A Virtual Tour of My Collection of Essays

The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood––whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay–writer is a chartered libertine and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. 

               Alexander Smith, "On the Writing of Essays." 
Dreamthorp:  A Book of Essays Written in the Country, 1863

Last month I took you on a virtual tour of my Poetry Collection. This month I will take you on a virtual tour of my Collection of Essays.  I will present images of book covers and title pages, and even a link or two to essays you can view online.   For brevity's sake, I will omit the posting of publication information.  You can, however, view the catalog listings of all my essay books on Library Thing.


An odd volume of The British Essayists 1808

For years, I craved for the entire forty-five volume set of The British Essayists.  But by the time I found a set in decent shape and at a reasonable price, I no longer wanted it.  I was more than happy with reading my motley collection of essays.


Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592

Francis Bacon 1561-1626

Seventeenth-Century Essayists

Contains essays by Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Webster, George Chapman, Edmund Bolten, Henry Peacham, Michael Drayton, Henry Reynolds, Sir William Alexander, Sir John Suckling, and John Milton (end Vol I); Sir William Davenant, Thomas Hobbes, Abraham Cowley, Richard Flecknoe, Sir Robert Howard, Thomas Sprat, Thomas Shadwell, Thomas Rymer, Edward Phillips, Joseph Glanvill, Samuel Butler, Earl of Rochester, Earl of Mulgrave, and the Earl of Roscommon (end Vol II); Robert Wolseley, Sir William Temple, Gerard Langraine, John Dennis, Charles Gibson, William Wotten, Sir Richard Blackmore, William Congreve, Jeremy Collier, and George Granville (end Vol III).

Joseph Addison 1672-1719

Joseph Addison 1672-1719 and Richard Steele 1672-1729
The Tatler and The Guardian complete in one volume

My Very First Book of Essays

Little did I know when I first picked it up off the top of a bookcase in an antique store in a village near RAF Mildenhall, England, and started reading it almost twenty-nine years ago, that this book, an odd volume of the 1806 edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, would become the cornerstone of not only my Samuel Johnson Collection, but my Essay Collection as well.

Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

Several weeks later, at a book fair in Long Melford, I bought a 1776 edition of The Rambler.

And then more SJ essay books. . .

And finally, about ten years ago, I acquired Johnson's Works from Mike Slicker at his Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg, Fl.

Francis Jeffrey 1773-1850 Modern British Essayists Series

Charles Lamb 1775-1834

William Hazlitt 1778-1830

Leigh Hunt 1784-1859

Men, Women, and Books; A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs From His Uncollected Prose Writings by Leigh Hunt (1st Amer. & 1st Eng. Eds.)

Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881

Four of the five books were published by Chapman & Hall, and the other in a similar binding design by Chatto & Windus (On the Choice of  Books).  The Chapman & Hall books have title pages dated from 1831 to 1850, but they contain publisher inserts listing books first published in the 1870s.  The Chatto & Windus book is dated 1878.

Jonathan Dymond 1796-1828

Acquired while I was on a Philosophy kick.  The complete title is Essays on the Principles of Morality, and of the Private and Political Rights and Obligations of Mankind by Jonathan Dymond.

Thomas Babington Macaulay 1800-1859

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

James Anthony Froude 1818-1894

Alexander Smith 1830-1867

Dreamthorp:  A Book of Essays Written in the Country.  First published in 1863.  You can read these essays on google books. My favorites are "A Shelf in My Book Case" and "On the Writing of Essays." 

Austin Dobson 1840-1921

Alice Meynell 1847-1922

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894

 I wrote about Will H. Low's copy of Across the Plains and Other Memories and Essays,  also by RLS, in my January 2013 blog post, "Memories of Things Experienced and Things Missed."

Adrian Joline 1850-1912

Augustine Birrell 1850-1933

In Feb 2013, I wrote about the provenance history of another book written by Augustine Birrell. Click on the title below to view my post.

Res Judicatæ.

