Month: June 2022

State of the Project, June 2022

Oh, dear Readers, it has been an incredibly busy month. First of all, let me direct your attention to the picture on the right, which was only one of the amazing books I got to squee over and learn from at the RBS session on The History of the Book in America, 1700-1830, held at the Library Company of Philadelphia and taught by the excellent scholar James Green, who is Librarian Emeritus at that institution.

During that week, I learned very little about Lennox directly, but a ton about printing in the early United States and how her books likely came to be in the US. It opened so many avenues in my future research that I had not even considered, and I’m absolutely thrilled that I went. I should state that I was pleased to attend via a William T. Buice Scholarship, courtesy of UVa’s Rare Books School. I encourage anyone who’s interested, particularly NTT or independent scholars, to apply and help defray the tuition and fees involved with attending.

Aside from the RBS course, I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve completed Phase 1.1 of the LBP! Phase 1.1 refers to the gathering of raw location data of extant copies of Lennox’s published work, recorded through Google maps and added to the Maps page on this site. The data now gets downloaded and converted to a .csv format, and then aggregated so I can check individual libraries for their actual holdings and eliminate any digital access copies that snuck in, or add material that got missed.

Once I’ve cleaned up and verified the data, then I’ll move on to analysis and remapping. At the same time, I’ll take on Phase 2, which is determining the data types I’m collecting and what I want the overall schema of the project to be. This section includes longevity planning, scalability, UI design and parameters, and a potential push for a sharable bibliographic interface that can be tweaked for use in other projects free of charge. I don’t anticipate starting Phase 2 before 2023, and I likely won’t be doing any serious data gathering on the books themselves until nearly 2024, though I’d be happy to be overestimating the timeline here.

All in all, I’m very excited about progress this summer and what next month brings. Stay tuned!

A hand-embroidered cover on a Bible dated to 1743, belonging to Mary Sandwith. It's red, green, blue, and yellow on a cream background using flamestitch.
Mary Sandwith’s Bible, from 1743. She embroidered this cover as a girl — the date she stitched on the spine is from when she was 11 years old. Part of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s collections.

Cool Discovery of the Day, Issue #1

Title page of a 1758 book titled "Angellica: a Comedy in Two Acts".

As I was browsing my way through the Penn State library website to determine what they had there that I’d need to use, I ran across an electronic copy of the work whose title page is featured here: Angelica; or Quixote in Petticoats, a Comedy in Two Acts. This 1758 play was not written by Charlotte Lennox, though there’s a note at the end of the dedication noting that they took Angelica (originally Arabella) and most of the plot wholesale from The Female Quixote by “Mrs. Lenox.” Nice to give credit for that much, at least, and it speaks to the contemporary popularity of the novel that it inspired this knock-off play.