ABA Summer Exhibition 2008: Women & the Book

 

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association and the Women’s Library present a major selling exhibition on women and the printed word. 370 items have been consigned by over 50 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, the oldest trade association of its kind in the world. We’ve also been delighted to welcome the participation of some of our overseas colleagues, making this a truly international event. Covering literature, women in the book-trade, science and medicine, politics, travel and children’s books, the exhibition will include books and related items by, for or about women, or printed, illustrated and bound by women: from an example of Dame Juliana Berners’ Boke of St Albans printed by Caxton’s successor Wynkyn de Worde at Westminster in 1496 to a 1997 proof copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. Alongside first editions by literary heavyweights such as Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf are ephemeral items such as Suffragette board games and presentation and association copies, such as a copy of Notes on Hospitals inscribed by Florence Nightingale. The price range is £40.00-£75,000. The Women’s Library will be displaying a selection of highlights from their special collections, and there will be a catalogue and two free lectures accompanying the exhibition.

 

Venue and times:

 

Friday 8th -Wednesday 20th August

Mon-Fri 10am-6pm; weekends 11am-5pm

The Exhibition Room, Bernard Quaritch Ltd,

8 Lower John Street, Golden Square,

London W1F 9AU.

Admission: free.

Contact: admin@aba.org.uk

Internet: www.abasummer.com

 

Lectures:

 

Tuesday 12th August 6.15pm:

Jolyon Hudson of Pickering & Chatto Ltd.

‘Understanding Booksellers and their Catalogues: an introduction to book collecting.’

 

Thursday 14th August 6.15pm:

Dianne Shepherd of the Women’s Library

‘Celebrating & Recording Women’s Lives: the provenance and development of the Women’s Library Collections.’

 

Highlights:

 

The following is a brief selection of exhibition highlights. All of the books will be offered exclusively at the ABA Summer Exhibition from August 8th and they are supplied with the name of the bookseller who is exhibiting them and the price at which they are for sale. We’d be only too pleased to supply further information on any of the items or topics discussed.

 

Bernard Quaritch Ltd open our selection of literature with the 1501 first edition of the “Comedies” and other writings by the tenth-century nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim, the first non classical dramas to appear in print (£40,000). They also offer the first edition of what is both the first original work of fiction and the first sonnet sequence to be written by an Englishwoman, Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, printed in 1621 (£40,000). We have works by female scholars, such as pioneering Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob’s An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory, 1709 (G&R Stone £750) and belonging to them, such as London bluestocking Elizabeth Vesey’s copy of Alciphron: or, The Minute Philosopher (Christopher Edwards, £750). There are first editions of Fanny Burney’s Camilla, 1796 (£2500, Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller), Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, 1813 (Jarndyce £28000) and  Emma, 1816 (Bernard Quaritch Ltd £28000); Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man, 1826, which is the first scientific disaster novel in English (Robert Temple, £5500); Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847 (Adrian Harrington £22500); and a number of Virginia Woolf items including a first edition of The Years, 1937 (Bertram Rota £1500) and eight of her pocket engagement diaries between 1930 and 1941 (Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller £75000).  Nigel Williams Rare Books is offering the original typescript of a 1961 interview with Agatha Christie (£350) and some of Dorothy L. Sayers’ advertising copy written in the 1920’s for the Colman’s Mustard Club (£195-£275).  Manuscript specialist Michael Silverman has consigned autograph letters by Beatrix Potter, George Eliot and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (£3500, £2000 and £500). A 1922 first edition of Richmal Crompton’s Just William, the first title in the series is £450 (Marchpane), and children’s specialist Marchpane have also provided a signed copy of Enid Blyton’s First Term at Malory Towers 1946 (£550) and a signed uncorrected proof copy of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997 (£7500). Harriette Wilson’s infamous Memoirs of Herself and Others is present in an early pirated edition of 1825 (Natalie Galustian £1000). Wilson’s attempts to blackmail the Duke of Wellington (who features extensively) inspired the famous retort: “Publish and be damned”.

