Who wrote that?

This post isn't about book binding. It's just about an interesting book.

Among my father's old volumes is this one:

Dodsley's Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands  Vol 6  1758

The volume is intriguing because of amendments made to the text of certain poems. Could they have been made by the author of the poems?

The writing on the page opposite the title page reads:

“This copy must have belonged to John Hoadly for his poems in the Collection are corrected in his own hand - see pp. 148 & 157 in this volume. On p 157 one stanza is substituted for another.”

In addition, there was an old postcard tucked into the book and protruding from the top, which said:

“Archbishop Hoadly’s volume - with his corrections”

There are actually corrections and annotations on pp 148, 150-1, 153-4, 157-8. On p 157, as claimed, a stanza has been replaced by a piece of paper stuck over it.

By the look of the page under the paper flap, this was done because so much erasing of previous annotations had been done to the page that the paper was damaged to the extent there was a hole in it.

Many of the poems in this book are unattributed, including the ones on the pages with the handwritten amendments. These particular ones are:

• "Vacation” on pp 148-154
• “To a Lady very handsome, but too fond of Dress” on pp 155-156
• “Anacreon Ode III” on pp 157-158

By searching the Internet I discovered that these poems were not written by John Hoadly, but by John Hall-Stevenson. All three appear in a collection of his poems:

The works of John Hall-Stevenson, Esq. Containing, Crazy tales. Fables for grown gentlemen. Lyric epistles. Pastoral cordial. Pastoral puke. Macarony fables. Lyric consolations. Moral tales. Monkish epitaphs. &c. &c. &c. Corrected and enlarged. With several original poems, now first printed, and explanatory notes. In three volumes.

London: printed by J. Nichols, for J. Debrett, and T. Beckett, 1795.

(This collection is in three volumes and these particular poems are in volume 1.)

 
John Hall-Stevenson (1718–1785), in his youth known as John Hall, was an English country gentleman and writer. Sydney Lee, a prolific biographer from Victorian times, was very scathing about Hall-Stevenson, describing him as a poetaster - an inferior poet, especially one with "unwarranted pretensions to artistic value". (Lee's biography of Hall-Stevenson can be viewed here.)

He was the one-time owner of Skelton Castle in Yorkshire, which he inherited in a run-down state after his uncle, an avowed Jacobite, fled the country.  He was a great friend of Laurence Sterne, and is memorialised as "Eugenius" in Sterne's novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy".

Two of the listed poems have amendments: "Vacation" and “Anacreon Ode III”, the latter being most extensive. Page 157 is the most interesting. As described, a complete new stanza has been pasted in:

In compassion, I straight struck a light with all speed,
Let him in, and behold a child, little indeed,
A mere chit, with a bow & with arrows equipp’d,
On his shoulders had wings, & the rain from them dripp’d.

There is crossed-out text at the bottom of the page:

With a bit of work it is possible to make out most of the text, which turns out to be another version of the replacement stanza:

I was mov’d with compassion, I soon struck a light,
And immediately open’d the door, when(?) --(?)ght
Stood a Boy with a bow and with arrows equipp’d,
And his shoulders had wings, & the rain from them(?) dripp’d.

I assume the writer rejected this in favour of the pasted version. Given the damage to the page, the writer was clearly unhappy about the original text and reworked it many times before he was satisfied with it.

So, what is the conclusion? I think it's highly unlikely that anyone other than the author of the poems would have gone to the trouble of making such revisions/corrections to poems that were not their own. Why would they? And if it wasn't the author who amended them, why choose those particular poems in the book and no others? The idea of anyone other that the author doing this makes little sense, so I'm very much inclined to believe that this is indeed the work of Hall-Stevenson himself.

Going back to Hoadly, if he didn't author the poems or amend them, what is his connection? John Hoadly (1711–1776) was an English cleric, known as a poet and dramatist. However, there was another John Hoadly (1678–1746)  who was an archbishop in Ireland, and was also the younger John's uncle. The note written in the book claiming authorship must surely be referring to John Hoadly the poet, but the postcard is referring to the older man. It's likely someone just mixed them up. We know that both these claims are false: John Hoadly didn't author the poems, so very likely didn't amend them; Archbishop Hoadly couldn't have owned the book as he had died before it was published.

It would be nice if I'd been able to find some connection between Hoadly and Hall-Stevenson to explain Hoadly's possible ownership of the book, but I can't. Hall-Stevenson's friend Laurence Sterne was a cleric, so it's conceivable that Hoadly knew Sterne through "work", and hence Hall-Stevenson. But that is pure speculation; perhaps the whole Hoadly connection was just a mistake caused by the mis-attribution of the poems, and should be dismissed.

