Or; why does our author ever expect to get anything but grading done in the last quarter of the semester, a tale of Great Expectations but Very Little Actual Progress. offered for the Public Good and General Scholarly Edification
Much as I wish I had progress to report, I have none — this is the season of Writing Feedback, and I am up to my eyeballs in thesis statements and argumentation, or at least attempts at these things. December should be much more fruitful. In the meantime, to all my readers and friends, happy USA Thanksgiving and holiday season ahead.
Greetings! This particular post is brought to you by the letter K (and about half of letter L). October is upon us –I’m already mad that the time change back to Standard time isn’t happening until the first week of November, as I can feel that it should be happening about now and it would be the least jarring for it to do so, but no, we have to wait until the first weekend in November because politics and candy lobbyists. Really, it just feels like adding insult to injury this year. There is too much argh happening, and the little bits I can do are not enough to fix any of it. If you feel similarly, you are not alone — keep at those little bits, though. Every tiny pebble helps build the mountain we need, no matter how small.
That being said, bibliography is comparatively a land of calm and sanity, unfazed by the cursed actions of tyrants and an impending lack of vitamin D. To our research we turn, therefore, as a welcome form of respite away from social media and the outside world. (Yes, my prose has gotten rather purple, but for this month at least we’re just going to work with it.) So, on to this month’s overview!
Things I learned from K:
To no one’s great surprise, I’m sure, I will be spending a decent amount of time at both the Kislak Library at University of Pennsylvania and Kresge Library at Oakland University. The latter in particular has copies of Lennox’s first book, Poems on Several Occasions (pretty hard to find), and Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, which is also fairly rare. Excited about both of those.
Not that many libraries that start with K, so the letter was shorter than I’d realized. I’d initially thought I might get through both K and L this month, but I forgot about midterm grading and so that plan did not come to pass. No big deal, though.
I have about 75 entries left in L, including the big one at the Library of Congress. Shouldn’t be a problem to get it done for the next update. We shall see! Also, I’ve started entering libraries into my database more intentionally. I may not know exactly what I’m doing with the books yet, but the locations I can build out now.
Number of libraries confirmed: 307 Number of libraries entered into the database: 58 Number of extant copies confirmed: 1156
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.
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
Greetings, gentle reader! Glad to see you once again. So the crazy news here is that I finished the letter H despite everything! (Or perhaps because of everything, honestly.) I’m frankly sort of amazed it happened, though. Perhaps it’s because there weren’t that many distinct entries, although there were some very big ones–Harvard’s libraries, the Harry Ransom Center, Indiana University (the Herman B. Wells Library led into the Lilly). Overall I’m pretty happy about my work so far.
Things I learned from H:
I have very strong feelings about catalogs that do not let you filter out microfiche from physical books.
I’m absolutely going to need fellowships to get through the sheer mass of works at Harvard and at UT-Austin.
There was apparently a Russian translation of Lennox’s play The Sister in 1788? I’ve only found it in microfiche in one place so far, but I’m suspending my “no microforms” rule for this one because I can’t find it anywhere else.
So “I” is really short, while “J” is a bit on the longer side due to the sheer number of high profile donors with “J” first names. It’s not bad, though. Coult September be the month with two letters? Stay tuned and find out!
Number of libraries confirmed: 241 Number of libraries entered into the database: 2 Number of extant copies confirmed: 893
Greetings, gentle reader! I’m not 100% sure what’s happening in the background of the letter G, but clearly she is not escaping death despite her status. A lesson for tyrants everywhere, methinks. But on sunnier thoughts, I completed the letter G!
Things I learned from G:
I should not have been surprised at how many institutional libraries are named after people named George, and yet here we are.
I will also need to spend some time in Germany, because as Norbert Schurer noted, the Germans were seriously fans of Lennox and published possibly the most translations/non-British editions of her work of any country, during her lifetime at least. There are also multiple German editions of her plays, which is really exciting.
Most unusual libraries on the list: the Tyron Palace library in North Carolina, and Gladstone’s library in the UK. Like, I am so excited to make that trip! And the volume they have is one of her harder works to find — her translation of Meditations and Penitent Prayers by the Duchess de la Valliere.
I have no reason to suspect that I will keep up this streak and finish H in August, though I will make progress. For one, I’ve got gallbladder surgery scheduled for the first week in August, and other than that, it’s the run up to the semester. Also, H has a lot going on with it — some big collections in there.
Number of libraries confirmed: 207 Number of libraries entered into the database: 2 Number of extant copies confirmed: 746
Greetings, gentle reader! The heat dome is upon us, and it sucks a whole lot, but I am pleased to announce that I have finished the letter F!
Things I learned from F:
I’m going to need to spend at least a month in France one of these summers. The National Library of France has so many editions and translations that I just don’t easily have access to here in the US.
The Fondren library at Rice, the Folger, and Princeton’s libraries are all must visits (Princeton is in this section because of listings in the Firestone library, which leads into the next point).
I’ve finally come to the conclusion that, because my info about which books are where within an institution with multiple libraries is a bit suspect, I really need to just group institutional holdings together, with rare exceptions (such as the Lewis Walpole Library and the Beinecke). So I’m finding separate sections I have for an institution and pulling them together, since they’re usually in the same catalog. This also went for the Five Colleges consortium, since they all share the same library catalog system.
The good news is that G is going to be short. H, however, is going to take quite a while given the Harry Ransom Library and the Houghton, for examples. In the meantime, I have been trying to pick out the readings I checked out of the library. I’m starting to sort of coalesce on an idea for moving forward, but I’m not entirely there yet.
Number of libraries confirmed: 184 Number of libraries entered into the database: 2 Number of extant copies confirmed: 688
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
Happy New Year! After a break that took me through the last quarter of last year, I am back pushing at my data verification boulder once more. As you might be able to tell from the image above, I am finished with the letter D. D contains 100 verified entries, which I mention primarily because it’s such a conveniently round number. Particular highlights include the UNC-Chapel Hill Davis library, the Detroit Public Library, Duke University library, UCSB and UC-Berkeley, The Royal Danish Library, and (unexpectedly for me) The Biblioteca de Catalyuna in Barcelona, Spain.*
Number of Libraries Confirmed: 149 Number of Libraries Entered into the Database: 2 Number of Extant Copies Confirmed: 618
*Do note that when we’re talking large library systems, often times the library I wrote down initially is not where the thing is actually housed, or it’s in special collections inside the library at large, or it’s off in storage somewhere, so for now this bit of data is still slightly wibbly. The existence of the books is confirmed, though, and that’s the important thing.
Lennox Bibliography Project 