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900

Agnes Repplier 1855-1950

Logan Pearsall Smith 1865-1946

First American Edition of Trivia.  No. 82 of 100 copies printed by Doubleday, Page and Company.  Signed by the author.
                   

I have a manuscript copy of a short piece (click to view) Logan Pearsall Smith wrote which appeared in More Trivia and then in All Trivia.



Max Beerbohm 1872-1956

Clarence Day 1874-1935

T. S. Eliot 1888-1965

Aldous Huxley 1894-1963

Russell Brain 1895-1966

Mary Hyde Eccles 1912-2003

The English Essayists:  A Comprehensive Selection From the Works of the Great Essayists, From Lord Bacon to John Ruskin, With Introduction, Biographical Notices, and Critical Notes compiled and arranged by Robert Cochrane.  Prize Binding Awarded 1913

If this is "a book of English Essays," then why is one of the 41 essays written by Edgar Allen Poe, and another written by James Russell Lowell?

Sixteen essays by fifteen American essayists (Lowell wrote two essays).

The second edition of a college text book that went through five editions.

No. 653 of Everyman's Library.  One hundred English essays from Caxton to Belloc.

A most interesting book about six different types of essays and the essayists who wrote them.  You can read it here on Google Books.

And this concludes the virtual tour of my Essay Collection.  For brevity purposes, I have omitted the display of scholarly essays about Samuel Johnson and William Shakespeare.  I have omitted the display of more than a few anecdotal essays in my Books About Books Collection.  And I have omitted the display of essays written by living authors.  You can, however, view the listings of all my books on Library Thing.

A Virtual Tour of My Poetry Collection

As time flows slowly by, Life's tide does rise and fall, Singing a baby's cry, Sighing a dead man's call.

The lines above form the first stanza of a poem I wrote many long years ago.  I no longer write poetry.  But I still read and collect it.  And this month, in honor of National Poetry Month, I will take you on a virtual tour of my Poetry Collection.   I will present images of book covers and title pages of English and American poetry, and even a poem or two.

Many of the books in my Poetry Collection stand side by side on a single shelf stretching across and above the closet in my library room proper.

In the far right corner of this shelf, out of view of the camera, stand several poetry books that Alexander Smith writes about in his Dreamthorp essay, "A Shelf in My Book Case."  I have all the other books he mentions in the essay as well.

Smaller poetry books display their spines on the top shelf of an antique secretary bookcase in our living room, with the smallest ones stored in a slotted shelf inside the bookcase, hidden between the Americana Collection of Hershel V. Jones and Audubon's Birds of America.

Still more poetry books are parts of other collections.  My Hawaiian poetry books share shelf space in the wall unit in the family room with the other books of my wife's Hawaiiana and Danish Collections.

Even our dog enjoys Hawaiian poetry.

My wife and I would love to call Hawaii "our island home."   But I need to win the lottery first.  We were stationed there from 1977 to 1982 when I was in the Air Force, and have been back at least ten times.

My volumes of The Works of the English Poets, With Prefaces Biographical and Critical by Samuel Johnson "top off" my Samuel Johnson Collection. My volumes contain the poems of Cowley, Milton, Rochester, Roscommon, Yalden, Otway, the Duke of Dorset, Halifax, Stepney, Walsh, Blackmore, Prior, Broome, Pitt, Somerville, Akenside, Moore, Cawthorn, Churchill, Lloyd, Cunningham, Goldsmith, Whitehead, Green, Armstrong, and Johnson.

Johnson's Poets 1779

Johnson's Poets 1790

Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson 1820, 1847, 1946

Johnson's Poets aren't the only poetry books I have from the late 1700s and early 1800s.  I have one volume of  Bell's Poets.

Bell's Edition of the Poets of Great Britain 1781

And I have one volume of Cooke's Poets.


Cooke's Edition of Select Poets 1810

And I have more than a handful of volumes of Sharpe's Poets – 26 volumes to be exact.