 UPDATE August 2019

While trawling the Internet (unsuccessfully) for samples of Hall-Stevenson's handwriting, I came across a website belonging to the Skelton History Group which included information about Skelton Castle. Through them I was able to contact the current owner of the castle and descendent of Hall-Stevenson, Anthony Wharton. I was in luck; he was intrigued by my story of the book and kindly agreed to find some examples of Hall-Stevenson's handwriting in his castle vaults (not many people can say that!) that were then sent to me.

Verse from Mr Wharton with margin notes

 
My initial reaction was disappointment, as the hand that wrote the few verses he sent was clearly not the same as that in my book. But when I examined the margin comments on the pages (above), eureka! - this writing did match that in my book, and pretty perfectly.

Comparison of writing from Mr Wharton (top) and mine (below). Note particularly the similarity in the "w".

Mr Wharton agreed that they matched, and said he was only "fairly" sure the verses he sent to me were by Hall-Stevenson. I think the evidence suggests that they were not. I was suspicious that these verses may not have been his; their subject and style did not match those of his published, and they do not appear in his collected works of 1795. The three verses that were sent to me were all very pro-Jacobite in tone and subject, and not Hall-Stevenson's style. We know that he inherited the castle from his mother, who in turn had inherited it from her brother Lawson Trotter, a Jacobite supporter who was forced to flee the country after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Some of the Trotter family therefore had strong Jacobite sympathies, and the verses could have been penned by one of them.

I'm now as sure as I can be that the handwriting in my book does belong to Hall-Stevenson himself. I can't think anyone else can credibly link handwriting in his notebooks from the Skelton castle vaults with alterations to his poems in the Dodsley book. One could also reasonably assume that the book must have belonged to him at some time - you wouldn't do this to someone else's book, would you? Mr Wharton told me that many pages had been extracted from the notebooks that contained the handwriting samples, and believes them to have been given to Dodsley for publication. I think it reasonable to imagine that Hall-Stevenson acquired a copy of the book in which his verses appear, perhaps Dodsley even provided him with a complimentary copy, and that this is the book that I now have.


Mr Wharton has invited me to the castle if I'm ever passing to view the notebooks. I may well do that!

Johnson's Shakespeare, 8 vols, 1765

Amongst my father's books were two incomplete sets of Johnson's Shakespeare, one from 1765 and one from 1768. All the books were in pretty poor condition.

I decided that I'd have a go at rebacking the 1765 set as this was most complete. Here are some of them:

Pretty awful.

I've not rebacked a book before so doing one was going to be a challenge enough, let alone a whole set. But what else was I going to do with them?

As with the Reliquiae, the primary purpose was to give the books integrity so they could be handled and read, rather than necessarily making them look pretty. The boards were tatty but serviceable, and I like to keep the inside paste down if possible because there is usually some inscription, like the name of a previous owner.

The Missing Volume

The one big problem was the fact that volume one was missing. Did I really want to go to the effort of restoring a set that ultimately was incomplete? Probably not. So I spent time visiting local bookshops and searching the internet to see if I could find the missing volume. It did seem unlikely, given I wanted a specific volume of a specific edition, but luck was on my side and eventually I did find one in a bookshop in Bordeaux, and at a price that I was willing to pay. The volume I found was, not surprisingly, outwardly quite different from mine - a Victorian rebind with a flat back and no raised cords - and so it would require a complete rebind to match the other books.

Spines

I decided from the start that I would not be able to preserve the existing spines. They weren't worth saving, and even if they were, I seriously doubted my ability to remove them in any reusable state, and my initial attempts confirmed this (!).  In any case, I was never going to be able to make a matching spine for volume one. So I said goodbye to the spines.

Process

Leaving volume one aside, all the volumes to be rebacked followed the same process:

1. Dismantle - remove boards and loose fly leaves
2. Remove the spine
3. Repair/reinforce the backbone
4. Sew new headbands
5. Form new hinges
6. Prepare the boards
7. Paste boards to new hinge
8. Begin inside hinge repair
9. Back lining
10. Prepare the new leather
11. Apply the new leather
12. Fix down old leather and inside paste down
13. Complete inside hinge repair

While the process is the same for each book, each one presented its own problems. I started at volume eight, thinking that the results would get better as I gained experience, and thus hoping that the first volumes in the set would and should look the best (for no reason I can now think of). Ironically volume eight probably turned out the best, and the results if anything gradually got worse. I'll touch on the reasons for this later.

