manuscripts

A spectacular facsimile edition of one of the most celebrated books of hours of the fifteenth century, the illumination by Jean Bourdichon reproduced in superb chromolithography by Léon Curmer. This copy additionally contains twelve sumptuous illuminated calendar borders as copied in gouache, watercolour and gold by Curmer’s anonymous copyist, identifiable through his signatures in this copy as the master facsimilist, Christian Schultz (1817-1883). His twelve superb illuminations show the occupations of the twelve months, including winter fireside dining, pruning, a garden, reaping, harvesting, threshing, grape treading, ploughing and sowing, feeding hogs and killing swine.
This was one of Curmer’s most ambitious publications, requiring painstaking copying from the original manuscript kept in the French Bibliothèque nationale. His methods are not well understood, but each leaf was first copied in gouache by skilled facsimilists who were almost never credited in the final publication. This copy, with the twelve calendar miniatures in gouache allows us to identify Christian Schultz as at least one (if not the only) copyist for this project, with several bearing his minute signature, not included in the final corresponding chromolithograph. He is perhaps better known for his subsequent work for the British Arundel Society, copying Flemish masterpieces such as the Ghent Altarpiece for their important and popular facsimiles. He had been born in Kassel in 1817, was trained in Germany as a draughtsman and studied lithography in Munich (Ledger, A Study of the Arundel Society 1848-1897, Oxford DPhil, 1978) In his work for the Arundel Society he made his copies by painting over photographic images of the work, and it is interesting to speculate how he created the Anne of Brittany facsimiles. Certainly, the whole book had been photographed (and reproduced in the text volume) but his finished miniatures are on fine but not transparent paper, and show no sign of preliminary markings. It would be a worthwhile project in the developing study of nineteenth-century manuscript facsimiles to compare digitised samples with both the monochrome photographs and original gouache miniatures in this copy.
Illustration attributed to Jean Poyet until 1868 when newly discovered documents proved it the work of Jean Bourdichon. Cf. Bourdichon, J. Les Heures d'Anne de Bretagne. Paris, 1946

Issued in a small number of typescripts for private circulation. An extraordinary short history and summary of several interesting cases that occurred in the New York Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence, compiled by Hollis H. Hunnewell, Voluntary Aide with other staff members for Lieutenant-Commander Spencer Eddy, Officer-in-Charge. It covers an important era of development, when the ONI (the oldest member of the US intelligence network) was tasked with espionage in monitoring foreign threats, both in naval affairs and domestically, detecting hostile acts among non-American communities, and acting as censor for cable communications. Though the author states in the inserted letter ‘I must lay stress on the fact that these pages are strictly confidential in nature, and for your own personal use’, the books seems, in retrospect, to be a rather reckless exposition of the Office’s actvities.
It is both serious and comical, with the the first half of its text setting out the history and aims of the ONS, its personnel and departmental structure, and the second half presenting a series of humorous anecdotes. The Office’s departments comprised: the executive and the espionage departments together with departments for: cables, plant protection, commercial, banking, Latin-American, I.W.W (for surveillance of the unions or ‘Industrial Workers of the World’), Russian and Czecho-Slovak, legal and file. A paragraph each describes their remit and a photographic copy of a flow-chart diagram explains the procedure of communication between agents and officers. A list of officers (including Eddy and Hunnewell) is provided, comprising voluntary aides, agents, enlisted men, enlisted men detailed to the Postal Censorship Office, enlisted women, civilians, telephone officers. The text then becomes an account of humorous mistakes and misunderstandings, presumably for the amusement of former members of the office. These are accompanied by well-known illustrator Maginel Wright Enright’s lighthearted vignettes (presumably commissioned for this account) which would be charming except for one obviously racist caricature accompanying an equally racist anecdote. There are two stories of botched espionage attempts using dictographs: one in which the apparatus was hidden in what was thought to be a disused fireplace in the home of a suspect (with predictable consequences) and another in which agents pick up only sounds of an amorous encounter between and agent and a suspect.
Worldcat locates two copies one at Georgetown University, the other in the US Naval War College Library. The latter is digitised, and contains one additional photograph (a group photo of officers) not present in our copy (probably never bound in). Though the texts are essentially identical, minor typographic variances confirm that copies were individually typed rather than duplicated. Our copy (unlike the NWCL copy) is specially bound in the style of Cobden Sanderson at the Rose Bindery, Boston (which was owned by the author, Hunnewell).

