickinson in 1886 and 1852; but they might have purchased the guidebook as another form of stationary travel. Although this Baedeker’s was donated by the E.M. Biddle who graduated in 1904, the Biddle family legacy is present enough in Dickinson college that E.M. could have inherited this book from another family member and then just donated it to the archives.

Because E.M. donated this Baedeker to the archives, I thought that it might be useful to see what other books he might have donated. If these books were also travel books or possessed handwriting that could distinguish the handwriting in the initial inscription of this book, it could help in getting a concrete answer about who owned and read this book. I was able to concretely discover three other books, one of which is Baedeker’s Berlin guidebook, a book about the U.S. Senate called Sketches of Debate in the First Senate of the United States, in 1789-90-91 by William Maclay, and another called The Book of the Homeless by Edith Wharton. This could indicate his ownership over the guidebooks, but we are in the same dilemma as when we started: were these previously owned by a different Biddle?

I also found that in the same year E.M. donated these books to the college, Dickinson purchased the “Biddle House,” which is now used by the Registrar’s Office and the Career Center. This generates some questions – why sell the house but not the books? Perhaps because the Biddle family was moving away; perhaps they needed some money but couldn’t be bothered to as for money over books. The mystery of the “E. Biddle” written in this book is tentatively solved, but unless one could find the receipt of purchase for this Baedeker’s the ambiguity lives on.

 

Works Cited:

Dickinson College Archives on Edward W. Biddle

https://archives.dickinson.edu/people/edward-w-biddle-1852-1931

 

Dickinson College Archives on Edward M. Biddle

https://archives.dickinson.edu/image-archive/edward-macfunn-biddle-1933

 

Dickinson College Archives on the Biddle House

https://archives.dickinson.edu/image-archive/biddle-house-c1900

Baedeker’s Afterlife: Edition Evolution

December 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Researching the afterlife of Baedeker’s Great Britain introduced me to an entire subsection of the book collecting world I had previously been unaware of. My intention was to try and track what I am calling the Edition Evolution of the Great Britain Guide, as my copy is the sixth edition, and given the scope of my guidebook (the table of contents spans several pages, and as I mentioned in my previous post, it covers content from geographic locations, floor plans, and popular activities within its area), it is not unreasonable to assume that there would be at least some form of significant change between editions. Luckily for me, I was not disappointed.

In my research, I was able to find out some of the history behind the legacy of Karl Baedeker, spanning several generations of Baedeker, and their guidebooks. Karl was born in 1801, into a family of bookseller and publishers. He started the “Baedeker” business in 1827, which coincidentally was around the time when tourism was really taking off (pun unintended). Following the foundation of this business, his first guidebook was published in 1832, 74 years before the publication of my own guidebook. The first edition was titled Rheinreise von Mainz bis Koln, as the Baedeker family was German – the first English edition guidebook wouldn’t be printed until 1861. This edition was called Baedeker’s Rhine, the first edition of which is currently being sold for a little over $5,000. As his company built its reputation, Karl travelled everywhere he could to gather the information to construct his guidebooks, until his death in 1859. He is hailed as the inventor of the formal guidebook according to at least a few people, including a chapter in a book titled Giants of Tourism by D.M. Bruce, R.W. Butler, and R. Russell, where they refer to him as “the perceived ‘inventor’ of the formal guidebook,” and his guidebooks themselves as a “bible” for 19th-century travelers. After Karl’s demise, his three sons continued his business, and it is still operating to this day.

As I gathered this information, I came across a wide variety of Baedeker’s guidebooks that are being sold online. First editions go for quite a bit of money, especially on rare book seller’s websites. But they are also being sold on places like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and generally a good number of used bookselling platforms. Even when I narrowed my search down to just the Great Britain guide, there are still a lot of results. This surprised me – given the condition of my book, which implies that it was largely used a shelf piece or perhaps escapism on behalf of the owner, I had assumed that these books were pretty exclusively “collector” edition books. But the original intention of the books was for them to be actively used as convenient travel guides, so of course they were widely spread for tourism purposes. I also came across a lovely book called the Baedekeriana (2010) by Michael Wild, who was fascinated by the history of the Baedekers and wanted to compile it. It includes written accounts from people who worked with the Baedekers, and is an anthology of articles about past Baedeker guidebooks.

The Baedekeriana details the intense attention to detail and accuracy, as well as the impact that cultural differences and World War I and World War II had on the printing of guidebooks, especially for a German-based company. I am excited to spend more time understanding this history myself, but for now I turned my attention more avidly towards the specific evolution of the Great Britain guidebook. Initially, I was only able to find the editions that bookended my own – the 5th edition, printed in 1901, and the 7th printed in 1910. Given that my own book was printed in 1906, these dates only affirmed to me that the attention to detail referenced in my research on the Baedekers was accurate.

Fig. 1

My edition of the guidebook is described as having “22 maps, 58 plans, and a panorama” (Fig. 1). The 5th has “18 maps, 39 plans, and a panorama”; the 7th “28 maps, 65 plans, and a panorama.” The visible growth of content just in the frontmatter of each book is a testament to the attention to detail given to the content of each guidebook. Over just 9 years there is an increase of 10 maps in just one specific guidebook. How are other books growing? How did this specific guide change along with significant world events?

