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WELCOME TO THE PERSONAL WEBSITE OF

ROBIN ALSTON

¶The Library History Database¶

Bibliography of the English Language
1958-2010

The Scolar Experience
The Janus Experience
Essays and Papers 1975-2002
Review of Snyder’s History of ESTC

BITS & PIECES

[Informal News & Happenings]
[Updated September, 2009]

CV
[Updated October 21, 2008]

Contact

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Bibliography of the English Language

Volume XX - in two substantial volumes - listing several hundred manuscripts has at last gone to the printers. Work on Volume XX has been progressing steadily since the year 2000, when I discovered to my horror that all the files which I had accumulated since 1960 had been lost in transit from Suffolk to London. I have had, in effect, to retrace the research of almost forty years. Not, in fact, possible. However, over two thousand entries have been recovered, and I hope that, notwithstanding the loss of records and photographs of several hundred items in some 120 libraries, the corpus of recovered entries will prove fruitful for researchers in English language history.

Subscribers to the series will be pleased to know that the end of this marathon project is at last in sight. I hope to complete the remaining volumes by the end of 2010. The final volume – which may have to be postponed until 2011 - is Volume XXII: cumulative indexes to the entire series being undertaken by Jane Read, a professional indexer. Jane has been working on this for over two years now and the result will be a wonderfully comprehensive index to authors, editors, revisers, titles, subjects, dates and places of publication, and languages.

Discovering new entries for published volumes continues as always. A recent discovery came to light during the editing of Volume XX: Benjamin Schultze, sent from Denmark to India as a missionary in the eighteenth century, published in German at Halle a description of Fort St. George on the Coromandel Coast near Madras. An English version of this was published, also at Halle, in the same year: The Large and Renowned Town of the English Nation in the East-Indies upon the Coast of Coromandel. Copies of this are at Halle University, Wolfenbüttel, Kiel University, the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and Rostock University. The only copy outside Germany is in the Spencer Library at Kansas University. The account, in dialogue format, has a glossary of unusual Hindostan words: it will be described in Volume XXI, Part 4. My interest in Schultze concerns his manuscript grammar of Hindostan, written at Madras in 1741 – British Library MS. IO.2531: Volume XX, L 179.

The Burney Newspaper Database

In 2008 - after many years of planning and, no doubt, over-planning - the Gale Research conversion of the Burney microfilms was was made available to readers in the British Library. Nowhere on the Gale trial site (to which I have recently been granted access in Barbados) is it stated how this project came into being. The Burney project owes its existence to the fact that I was part of the development of the remarkable Mekel M400 microfilm digital scanner, and played a significant part in the development of its many features which made the Burney conversion possible. I met Maurice Amesbury, the designer of the Mekel machine, in the research laboratories of the Air and Space Museum in Washington. This remarkable facility was run by an Argentinian engineer – Hernan Otano. He knew more about what was happening in the world of computer applications than anyone in Britain, and I always visited him on my frequent trips to Washington during the formative years of the development of ESTC which was my major responsibility in the British Library. Maurice came to London three times during the development of the Mekel camera and I was able to provide him with the considerable variety of microfilming in the BL’s collections. He brought a prototype to a London computer exhibition held at Hammersmith in 1997 and I was impressed by the camera’s ability to cope with a wide variety of problems found in films made over the years at University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. I persuaded the British Library to acquire the M400 at a significant discount from Mekel Engineering, and was responsible for the initial trials which used a wide variety of stock microfilms of British Library materials – including, of course, the Burney microfilms. The project was beginning to yield wonderful results, and so the BL had to transfer responsibility for further testing to a full-time member of staff – in fact Edmond King, then involved in the Preservation Service. Progress was halted as the fees from consultants threatened to endanger the project’s future, and nothing more was heard of Burney until the BL was successful (in partnership with Gale) in getting siginificant funding from the National Science Foundation in Washington – largely as a result of my having demonstrated to Michael Lesk (who left Bellcore in Morristown to become an officer in the NSF) the system’s potential. I am preparing a paper giving details of the genesis of the Burney project and this will be made available on this website when completed. I am at a serious disadvantage, however, in trying to write the project’s history since all my files and working papers relating to my involvement as Consultant to the Director General between 1975 and 1996 are in the Bodleian Library! For those interested in the beginnings of digital access to printed or manuscript materials my lecture to the Society of Archivists is worth checking – essay11.htm.

Book Sale Catalogues
1676-1800
British Isles – America – Canada - India

Research on this project is now complete, and I am hoping to send copy to the printer early in 2010. This project has been progressing slowly for many years now, but is (at last) as complete as I can make it. It will, I trust, be better, more comprehensive, and certainly fuller in detail than any work published to date: Lawler; the British Museum list printed in 1915; or Munby-Coral (1977). For the period from 1676 to the end of 1800 I have listed over 1,850 sales not previously recorded. The final process in this vast task which has been accumulating in cardboard boxes for decades is proof-reading the entries and attempting to document the names of the owners (over 5,300). I hope to deliver copy to the printer in late January 2009. It now occupies 1,250 pages in quarto format. A copy of the preliminaries and a specimen of the catalogue can be consulted at munby2.htm.

