State of the Project, September 2025

Greetings, gentle reader! Just as GBBO returns with a new season in the USA, so do I return this month with an update on the Lennox Bibliography Project. The world may be a searing hellscape with death, destruction, groypers, assassinations, the death of health insurance and job security in academia, but at least we’ve got a banging recipe for hobnobs I cannot wait to try. I went retro and made old-school, crossed-with-fork-marks peanut butter cookies this weekend, and I do not regret it in the least. That is not why you’re here, though. You’re here for an update! This baking celebration bit is brought to you in honor of the fact that I did, in fact, finish both I and J this past month! To the virtual bibliography tent!

Things I learned from I and J:

• It was incredibly rude for John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to endow two libraries but name them both after himself.
• The John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester has a surprisingly robust Lennox collection, much more so than I’d been led to believe by my earlier WorldCat searches.
• The aforementioned strategy of combining multiple libraries at a single institution when I do the searches has turned out to be a much better strategy. Yay for process iteration!

Seriously, I feel as though I’ve hit a milestone, even though we are not halfway through the alphabet yet. In truth, I felt it so strongly that I did some checking. It turns out that while I may only be on the 10th letter, I’m very nearly halfway through the entries I have in the spreadsheet. I have just under 3100 lines in the sheet with info, and I’ve hit just over line 1550.

Now, there are some caveats to bit of data trivia — first, I’ve been adding blank lines between libraries to help block the data into groups and make it visually easier to track; second, not everything in the file exists, and some are in duplicates but I can’t know that until I track it down and verify it; and third, my newfound method of grouping multiple libraries at an institution means I’ve moved things around slightly as I get to a new place/encounter a place I’ve started before. I don’t really think this last point is statistically significant, but it does mean it takes me slightly longer to quantify my progress when I sit down to it.

Database Musings

In addition, now that I’ve hit something approximating midpoint, I felt my attention turning back to the Heurist database. It’s gone through some updates and improvements, and I’m very pleased with it overall. Still easy to use and enter data, but with new, easier to parse mapping capability, which is one of the things I very much wanted (and why I kept the library coordinates from Google Maps, so I could eventually see proximity data and plan out trips. Also because I think it’s cool). I also realized I was a little offbase about the number of entries I was quoting. I have two books and their locations in the database, not two libraries. I have 54 library entries thus far, with two new ones as of today.

That, of course, is not as simple as adding two records. For those of you familiar with relational database work, you probably know more than I do and can skip this part. For everyone else, in order to make this work, you can think of it as putting a bunch of different pegs on a pegboard, each for a different data point, and then using yarn to connect them. So for every book location, I need not only the info about the book, but about the library it’s in. For every library, I need the institution it’s connected to. Each library entry is therefore at least two entries, along with all the connections to be made and the mappable location entered. I’ve put off entering in more books until I get the library locations entered, at least as far as today’s plan goes. I may change my mind and start entering books again just to get the basic info in place and connections made.

Beyond that, I still need to decide exactly how I’m going to put information about the books — collation formulae, images, provenance, marginalia, as well as the standard bibliographic stuff. For most of Lennox’s work, this is not hugely problematic in terms of parsing out issue, edition, etc., at least not on the face of it. Most of her works didn’t go through too many printings/editions, and the ones that did often were either international, translations, or clearly post-1774/Donaldson v. Beckett reprints from different publishers, so the status of the edition is pretty clear. ¹

Regardless, all of that has to be determined eventually. I know I’m heavily interested in individual issues and evidence of use of Lennox’s books, but I don’t want to shortchange the more traditional bibliographic data either. I also frankly need a refresher on determining all of it, because it’s been a hot minute since RBS and I’ve been busy doing other, more day job-related things. I’ll sort it out as I get closer, though. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

1. This assessment does not, FYI, include the many and varied printings/editions/issues/whatever of the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully in its varied titles and incarnations. ↩︎

Number of libraries confirmed: 281
Number of libraries entered into the database: 54
Number of extant copies confirmed: 1038