Two near-miniature volumes of psalms in shorthand by Joseph Forfitt, a London apothecary and a religious dissenter who was to become the first secretary of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor. An industrious copyist, he apparently produced a number of evangelical manuscripts, often digesting or transcribing theological or liturgical texts, which were referred to on his death as ‘The Curious Manuscripts of Joseph Forfitt’ and ‘a library in themselves’ (The London Chronicle, March 10-12, 1763, advert for sale). These two tiny volumes are early examples and present the psalms in the abbreviated versions by Bishop Patrick Simon and Isaac Watts. Transcribing the psalms manually into shorthand in this period (and other similar manuscripts are known) served a dual purpose of mastering shorthand with known and easily verifiable texts and as an act of devotion, internalising the text through transcription in an alternative language. The miniature format of shorthand psalms has a precedent in Jeremiah Rich’s Whole Book of Psalms in Meter According to the Art of Short-Writing printed in 1660, but Forfitt’s manuscript uses a more up-to-date shorthand system, currently unidentified among the many systems in the years around 1700 (when shorthand experienced something of an explosion in use and interest).
It was potentially also conceived by Forfitt as having an evangelical end, reducing texts in volume for transmission in portable form, though his evangelism was primarily conducted through the distribution of printed bibles among the poor. The Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor was founded by a group of London based dissenters, led by Benjamin Forfitt, with Joseph as treasurer and later secretary. Early members included the Countess of Huntington, John Newton, the Thorntons of Clapham, Henry Venn, George Whitefield and William Wilberforce. It sent bibles to poor communities in both Britain and America, the latter including enslaved and indigenous people. A letter published in 1761, Extract of a letter from the Reverend Mr Wright, in Cumberland County, Virginia. To Mr Joseph Forfitt, July 1761, returned thanks for Forfitt’s ‘endeavours to promote the glory of God in Virginia by spreading good books amongst the most ignorant and poor’.
Surviving examples of Forfitt’s manuscripts include A Select Collection of Psalm-Tunes and Anthems set in three Parts for the Voice and Musical Instrument called the Psalterer, quarto, 1737 (Maggs, English Literature prior to 1800. Part 6, 1950, £5, now Beinecke Osborn Music MS 17); a three volume Bible and Book of Common Prayer (1729-40) also in shorthand (Sotheby’s, 5 May 1981, £75 to Maggs);
A new version of the Psalms of David; Book of Common Prayer; The Book of Psalms in Metre, 1740, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University).

An intriguing homemade book created by an aspiring young writer, copying extracts from a popular juvenile title, Marmaduke Multiply, published in 1817 and designed to teach multiplication with engaging illustrations. In this version, a Francis (or possibly Frances) Taylor has copied extracts from the book using different hands, without much thought to order. Some are captioned ‘with my left hand’, another ‘half with my right hand’ as though he or she were deciding which was the best hand, or simply trying writing and drawing with an unfamiliar hand. Given the general insistence on right hand writing in the period it is an unusual survival, albeit rudimentary, an evidence of active learning activities in the acquisition of early literacy.