So to how it went. This isn't a comprehensive account of everything, just the highlights (and low lights) ...

Dismantle & remove the spine

This involved removing the boards, most of which were either already detached or nearly so. Also any loose or nearly loose end papers would be removed to be tipped back in at a later stage.

Repair/reinforce the backbone

The first volume I repaired was split in two, and my original plan was to thread a stitch through inside the existing cords, pull the two pieces together and use the thread ends to form board connections. This failed because the cords proved too fragile and brittle to accept a needle, so instead I glued on a layer of repair paper which also served generally to hold the text block together. The brittleness would have also caused problems with the headband stitching, so the reinforcement was needed for that as well. I also glued another thin line of repair paper down the length of the split for a bit of extra stiffness.

I subsequently used repair paper on every book to overcome the brittleness of the backbone and add some strength to the text block.

Sew new headbands

All the original headbands were missing but I found a fragment of one stuck between two pages, allowing me to see what they looked like.

I already had some red and white thread so I decided that they would be a reasonable match. The original had a rolled paper core; for my first headband I used string stiffened with paste as the core. Subsequently I decided something a little more robust was needed and I used strips of leather.
I found a very helpful video on the internet about sewing headbands (https://bookbinderschronicle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/bookbinding-101-sewing-headbands.html) as I've had little practice. The technique is slightly different from the one I learned from Angela.
Angela knots the two thread to start and pushes the leading thread through the backbone and pulls the knot after it. The video version starts differently, in that the non-lead thread (red) is threaded through first and then the lead thread (white) knotted on and then looped up and over the core. The benefit of this is that the knot doesn't get pulled through and so puts a bit less strain of the fragile backbone, but admittedly it's marginal. However, the video then loops the thread over the core and back through the same needle hole, thus anchoring the core permanently at the start. Angela's method holds the core using a pin or needle but only temporarily. But from then on it's basically the same technique.
Finishing is similar to starting - take the lead thread down through the folds and back up the spine, then over and back down through the same hole, thus forming a loop over the core that anchors it at the end.

One thing I did extra: I didn't like the fact that when the needle is at intervals passed down between the pages and out through the backbone, it comes out through a random point and potentially going through little or no paper. The strongest point is through the centre of a signature, so I went through the text block and marked the centre of each with a tab of paper. When the time came to take the thread out through the backbone and up and over the headband I aimed for the nearest tab, thus making sure every stitch was through the centre of a signature. I feel this makes a stronger job.

Form new hinges

I didn't want to use tapes as I thought they might fill the gaps between the raised cords and spoil the look of the spine (probably an unjustified worry) so I chose to use fraynot to form a cloth hinge.

This worked OK but the floppiness of the cloth when tucking into the pasted board made it very fiddly. After two volumes I switched to using mull instead. I've not seen this suggested or recommended anywhere and could be a mistake, but it seems strong enough and its stiffness really helps with getting under the lifted paste down. (Angela informs me that the mull may not be acid-free, so not of archival quality.)

I cut slits in the mull...

  to fit over the cords.

In any case, the eventual strength of the board hinges come from the leather, so it's questionable just what this component does beside holding the boards together before the leather is fixed on.

Prepare the boards

Probably the most difficult part of the process. It involves lifting the paste down on the inside of the board so the hinge (fraynot, mull or whatever) can be pasted under it. The paste down is invariably stuck firmly to the board and any attempt to lift just the paper ends in a torn mess. It's almost inevitable that part of the board has to be lifted with it, forming a sort of pita bread-like pouch to take the hinge.

The leather of the turn-in needs to be slit at the head and tail for an inch or so to allow the paste down to be fully lifted.
On the other side the leather needs to be lifted similarly so that the new leather can be slipped under it. On the first volume I tackled the leather was already coming away, and lifting it was not too difficult. On later volumes the leather was stuck down more firmly and was much more difficult to lift, a real challenge - one of the reasons for less satisfactory results.

Before attempting to lift the leather, I trimmed the leather back from the hinge and, after lifting, pasted a thin line of card along the back of the board.

This technique in theory helps there to be less of a ridge where the old leather joins the new.

Paste boards to new hinge

Once I'd started using mull for the hinge this was straightforward. I had to remember to leave an inch top and bottom unpasted so it was free to have the new leather tucked under it when turned over the board edge.