I was able to find an 1894 Baedeker’s Great Britain on eBay that showed some of the internal book – it has “16 maps, 30 plans, and a panorama.” Interestingly, the title page says it has 16 maps, but the list of Baedeker’s guide books behind the front cover lists the third edition of Great Britain as having 15 maps. I’m not sure why this discrepancy exists, and after taking a closer look at the other PDFs I found, the 5th edition describes the Great Britain guide book in that same list to have “16 maps, 30 plans, and a panorama”, the 7th doesn’t display that list at all, and mine is frustratingly obscured by a library identification card.

Something else I stumbled across while I was traipsing across the internet trying to find other editions of the Great Britain guide was the shocking discovery of just the Baedeker maps being sold. The very things that drew me in initially are apparently the main draw for a good number of interested parties. On Etsy some of them are being sold for $115, which is an unfortunate loss for those looking to find intact editions.

 

Works Referenced:

Wild, Michael. Baedekeriana: An Anthology. Red Scar Press, 2010.

Maps Galore! A Study of Baedeker’s Great Britain

October 28, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Fig. 1

Baedeker’s  Great Britain: A Handbook for Travellers by Karl Baedeker stood out to me because of the maps inside of it – all 22 of them, as well as 58 visual plans of various buildings and one panorama. When I am holding the book, I feel as if I have travelled back in time, looking at maps of 1906 London. The guidebook contains information exactly relevant to when it was written, including hotel recommendations, popular sports, a brief history of the region, etc. Most of the maps are in color and are of the same material paper as the first three title pages in the book (Fig. 2). Although all of the pages are very thin, these pages have a slippery feel, almost as if they are laminated. The few that are black and white, such as the plans to Chichester Cathedral on page 54, as well as the other pages in the guidebook, feel very similar to the paper one could encounter reading a novel of today, except very thin; in many areas, you can see the shadow text of the previous page through the next (Fig. 3). The pages are slightly yellowed, and in some areas, they are folded over or ripped.

 

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

This Baedeker’s Great Britain is a 6th edition copy published in 1906. It could have been published in three locations: Leipzig, with Karl Baedeker as the publisher; London, by Dulau & Co.; or New York, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. There is no definitive publisher in the title page, and there is no editor listed in the book. Baedeker’s is 4.25 x 6.25 x 1.125 in inches, and 10.8 x 15.9 x 3 in centimeters.

The guide is 606 pages long, plus 66 pages of front matter in Roman numerals. Notably, the several foldout maps within the book are not included among the numbered pages. Every 16 pages there are signature marks, on the first page a number or letter, and on the opposite page the same number or letter accompanied by an asterisk. In the introduction, this is done in lowercase letters and the following pages are done with numbers. Examples include “a” followed by “a*”, or “14” followed by “14*”; there are letters through “e” and numbers through “38” (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

The book is bound with red cloth, and its title is indented and embossed with gold (Fig.1). There are several other decorative indentations along the cover. The outer pages are decorated with what looks like a faded marbling design (Fig. 5). The decoration looks scalloped, but there are some variations to it. Although it is faded, along the top pages there is some visible color: black, blue, and some red (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6

The binding along the spine of the book has slightly separated from the pages, allowing me to look behind the cover (Fig. 7). It appears to be bound by glue, some form of a connecting or protecting cloth, and staples. Some of these staples are visible through the pages of the book in the index; this was exciting to me because I was expecting thread or something similar, but instead I found metal. Because it is tarnished, I wasn’t certain at first if the staples were thread, but holding the book up to the light caused the few untarnished areas to shine, and seeing behind the spine of the book made it clear to me that they were staples.

Fig. 7

There are also two fabric bookmarks attached to the spine, one in black and one in red, held in two different places in the book (Fig. 8). The red one has been severed from the spine and seems to be held there only by time and the memory of what it is supposed to do. This could suggest that there was more use out of this book than originally assumed, considering that there are very few marks in the book made by human hand. In the middle of the book, I found a bug, pressed between pages 250 and 251 (Fig. 9). Upon further inspection, you can make out legs, antennae, and what could have once been wings. Following that discovery, I found several other small bugs preserved inside the guidebook.

Fig. 8

On the front page directly glued to the cover of the book, there is a sticker that says “Library of Dickinson College”, the college logo, and “Presented by Edward M. Biddle” (Fig. 10). This sticker covers a list labeled “Baedeker’s Guide Books”. On the title page at the top right, written in pen, there is a handwritten notation that says  “E. M.. Biddle, July 6, 1907” (Fig. 10). On the following page containing the imprint statements, there is another note, written in pencil, that says the same thing (Fig. 2). The similarities between the handwriting indicate that this was likely written by the same person.

Fig. 10

When I asked the archivist librarians at Dickinson if there were any files on Edward M Biddle, we found a list containing 15 Biddles, all of whom attended Dickinson College. This list has 4 Edward Biddles, three of whom could be Edward M. Biddle. We were able to find a file on one Edward Macfunn Biddle, who graduated from Dickinson in 1904, and directly afterward attended Yale (Fig. 11). It is possible that this was his book. If so, there is no way of knowing how he used it. Other than the two handwritten inscriptions, there is only one other annotation within the guidebook; in the same handwriting it says, “Aug 1946 EMBiddle – Gift” (Fig. 3). Beyond these markings. there are several proclaiming the book to be the property of the Dickinson Library, including the sticker at the front of the book, a red stamp that says “Dickinson College Library” along the top pages (Fig. 10), and a raised indentation on the imprint statement page that says “Dickinson College Library”. There is also a black stamp warning readers that “THIS BOOK MAY NOT BE TAKEN FROM THE LIBRARY”. It’s interesting that there are so many marks from the library; one of them even covers up some of the text.  Why might this have felt necessary? 

Fig. 11

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