GENERAL NOTES
WE have just received the catalogue of the library of the late Dr. Daniel, Provost of Worcester, which was bought in its entirety by Mr. Chaundy, of Oxford. Dr. Daniel, who died in the autumn of last year, was born in 1836. From boyhood onwards his favourite hobby seems to have been printing. "As early as 1846 a small hand press at Frome Vicarage, in Somerset, painfully produced a little letter, and in 1852 at least three numbers of the Busy Bee, printed and published by H. and W. E. Daniel, at their office, Trinity Parsonage, Frome." In 1856 two more substantial volumes (Sonnets, by C. J. C., and The Seven Epistles to the Churches, in Greek) were issued from Frome.
*****
So much for origins. The Daniel Press known to fame only came into existence in 1874, when the little hand press from Frome was set up in Worcester. The first book printed by the Daniel Press, at Oxford, was Notes from a Catalogue of Pamphlets in Worcester College Library, 1874, of which five-and-twenty copies were issued. A copy of this pamphlet is priced at 45s. in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue. A New Sermon of the Newest Fashion, printed from a MS. found in the College Library, appeared in 1877. In this volume Dr. Daniel first made use of the fount of type which had been cast for Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, and which had lain forgotten in the Clarendon Press for a century and a half. Henceforth Dr. Daniel was to make use of the Fell type in all his publications.
*****
The most treasured book of these earlier years is the Garland of Rachel (1881), which consists of poems offered to Miss Rachel Daniel on her first birthday by, among others, Andrew Lang, Austen Dobson, Robert Bridges, John Addington Symonds, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, T. Humphry Ward, and Margaret L. Woods. Only thirty-six copies were printed, one of which is priced in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue at £40.
*****
In 1882 the old press was replaced by a much more scientific machine, and among the first books to be printed on the new press was Prometheus the Firegiver (1883), by Robert Bridges. A number of the Poet Laureate's poems were to be issued from the Daniel Press. Of the Poems of 1884 one hundred and fifty copies were printed (£3 10s. in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue). The Feast of Bacchus (one hundred and five copies) and The Growth of Love, published anonymously in an edition of only twenty-two copies, appeared in 1889. The year 1903 witnessed the publication of two more pieces from Mr. Bridges' pen, namely, Now in Wintry Delights and Peace, an Ode written on Conclusion of the Three Years' War.
In 1884 Dr. Daniel made use for the first time of a number of fine seventeenth-century woodcut ornaments. His printer's mark was a piece of contemporary work, designed by Alfred Parsons, representing Daniel in the lions' den, with the motto, Misit Angelum Suum.
*****
Noteworthy volumes which issued from the Daniel Press in the nineties were Our Memories, Shades of Old Oxford (1893), a collection of Oxford reminiscences by various hands; The Child in the House (1894), by Walter Pater, published only a month or two before his death; Poems of Laurence Binyon (1895); Keble's Easter Day, of which only twelve copies were printed by Miss Rachel Daniel (1897). Eight years before Miss Daniel had printed The Lamb, by W. Blake, in duodecimo (1889).
*****
Besides those already mentioned, Dr. Daniel issued a number of reprints of old books. Sixe Idillia, translated from Theocritus by E. D. (possibly Dyer), was reprinted from the unique copy (1588) in the Bodleian Library. Love's Graduate, a comedy, by John Webster, being Mr. Gosse's distillation of what was Websterian in the Webster-Rowley comedy of 1661, appeared in 1885. The Muses Garden of Delights, a reprint of a unique Elizabethan volume, edited with an introduction by William Barclay Squire, was printed by Dr. Daniel in 1901. Another edition, printed by the Clarendon Press, was published in the same year.
*****
We have mentioned only a few of the Daniel books. A complete bibliography of the publications of the Press during its first thirty years of activity may be found in an article by Mr. Madan, at that time Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, contributed to the Times Literary Supplement of February 20th, 1903. As we have already had occasion to mention in these columns, the Daniel Press is now in the Bodleian, together with specimens of the books produced on it.
*****
Contemporary private presses are fairly numerous. The two which produce what are, from a literary point of view at any rate, the most interesting books are the Hogarth Press and the Ovid Press. From the Ovid Press Mr. John Rodker has just issued a very handsome edition of the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Poems by Mr. Eliot have also been published by the Hogarth Press, together with works in verse and prose by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and J. Middleton Murry.
