Patrick Spedding

Alexander Pettit

Eighteenth-century British Erotica: Edmund Curll and Grub Street highlights

Paul Tankard

Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16th-century France to early 20th-century Tasmania. Chapters examine marginal commentary from 17th-century China, 18th-century Britain, and 19th-century America, investigating the reputations, as reflected by attentive readers, of He Zhou, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Warton, and Sir Walter Scott. The marginal writers include Jacques Gohory, Mary Astell, Hester Thrale, Herman Melville, the young daughters of the Broome family in Gloucestershire, and the patrons of the library of the Huon Mechanics’ Institute, Tasmania. Though marginalia is often proscribed and frequently hidden or overlooked, the collection reveals the enduring power of marginalia, concluding with studies of the ethics of annotation and the resurrected life of marginalia in digital environments.

Social Reading and the Literal Margins

Marginal Notes

David Gregory

Paul Watt

Ed Cray

Derek B Scott

The songbooks of the 1830-40s were printed in tiny numbers, and small format so they could be hidden in a pocket, passed round or thrown away. Collectors have sought ‘these priceless chapbooks’, but only recently a collection of 49 songbooks has come to light. This collection represents almost all of the known songbooks from the period.

Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, Volume 1

Patrick Spedding

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