Back lining

The purpose of the back lining on the spine is to provide a smooth surface for the leather. It also gives the backbone stiffness, but here the spine has already been strengthened with repair paper and once the leather has been applied, there was a danger that it would be too stiff. So after initially realising this problem I tried to use just the minimum of back lining, just enough to smooth out the major unevenness of the backbone, the headband stitching.

Prepare the new leather

Perhaps the trickiest part of this was dyeing the leather to match the existing boards - the original colour of the calf I used was significantly different.

I experimented quite a bit to find the best colour match, and settled on a combination of three dyes (applied separately). One of the dyes was water-based, the others oil. The mixture didn't seem to matter and the results were fine. I realised after the first few books that I could use the dye to help blend the colour of the leathers where they joined, but not while I was using a water-base dye (it would blacken the old leather). So I found an oil-based equivalent and switched to that. The results were a slightly darker, I guess because the oil dye is more penetrating. This meant that the colour match in the later books was not as good, which I was somewhat disappointed with. Lessons learned: having found an acceptable colour match, don't mess with it. And use oil-based dyes so they can be used for touching up/blending the resultant joint.

In all cases I splattered the dyed leather with dark brown spots using a toothbrush. This gave it a pleasantly "aged" appearance, more like the old leather.

I decided to dye the leather before paring it. As the dyeing process was more likely to go wrong, it was better to get this part over first in case I needed to start again.

Apply the new leather

Possibly the most nerve-racking operation of the whole process, because (a) it's a bit of a race against the clock as the pasted leather dries, and (b) the need to keep the new wet leather away from the old leather; if the old leather gets wet it will blacken (I learned this the hard way). You need to take steps to keep them apart. I folded greaseproof paper around the lifted old leather and clipped it in place.

The hardest part is turning the new leather over the board edges and under the lifted pasted down. The fragile old leather inevitably gets knocked about during the process however careful you are.
The image below tries to show where the leather will be tucked into.

It also shows the text block protected with a plastic bag to keep it free of paste.

Once the leather was pasted in place, I wrapped the book (with release paper between text block and boards) with string to ensure the leather was stuck firmly around the raised cords and to emphasise them.

It was left like this for about 15 minutes. (It was at this point on volume seven that the paper protecting the old leather slipped out of place and it got wet ...

... with predictably bad results.)

Afterwards, the string was removed and packing (two sheets of thick blotting paper) inserted inside the boards and the book placed under weights.

Fix down old leather and inside paste down

It's now straightforward to use adhesive to fix down the old leather on the outside...

... and also the top and bottom of the inside paste down, where the leather was turned-in.

Complete inside hinge repair

The inside hinge of each board needs to be repaired once the inside paste down is completed. Because the repair paper adds thickness to the inside of the hinge, it should be in place (but only stuck on one side) before the new leather hinge dries and shrinks to the size of the book, otherwise the hinge might become too tight.

The packing material placed inside the boards while the leather is drying should be enough to stop the hinge from over-tightening, and the thickness of the inside repair paper is probably not significant in comparison, but it's not worth risking the joint from becoming too tight or else the board will not sit flat.

Finishing touches

I used a combination of Klucel-G and SC6000 to cover the join of the leather, to improve the appearance and help protect and consolidate the old leather at the edge. The treatment does slightly darken the leather but not by much.

The use of these two materials is widely discussed and recommended in various documents on the Internet (see References).

One example of a finished book (volume 6):

Dyeing

Some observations:

- water based is less penetrating (i.e. not as intense) as oil based

- water based colour is not fast, will stain if it gets wet afterwards. Oil based doesn't do this as it's not water-soluble.

- oil-based dye can be used (carefully!) to touch up and blend the leathers where they join. You can't do this with water-based as the old leather will blacken.

Volume 1

Volume 1 was different from the others because it was completely rebound, with new boards. This actually made it easier as there was no existing leather to repair and co-exist with.

The cover was in poor condition and well on its way to coming off by itself. The text block, however, was in good shape which was all that really mattered.

Removing the cover, old headbands and preparing the text block was straightforward. The first problem was trying to reshape the book, as its current (re)binding had given it a flat back. I tried to coax it into a rounded shape by forcing the text block against a curve surface (a bit of drain pipe!), initially softening the spine with adhesive to allow it to change shape, and then clamping like that for a few weeks.

Even after this, when released it still lost some of the rounding, but held just about enough to be acceptable.