*****
Our French allies seem to be making a serious effort to break with that tradition of bad printing which has for so long oppressed their literature. Several new publishing houses have come into existence with the avowed purpose of producing books that shall be handsome objects in themselves. The directors of the Nouvelle Revue Française have set a higher standard in their publications than most of their rivals. But even in their editions the most horrible atrocities, such as the omission of a whole sheet of sixteen pages in the middle of a book, occasionally happen. But the books produced by La Sirène, by La Belle Edition, and the Société Littéraire de France are worthy of all praise.
*****
The selection of rare and valuable books from the Arbury Hall Library which, as announced in the January number of The London Mercury, was to have been offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's on behalf of the owner, Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate, K.C.M.G., has instead been sold privately. Neither the name of the purchaser nor the destination of the books has yet been made public. Since the collection contains editions of Elizabethan books of the utmost rarity, and indeed some that are apparently unique, it is to be hoped that it will not pass beyond the reach of students of literature.
*****
Collectors of Swinburniana will be interested in A Catalogue of the Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Library of Mr. Edmund Gosse, London, privately printed at the Chiswick Press, 1919. Only fifty copies of this catalogue have been issued, of which a few can still be obtained from Mr. James Bain, bookseller, 14 King William Street, Strand.
*****
Many items of the greatest rarity are included in Mr. Gosse's collection. Among them we would note one of the fifteen copies of The Devil's Due (1875), preserved by accident when the issue was destroyed; Laus Veneris, Moxon, 1866, one of a few trial copies issued before the poem was included in Poems and Ballads; the essay on William Blake, Hotten, 1868, with the original title-page, afterwards cancelled, ornamented by the vignette of Zamiel from the Book of Job; The Jubilee, The Question, Gathered Songs, all three published by Ottley in 1887, in editions of only twenty-five copies each. Among the Swinburne MSS. in the possession of Mr. Gosse are the holograph of Pan and Thalassia, and the holograph of the first draft of Anactoria.
*****
The new Public Libraries Bill, which received the Royal Assent in the last days of 1919, should do much to assist the development of what is already an important educative force. We look forward in time to a national library system, with a central clearing house of books and a free interchange between the individual libraries. It is surely only in this way that the multifarious needs of an increasingly alert and well-educated society can adequately be met.
*****
Tuesday, March 23rd, is the date fixed for the sale of the second portion of Mr. Henry Yates Thompson's collection of illuminated manuscripts. Thirty-four lots are to be sold—twenty-six MSS. and eight fifteenth-century books, printed on vellum and more or less illuminated, "which mark the transition from writing to printing ... and are an indispensable addition to any complete collection of medieval illumination."
*****
The first fourteen lots are English manuscripts. A twelfth-century book, Hegesippus de excidio Judeorum, is remarkable for its contemporary binding, one of the very few of such bindings which have come down to us. Lot XL. is a fourteenth-century Psalter, which appears to have belonged to John of Gaunt, and subsequently to Henry VI. A similar Psalter, evidently by the same hand, though of a rather later date, exists in the library of Exeter College. These two Psalters are, in Mr. Yates Thompson's opinion, the high-water mark of English illumination, being perhaps second only to the St. Omer Psalter.
*****
The eight printed books range in date from 1466 to 1498, and include a copy of the excessively rare Institutiones of Justinian, printed at Mainz by P. Schöffer, 1468. The twelve MSS. which conclude the sale are of French and Italian origin and have all belonged to famous owners. Among them is an early fifteenth-century MS. of Boccaccio's Des Cleres et nobles femmes, illustrated by miniatures of that Parisian school of illuminators who "almost renounced the use of gold for backgrounds and made use of bright and rich colours in broad masses." The book belonged to the Admiral de Coëtivy, who was killed at the siege of Cherbourg in 1450. Mr. Yates Thompson quotes an extract from one of the Admiral's letters, which proves him to have been an ardent lover of his books. "Envelopez bien mes livres," he writes to his servants, giving directions for the packing and dispatching of his library, "et les faites enfoncer en pippes (casks) en et par manière que s'ilz cheoient en l'eaue, qu'ilz ne se puissent mouller ne gaster en aucune manière."
*****