Sharpe's Edition of the Works of the British Poets 1808

These volumes, some of which I will rebind dos-à-dos,  contain the poems of Addison, Tickell, Hamilton, Churchill, Cunningham, Cotton, Akenside, Gay, Swift, Prior, Butler, Savage, Dryden, Moore, Mallet, Langhorne, Green, Jago, Hammond, Lyttleton, Dyer, Thompson, Somerville, Shenstone, Young, Hughes, Congreve, Fenton, Blackmore, Pope, Glover, Goldsmith, Beattie, Johnson, Warton, and Jones.

  Nice engravings in the Sharpe edition!  These are not frontispieces; they are located near the end of the section of each poet.

Here's an 1811 edition of John Gay's works published by Suttaby, Evance & Fox.

I was in the process of rebinding it when I noticed  the filler material in the boards consisting of title pages of two books printed after 1811, meaning this book was rebound in 1819 or later.

                                Here's a four-volume set of more British poets.

Jones's Cabinet Edition of the British Poets 1820s (all four volumes need rebacking)

This set contains the poems of Milton, Cowper, Goldsmith, Thomson, Falconer, Akenside, Collins, Grey,  Somervile, White, Burns,, Beattie, Gay, Shenstone, Butler, Byron, Pope, Mason, Watts, Hayley, Prior, More, Dryden, Smith, Bloomfield, Canning, Gifford, Lord Lyttleton, Hammond and Richardson.  I love the frontispieces.

Have you ever heard of The Penny Poets series from the 1890s?  I have four volumes featuring two English poets, and two American poets.

I have ten volumes of The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry (1920s and 30s).

Austin Dobson (1840-1921) is one of the English poets whose works I collect.  I have both English and American editions of some of his works.

Now this oversized poetry book by Dobson had to find a place on top of one of the two bookcases in my library closet.

                                                      New York, 1890

By far, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the American poet who takes up the most shelf space in my library.

I have one complete set of the 45 parts of Longfellows poems and prose works issued from 1879 to 1883. And I have 43 parts of a second set.  Subscribers had the opportunity to have the 45 parts bound into three volumes, but the former owner of my set, a Mrs. Barrett, chose to keep them as issued.

On my bookbinding pile for years has been a three-volume set of Dante's Divine Comedy, translated by Longfellow and published in 1889.  Next to it is an 1859 London edition of Longfellow's poetical works, followed by an 1896 Boston printing of Evangeline.

The book that was the hardest ever to find was a book my sister-in-law remembered reading to her children when they were young.  It was about angel children and the chores they perform each day of the week.  But she couldn't remember the title.  It took me six years to identify it.

Angel Children are little things
With fairy ways
And fairy wings.
They sleep in the clouds;
And they live up high
Along with birds
In the big blue sky
Frances Wosmek wrote and illustrated Sky High and it was first published in 1949.  Frances, ninety-six years young, still writes poetry and has her own website:  franceswosmek.com  If you're familiar with her work, say hello to her.

I have numerous poetry books of individual authors some of which I will display either covers or title pages, mostly in collages.

Mark Samuels Lasner will be glad to see that I have Oscar Wilde's Poems in my library.

Cowper 1864

                 Formerly owned by Henry E. Huntington's daughter Marian Huntington.

If you want to read more poems from the 1500s, you'll find some in Edward Arber's  English Garner.

Here's the Google Books link for Ballads of Books pictured below.  It contains verse by Southey I favor, which surprisingly is not included in my copy of Southey's works. My days among the dead are past; Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are cast The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day

Here's a little trivia.  The poet below, Edward Lowe, was the inventor of Kitty Litter.

Paul Lemperly's copy

Since I call myself moibibliomaniac, I couldn't pass up a poetry book with "Moi" in the title, could I?

The most beautiful book in my Poetry Collection is John Henry Nash's The Psalms of the Singer David.  And yes, I do regard it as poetry.

            John Henry Nash gave this copy to the bibliophile Barton Currie in 1931.

And here ends the virtual tour of my Poetry Collection.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you want more, you can view the listings of all my poetry books on Library Thing.