The Perils of the Computer Age

Losing all of the materials for Volume XX in 2001 seemed at the time about as dispiriting an accident as any writer or scholar could face. Remember what happened to Lawrence’s manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading Station in 1919? Carlyle’s manuscript of The French Revolution sent to John Stuart Mill for his comments? Or Hemingway’s manuscripts, lost by his wife en route to Switzerland? Computers can be just as inconsiderate. At the beginning of September this year the Sunbeach computer in Barbados managed to lose all the email belonging to its clients. So I have now only a backup on a disk in Barbados made last February which I trust is still readable: since I prefer webmail (innocently believing that Internet servers do not crash) I now have no access to any mail for the past five years.

Completion & Celebration

B E L

I had planned to celebrate the completion of B E L next year. This will not take place as I had hoped. Instead, I propose to hold a small party in London for a few friends and supporters to mark the end of an odyssey which has lasted now for fifty-one years. Notice of this will be given on this website next year. I have included in Volume XX a Tabula Gratulatoria, naming some distinguished scholars, bibliographers, and librarians who made B E L possible.

Tabula gratulatoria

Julien M. Cain, Administrateur Générale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [d. 1974]

Louis B. Wright, Director, Henry Clay Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington [d. 1984]

William A. Jackson, Director, Houghton Library, Harvard University [d. 1964]

Howard Millar Nixon, Deputy Keeper, Rare Books, British Museum; Librarian, Westminster Abbey, [d.1983]

John Laurence Wood, Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum/British Library [d. 2002]

Gwin Jackson Kolb, Professor of English, University of Chicago [d. 2006]

Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel Besterman, Universal Bibliographer, Geneva [d. 1976]

Eliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Saxonist, Columbia University [d. 1970]

Francis Peabody Magoun, Saxonist, Harvard University [d. 1979]

Jess Balsor Bessinger, Saxonist, Universities of Toronto & New York [d.1994]

James Lowry Clifford, Johnsonian Scholar, Columbia University [d. 1978]

John Collins Pope, Saxonist, Yale University [d.1997]

Laurence W. Towner, librarian, Newberry Library, Chicago [d. 1992)

James Hinton Sledd, Professor of English, Universities of Texas, California, and Northwestern [d. 2004]

James Wells, Librarian, Newberry Library, Chicago

Baugh, Albert Croll, Historian of English, University of Pennsylvania [d. 1981]

Blanche Henrey, Bibliographer of Botany [d.1980]

Frederick Noël Lawrence Pointer, Librarian,

Wellcome Medical Library [d.1979]

Alfred Mabbs, Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office [d.2009]

Bernhard Fabian, Professor of English, University of Münster, Germany

Edwin Wolf II, Librarian, The Library Company of Philadelphia [d. 1991]

John W. Jolliffe, Bodley’s Librarian, Bibliographer and Computer Genius [d. 1985]

Mary (Paul) Pollard, Librarian & Bibliographer, Trinity College, Dublin [d.2005]

David Fairweather Foxon, British Museum Library, Reader, Oxford University [d. 2001]

Robert Millner Shackleton, Bodley’s Librarian, Professor of French, Oxford University [d. 1986]

Geoffrey Martin, Professor of History, Leicester University,Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office [d.2008]

Sir Frank Francis, Director, British Museum [d..1988]

David Mcgregor Rogers, Librarian, Bodleian Library [d. 1995]

Paul Oskar Kristeller, Medievalist, Columbia University [d. 2008]

Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespearean Scholar, Munich Univeristy [d.1990]

John Claud Trewinard Oates, Bibliographer, Deputy Librarian, Cambridge University Library [d.1990]

Adams, Herbert Mayow, Bibliographer, Librarian, Trinity College, Cambridge [d.1985]

Arvid Gabrielson, Anglicist, Stockholm University [d. 1972]

Olof Von Feilitzen, Linguist, Onomatolgist & Librarian, Royal Library, Stockholm [d. 1976]

R. Julian Roberts, British Museum and Bodleian Libraries

Jack Arthur Walter Bennett, Medievalist, [d. 1981]

Morton Wilfred Bloomfield, Medievalist, [d. 1987]

George Leslie Brook, Medievalist, [d. 1987]

James L. Rosier, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Vivian Salmon, Historical Linguist

Francis Wormald, Palaeographer, London Univeristy [d. 1972]

Thomas F. Staley, Director, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin

Hans Aarsleff, Linguist, Historian of English, Princeton University

Hans Kurath, Linguist, University of Michigan, Centenarian [d. 1992]

Fred C. Robinson, Medievalist, Yale & Stanford Universities

Sherman McAlister Kuhn, Medievalist, Editor, Middle English Dictionary [d. 1991]

Takanobu Otsuka, Linguist, Osaka University [d. 1978]

John [Jack] Henry Pyle Pafford, Librarian, University of London [d. 1996]

Charles Randolph Quirk, Linguist, University College, London

Albert Hugh Smith, Medievalist, Philologist, University College, London [d. 1967]

Eric Ceadel, Librarian, Cambridge University [d. 1979]

Hank Epstein, Computer Genius, University of California Library System, Founder of Mitinet

Fred W. Ratcliffe Librarian, Manchester and Cambridge University Libraries