Literary Discoveries.

Ramblings in an Eclectic Library.


About the Site. | Table of Contents. | The Library. | Dr. Boli.

Cathay and the Way Thither.

This series by Sir Henry Yule, together with his translation of Marco Polo, makes up a good collection of medieval accounts of the East, now found on our page devoted to the Age of Exploration.

January 31, 2021.

A Library of American Literature.

A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time is a set of ten fat volumes edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. We have collected the volumes on their own page.

October 12, 2020.

On-Line Libraries.

A metalibrary of on-line libraries. Our own Eclectic Library points to books with scanned page images, but on this page you will also find collections of useful text files.

October 7, 2020.

Roots of Science Fiction.

Books and stories with fantastic or imaginative elements that point the way toward the future genre of scientific romance, or science fiction. Many of them are utopian satires.

September 30, 2020.

Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.

A page of their own for the rivals (and sometimes collaborators) of Shakespeare. It may spill over into the reign of Charles I.

September 19, 2020.

Patrologia Orientalis.

A series of texts in Oriental languages, with French or English trans­lations, published by Firmin-Didot. The series is still continuing, with at least 56 volumes released, but 23 of the first 25 can be found in full on line.

August 24, 2020.

American Incunabula.

“Incunabula” is a Latin term meaning “swaddling clothes,” and gen­erally applied to the origins of anything. But in English it has one meaning: the books from the earliest age of European printing, up to the completely arbitrary year of 1500. These fifteenth-century editions are rare and extremely valuable, and every book collector covets them.

Early American imprints—that is, printed books and materials from the English colonies in North America and from the first years of the United States—are also rare and valuable. In fact, the most valuable printed book in the world is not an incunable but the Bay Psalm Book, printed in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1640. Dr. Boli proposes a new term for these early American imprints: American incunabula, a term that no one else seems to have come up with. And just as the cutoff for incunabula has for centuries been set at the com­pletely arbi­trary date of 1500, so we shall set the last date for American incunabula at 1800.

Why 1800? It is not a completely arb­itrary date. The printing business evolved gradually in America, but the year 1800 is in the middle of several large changes. First of all, 1800 was about the time printers abandoned the long S—an abandon­ment that, by historical standards, was very sudden, so it makes a very easy visual distinc­tion to look for. Second, Americans were begin­ning to cast their own type, which previously had to be imported from England. Third, the recent independence of the United States was encour­aging native pub­lishing. Today, if one finds a book in the United States that was printed in the 1600s or 1700s, it is much more likely that it was printed in England or France than in North America. At some point around 1800, that ceases to be true, and American books predominate.

In short, the period up to 1800 is a period when American books are scarce and at least moderately valuable; after that they become common and cheap. If you have a book printed in the English colonies or the first quarter-century of the United States, it is probably worth some money.

The good news, though, is that anyone can build a digital collection of such books, and Dr. Boli has done just that in his new page of American Incunabula. We begin, of course, with the Bay Psalm Book, and continue all the way to the first books printed west of the Alle­ghenies, namely in Pittsburgh, where John Scull (with encourage­ment from Hugh Henry Bracken­ridge) set up a press in the 1780s. The books are arranged chronologically, and chosen according to the usual standards of the Eclectic Library; which is to say that the collection includes whatever interested Dr. Boli for his own whimsical reasons.

August 22, 2020.

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