Looking Closer at the Inscription page in Poems / by J.D. ; With Elegies of the Authors Death
So, I have gotten my anti-blog rant out of the way, and I have Donne a biographical summary of sorts (first and only time you’ll see that pun, promise). Maybe it’s time to actually talk research. I spent a fair bit of time leafing through the first edition of John Donne’s collected poems that UBC keeps locked away in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library, and I noticed a bunch of stuff that miiiiight give us a better idea of what this first edition has been through.
Let’s summarize.
- Published in 1633
- 406 pages
- Size: Small Quarto (all pages complete with lettering on the bottom middle and the first word of the next page on the bottom right)
- Inscriptions on first blank page, from multiple authors. The information on the page includes:
- “Rebound in 1914”
- A sticker of sorts which reads “J.A.W. Bennett, Magdalene College, Cambridge”
- This person was clearly an owner at one point, and some further research revealed that he worked with characters like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien at Cambridge and Oxford, so he was clearly a badass, but unfortunately he specialized in Middle English Literature and therefore did not publish anything related to Donne. I also couldn’t find any information on his possession of the collection, and so I have no way of dating the time in which the book took residence in Bennett’s library. However, I would love to imagine that this very edition overheard some of the conversations Bennett may have had with Lewis and Tolkien, as well as a handful of other midcentury British scholars who were all part of this Oxford/Cambridge literary society (they were called the Inklings, and you should look them up).
- A bunch of page numbers:
- p.273 – first issue of first edition
- p. 186 (written by two different people)
- ” see 331, 341″
- Turns out, page 273 is missing a running title and has 35 lines of text, an error that only occurred in the first issue of the first edition. Pages 330-31 and 341 are missing words that would have read as offensive to the king or the church at the time, and were omitted from the first edition (more on these numbers later).
- Page 186 has an old inscription that reads “To Ann S–h”. The inscription is written right above the poem “The Message”, but curiously, the title of the poem is not printed. I have however not been able to find any facts related to this.
- The book itself is missing its title page (unfortunately)
- The first page (the Printer’s Note) has been fixed (added new paper) multiple times, resulting in only half a Printer’s Note today
- Two types of “s” letters have been used indiscriminately (but one “s” very much looks like an “f”, and there are a lot of instances where the mixed use renders some pretty cheeky readings).
- There is some water damage (or what appears to be water damage) on the bottom of the last third of the book.
For the rest of this blog, I will be focussing on what it is that makes this specific book a first issue of the first edition, and will hopefully be able to discover some facts about the manuscript circulation culture in which these poems were formed. Fingers crossed I find some stuff.