 

Some of the most remarkable items, though few are by household names, relate to the role of women in the book trade, which was much more extensive (and began much earlier) than is commonly realized. The collected works of Thomas Taylor ‘the Water Poet’ were printed in London in 1630 by a consortium of printers including Elizabeth Allde, a widow working on an equal footing with her male colleagues (Alex Alec Smith, £3500). Caroline Watson was one of very few women to maintain an independent practice as an engraver and a fine 1783 print of the actor David Garrick paying tribute to Shakespeare (Grosvenor Prints, £650) is a testament to her skill. We have a volume on militia law printed in 1718 by Elizabeth Nutt, the matriarch of the London pamphlet trade (Unsworth’s Booksellers £300) and a volume of law reports printed in 1789 by Elizabeth Lynch, a specialist legal publisher and bookseller with two shops in late eighteenth-century Dublin (Tim Bryars Ltd £250). A collection of original literary contributions was published with royal approval under the title Victoria Regia by Emily Faithfull’s ‘Victoria Press for the Employment of Women’ in 1861 (Ash Rare Books, £150). Women had long been involved in the book binding trade, but mostly folding printed sheets and sewing bindings. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of female designer book binders. Bindings by women include a copy of Les Heures dites de Jean Pucelle (1910), bound by Katharine Adams for her friend the eminent curator and collector Sydney Cockerell (George Bayntun £2000), and an illustrated record of the work of the Guild of Women Binders (1902), which was probably bound for exhibition display by a member of the Guild (Tim Bryars £1750).

 

Dame Julian Berners Boke of St Albans, 1496 (Sokol Books Ltd £39,500) is the first printed book in the English language which was the work of a woman, the first use of colour printing in England and the first printed text in English on country sports. Other works relating to female accomplishments or pastimes include a volume on gymnastic exercises with a splendid Treatise on Calisthenic Exercises arranged for the Private Tuition of Ladies of 1827 (Grant & Shaw Ltd £2750). Cookery books range in date from a 1751 example of The Lady’s Companion (Black Cat Books £1100) and a 1777 copy of Sarah Harrison’s The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book (Jarndyce £850) to Erna Mayer’s How to Cook in Palestine of c. 1925 (Fishburn Books £395). Mrs Beeton is included, but as ‘editress’ of the new series of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (volume one,1860), where the emphasis was squarely on fashion (Tim Bryars Ltd £100). Brenda Girvin was another pioneering female journalist, and we have her copy of Arnold Bennett’s 1898 work Journalism for Women (Ash Rare Books £250).

 

Artists and naturalists are well represented. We have a set of Floral Illustrations of the Seasons, 1831, the major work of botanical illustrator Margaret Lace Roscoe (Henry Sotheran £6000) and an engraving of spiders by Anna Maria Sybilla Merian from Histoire generale des insects de Surinam et de toute l’Europe (Paris 1771, Henry Sotheran £850): in 1669 Merian made an extraordinary journey to Surinam to study insects in the Dutch colony with her daughter. Works by female travellers in the exhibition touch on all the continents of the world, but include a first edition of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, 1937 (Omega Bookshop £1250).

 

Under the heading ‘science and medicine’ we have a 1604 example of Rosslin’s The Birthe of Mankinde, the only early English version of the first work for midwives (Sokol Books Ltd £4250); Mrs Pengree’s 1815 translation of Lalande’s Ladies’ Astronomy (Andrew Hunter Rare Books, £550); and the first Yiddish edition of Dr Allbutt’s The Wife’s Handbook, advice on contraception for women which led to the author being struck off for corrupting public morals (Fishburn Books £750). An 1863 copy of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals has been inscribed to William Hammack, for his valuable assistance during the preparations for the International Statistical Congress of 1861, where she presented her work on the importance of uniform hospital statistics (Rebecca Hardie Rare Books, £8000).

 

The politics and philosophy section is very strong, containing many items relating to the struggle for female suffrage, including two very rare games, Pank-A-Squith and Panko, both from 1909 (Pickering and Chatto £1250 & £500). Some of the material is decidedly anti-suffrage in tone, such as the original artwork for Florence Claxton’s The Adventures of a Woman in Search of her Rights, (c. 1871) where the heroine becomes physically ugly through study and is eventually forced to flee to America where she marries a polygamous Mormon – fortunately it’s all a dream (Greening Burland, £6500). There is a great deal of earlier material including a splendid album compiled over a lifetime by Ann, wife of the abolitionist George Thompson, relating to Quakerism, anti-slavery campaigning and women’s rights (Ian Marr Rare Books £6000). Bernard Quaritch Ltd are showing a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792 (£7500) and also Lady Mary Shepherd’s 1824 metaphysical Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (£1750).