Greetings, dear reader! I’m overdue on my monthly check-in, I know. Since I last wrote, things have been interesting on a local level as well as Interesting on a national one. My youngest stepson somewhat abruptly moved in with us full time, which while lovely has been a somewhat unplanned bandwidth expenditure that required a lot of reallocation of time, money, and attention. In addition, Christmas and all things end of year have put quite a few things in the slow column, regrettably including the LBP.
That being said, I have at least put a few hours in on it since November’s check-in. I’m still working on “L”, but I’ve at least gotten through the Library of Congress. I’ll give a fuller accounting later in January, but I thought for now I’d give something of an overview, both of last year’s work and the project to date.
In March 2022, I started building this website and recording data in earnest, beginning with an effort to find where the books were I’d need to see and what sort of travel might be needed. I expected this to take a few months (Oh, sweet, näive past-me!). By January 2023, I began to realize I’d been in error and this would be a longer process, due in part to the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, in all its translations.
In July 2023, I finished with Phase 1 of the project, which was gathering data on all extant copies of Lennox’s work and trying to get some sort of sense of where things were. In the end, I created a total of 3 custom Google maps of locations, broken down by title, then year and bookseller/location. I would have preferred to have all the locations in one file, but I hit the limits of what custom Google maps could handle each time and had to open a new one.
I next had to verify holdings and make sure my notes were accurate as Phase 2, which meant going through each library’s catalogue and making sure all the listings were for physical books, not e-books or ECCO subscriptions or microfiche/microfilm. I pulled the data into CSV formats and put it into one large spreadsheet, then organized it by library rather than book title. From there, I began the process of verifying items in hopes of cleaning up the data and getting to the more active research of Phase 3 — a process that is still ongoing. At the end of Phase 2.1, I had 2612 prospective records, which I thought was a lot. 🙂 I also started a Heurist database to use as the eventual backbone of of the data, and possibly the eventual functionality for the bibliography. We’ll have to see.
I began Phase 2.2 that month, with my first update in August 2023. I am still doing that work, going more or less alphabetically by library name. If the number of records holds anything like true (I suspect it’s closer to 3000) then I’m a bit over halfway through, roughly 18 months later. According to the last full update in October 2025, I hit 1156 records confirmed, not counting those I’d deleted as duplicates or that didn’t turn out to exist. There’s still a lot of eventual math to be done, but I’d say overall I am pleased with the progress I’m making.
I think it’ll be at least another year until I start applying for research fellowships for in-person work, though I will probably start pursuing some smaller opportunities to help fund a Heurist subscription. It’s free, but if I’m going to be using it more often, I should contribute to the org’s costs.
I knew this would be a long term project. I don’t know if I had entirely reckoned on coming up on four years without seriously being able to look at actual books yet. That being said, I’m not tired of it yet, and I think I’ve actually uncovered some interesting insights. Here’s to continued progress. I’ll be posting an actual update in a couple weeks’ time.
Lennox Bibliography Project 