 | |  |
Notes
Accounts vary on the details of Scott's acquisition of the publishing company. On 15th August 1882 the Publishers' circular announced that the Tyne Publishing Co now belonged to Scott, but certainly the Tyne Printing Co continued in business after this date and they seem to have continued as publishers as well as printers. Furthermore, from the beginning, Scott's printing works was in Felling-on-Tyne and according to local and trade directories the Tyne Printing Co was never in Felling. James Clegg's International directory of booksellers . . ., Rochdale, 1910, asserts that The Walter Scott Publishing Co Ltd was founded in 1875 and presumably this information was supplied by Scott, but none of the other sources agrees with this date.
Other possible examples are found in Harvard University Library, which has two copies of Howard Blackett's Life of Giuseppe Garibaldi, one published by the Tyne Publishing Co and the other by John McGready, and the University of British Columbia Library, which has a copy of J. T. Lloyd's Henry Ward Beecher: his life and work, a Tyne Publishing Co title which was also 'published' by John McGready.
The ornaments form two sides of a frame: along the head an ornament with spirals of leaves 11 x 97 mm; along the gutter an ornament with stylised leaves 141 x 18 mm. There are also two rows of eleven star ornaments, one above and one below the author's name.
All the Askew copies have similar bindings (red leather quarter bound on red cloth boards blocked on the front with the words 'Gems of Literature Series') with no indication that the cases were supplied by Scott. It is therefore possible that Scott sometimes supplied only the book blocks and the customer provided the cases.
The following are a few examples which I have seen: J. Arthur Bain, Life and explorations of Fridtjof Nansen, nd; Thomas Browne, Religio Medici . . . and other essays, 1886; Daniel C. Eddy, The young woman's friend, 1885; English fairy and folk tales, ed Edwin Sidney Hartland, nd; J. T. Lloyd, Henry Ward Beecher: his life and work, 1887; and Edward Bulwer Lytton, Alice, or the mysteries, nd. It does not follow, of course, that all copies of these books will be wire sewn, because one edition could be bound in a variety of ways. Routledge also sometimes used a wire sewing machine in their Morley's Universal Library Series.
The Scott copies which have been used to set against the non-Scott copies have been chosen simply for their accessibility, mainly because the bibliography of Scott reprints is extremely obscure. All the Scott titles are from one or other of the reprint series but it is almost impossible to say from which particular series. Scott's reprints are almost invariably undated, and individual copies seldom have any indication of the series to which they belong. According to Scott's advertisements the same title could appear in several different series, still with no indication in the books themselves; Oliver Twist and Pickwick papers, for instance, are each in seven different series.
It has not been possible to examine this copy, and the Harrop state appears to be rare. The National union catalog pre-1956 imprints lists only four copies and one of these (the copy claimed to be in the Library of the Department of the Navy) has proved to be a ghost. No copy has so far been located in Britain.
| | |