After stitching the headbands I glued on false cords made from strips of leather. I decided to use tapes for attaching the boards, and to make the backbone similar to the other volumes, I filled in with mull before lining it.

From here it was a straightforward leather binding exercise, as per Angela's book.

I was fortunate that the book had been given extra flysheets during its previous rebind, and I was able to use these as paste downs.

As with the other volumes I tied up the book with string for a short while to emphasise the raised bands

I was pleased with the results. The speckling on the leather really helps to make it look aged.

To continue...

Spine decoration

I decided on simple tooling for the spines, simpler equals less opportunity for mistakes. Even then I was reluctant to do the text labels myself - I'd previously found it challenging enough to make one - a letter at a time - let alone eight that looked the same. So I arranged for a bookbinding acquaintance of Angela, Chris Noel, to make up the labels for me. Chris has a blocking press, a piece of bookbinding kit that holds the lettering as a block, and allows titles to be stamped out in one go, and repeatably.

After my simple tooling the set looked thus (volume 2 is on the left, and you can see the colour difference I mentioned earlier):

I'll update this when the labels are in place.

UPDATE

Labels fixed and SC6000 applied where appropriate, and given a bit of a polish. I think they look great. A book conservator would be horrified. I just hope my father would have liked the result.

That's it! I hope it was informative.

References

My basic reference book:

Bookbinding in Pictures, A Beginner's Guide to bookbinding, by Angela Sutton, http://www.edenworkshops.com/Bookbinding_Tutorial_From_Angela_Sutton_On_CD.html

(As of 2019, Angela is the chairman of the Society of Bookbinders:
https://www.societyofbookbinders.com/meet-our-new-chair-angela-sutton/)

The leather binding repair bible:

The Restoration of Leather Bindings, by Bernard Middleton

A good book on general repairs:

The Practical Guide to Book Repair and Conservation, by Arthur Johnson.

The last two I picked up second-hand on the Internet.

Use of Klucel-G and SC6000:
SC6000 and Other Surface Coatings for Leather: Chemical Composition and
Effectiveness by Tish Brewer.
The original link to the document at the University of Texas is dead, but I found it reprinted as an article embedded in here (page 33): http://www.philobiblon.com/bonefolder/BonefolderVol2No2.pdf

and others.

Restoring the Reliquiae

This book was in a very sad condition.

There was very little of the spine left. The front and back boards were missing, as were some of the front leaves, notably the illustration of Charles I and the original title page. The text block was actually in good condition apart from it being spilt in two halves.

As I said in the previous post about this book, the title page was false. The experts I consulted were of the opinion it was a 19th century addition. Surprisingly for its condition the book was probably a Victorian rebinding, which would be consistent with the contemporaneous title page. The Victorians were in the habit of rebinding their collections in the current style, but apparently often in poorer quality, which means that books in their original binding can still be in better condition. I have at least one example of this.

The confirmation that this book was Almack's 31/Madan's 61 edition of the Reliquiae meant I now knew what the missing illustration and title page looked like. I decided that I wanted to rebind the book with the missing pages so it was close to its original state, and so I obtained copies of them from the British Library, who held a copy of this edition. The false title page and hand-written notes were moved to the back of the book.

The title page I was sent was of course a copy from a book someone once owned, so as usual they had written their name on it:

Original image from the BL

It wouldn't have been right to have the hand-writing of the owner of this page reproduced into mine (interestingly it seems to read "Ann Poley his booke"!?), and I also wanted to tidy it up generally and sharpen it prior to printing, so I gave it a good clean with my photo editor (the GIMP, a Unix program) to produce this version:

 That's better.

Similarly I needed to lift the picture of Charles from the double page image I was sent:

to produce this:

The images needed to be combined into one folio so when printed they would be folded with the two pages facing each other.

I wanted to match the colour of the pages in the book, which looked yellowed and aged. Clearly a white image would look pretty bad. So I photocopied a blank page from the book, duplicated it, reversed one and joined them together to create an image of a folded sheet:

and then combined the two images:

How about that! I was quite pleased with the result.

So to the rebinding itself. The loose leaves were removed to be tipped back in later. The remnants of the spine leather was removed. As with "The Idler", new stitching pulled together the two halves of the split text block and held the new tapes.

Here is a work-in-progress picture, showing the boards attached with the tapes recessed, the back lining applied and leather headbands just glued on and held by elastic bands.

The leather was from the same skin as "The Idler", dyed in the same way and suffered the same unexpected but serendipitous mottling.

I was happy with the overall result: