Greetings, friends! It has been an eventful spring, what with *gestures at the entire landscape of the United States* all this going on. Also, in April, with two weeks of the semester left, I managed to get sick and break a rib from coughing. I am well and recovering, but I certainly can’t recommend the experience. That being said, I am making progress again! I have finished with the letter “E,” which feels like forward momentum.
Things I have learned from E: First (still, again), my initial forays into WorldCat feel as though when there were multiple libraries at an institution, they simply picked one out of the bunch and assigned it to that one if not otherwise specified. Now, some of this could be that my data set is a little older, and things do get moved around — into and out of storage, deaccessioned, whatever. But the sheer number of entries that are elsewhere (for example, holdings listed at various NYPL branches rather than at the Schwartzman location, which is apparently where most all this stuff I’m looking for actually lives) is too high to be altogether attributable to changes over time.
Second (and this is more of a personal pet peeve), the number of entries that suggest Johnson did the actual writing/translation for Lennox is more pervasive than I’d really realized and also deeply annoying. I have a great admiration for Samuel Johnson, but he frankly didn’t have the bandwidth to have written the better part of Lennox’s work in addition to his own, even if we ignore issues of style, content, and consistency. One more thing to work on, I suppose.
Third, I need to get busy determining what info I really want and how I’m going to present it. I’m doing more reading this summer on descriptive bibliography in general and trying to build up my library so I can make informed choices. We’ll see what we can find. I’ll keep the blog updated as I make decisions, naturally.
Number of libraries confirmed: 165
Number of libraries entered into the database: 2
Number of extant copies confirmed: 554
Lennox Bibliography Project 
So great to read about forward momentum, Michelle!
Wishing you a good summer of study and cataloguing. 😊
Susan Carlile, Ph.D. (she/her) | Professor of English | California State University, Long Beach
Zoom office: https://csulb.zoom.us/j/95537600054
“Before I am Quite Forgot: Women’s Critical Literary Biography and the Future,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, 2023.https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=abo
Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind, University of Toronto Press, 2018https://utorontopress.com/9781442626232/charlotte-lennox/
I acknowledge the Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of the Los Angeles basin and Southern Channel Islands and am grateful to have the opportunity to work at the sacred site of Puvungna. I pay my respects to the Ancestors, Elders, and relatives/relations past, present, and emerging.
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