Headed ‘Tanhauser. 1er Acte. 1ere Scène’ this brief manuscript note describes and illustrates designs for each act of the production of Tannhäuser consistent with the infamous Paris production of March 1861.
Act I Scene 1 (for the orgiastic ballet of the Venusberg) is described in just over 5 lines as ‘Une vaste grotte souterraine éclairée par un jour fantastique, au fond tombe une cascade dont les eaux vont se perdre dans un lac bleu. A gauche apparition d’une grotte voluptueuse’. A sketch diagram shows the arrangement of two curtains and three wings. Scene 2 is described as a ‘Une belle vallée éclairée par un soleil brillant, au fond à droite le Wartburg à droite, à gauche, le Hersvelberg, à droite un chemin descendant du Wartburg, sur une éminence, une image de la vierge’, with a diagram showing the arrangement of curtain, wings and position of the Wartburg castle on the right. Overleaf the scene change for Act I, set in the Minnesingers’ Hall in the Wartburg castle is described in just over 8 lines with a diagram showing the receding perspective of the majestic hall, together with 5 lines describing the return to the valley of second scene of Act I for the final act, with changing lighting effects for dusk, night, dawn and day with clouds for the apparition of Venus.
The instructions, a brief outline sketch rather than detailed designs or instructions, follow the arrangements of the Paris version, modified from the Dresden premier of 1845, with the ballet brought forward to the very first scene to accommodate Parisian expectations. While the final design of the production was divided between three scenographers (Charles-Antoine Cambon, Édouard Desplechin and Auguste Alfred Rubé) these notes have the character of a preliminary overview, or perhaps a note for potential lighting effects. Detailed designs, maquettes and several contemporary prints exist for the production, and provide an interesting comparison for this ephemeral and unsigned note. The thumbnail sketch for Act I Scene 2 sems to confirm, for example, that it is a prior sketch rather than one made by an eyewitness to the performance, with its rather different arrangement of the rocky precipice for the Wartburg castle depicted in the plans and prints. The identity of its maker remains thus far unknown, but is likely to have been a member of one of the various workshops and teams tasked with the overall conception of this momentous performance.
Wagner’s Paris Tannhäuser ranks as one of the most infamous and most-discussed opera performances of all time ― while it was greeted with jeers and critical disdain and was cancelled after the third night it cemented Wagner’s European cult, due in large part to the essay published by an attentive member of the audience, Charle Baudelaire, who in the following days rushed his seminal critique of the performance and defence of Wagner into print as Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.

Bernard Hoepffner (1946-2017) was a noted French translator of ‘difficult’ works in English, a major part of he European literary landscape, who counted works by Joyce, Orwell, Twain, Melville, Amis, Philip Sidney, Seamus Heaney among his many acclaimed translations. Polymathic and largely self-taught as a translator, he had trained as an architect. It was presumably during this training that he created this unique and unpublished collection of abstract designs in indian in and watercolour. Each of the 20 designs bears a title: naissance, espoir déçu, reflets d’une pensée, être agressif, être passif, un desolé, perspective, rêve, rather like a set of enigmatic tarot cards for reflection and meditation. He dedicates it ‘à Dazet, vers Jean, pour Abis’. By way of a preface he simply types ‘Pas de préface’, and as a postface he writes: ‘il ne faut pas confondre Minotaure avec Minautaure’ and gives a date of 29 April 1965’.
Hoepffner spent many years in Britain, first moving there as a young man. He worked variously a furniture restorer and smallholder, before finding his vocation as a translator. He served a president of ATLAS (Association
for the Promotion of Literary Translation) and died tragically at the age of 71, swept from rocks by the sea near his home in Pembrokeshire in 2017.

An original lease granted by George II to Sir Matthew Decker of lands once part of the royal park of Richmond at Richmond Green, formerly known as the Bakehouse. Sir Charles Hedges (died 1714), Secretary of State to Queen Anne had built a fine house here, which was enlarged by Decker (1679-1749), a wealthy Dutch merchant, who settled in London in 1702, becoming and MP and director of the East India Company. He created a celebrated garden on this land, widely commented on by contemporaries and the site of the first successful cultivation of the pineapple in Britain.

This little pocket book has been densely filled with diary notes by a young girl or young woman, presumably one Flora Keene. She copies out several hymns at the opening, and then completes every day of her diary, with dense and minute notes, now very hard to read, mainly noting family comings and goings. The frontispiece by John Leech entitled ‘Volunteer Movement — Jones & Family go under Canvas’ is a satire on the British volunteer rifle corps, formed in 1859 as a response to public fears of a French invasion. There is also a series of delightful vignettes by Tenniel on Shakespearean quotations.

An early seventeenth-century heraldic pedigree of the Offley family of Madeley (Staffordshire) with the arms of their prominent dynasty of London guildsmen, which include Henry Offley (d. 1613) who had married Mary, the daughter of Sir John White Lord Mayor of London; and Thomas Offley (1501-1582), a successful wool and cloth merchant — Lord Mayor of London in 1556. Also in the lineage is Stephen Jenyns (1453-1523) another important London Lord Mayor with Wolverhampton origins whose arms are accompanied by an elaborate cartouche noting his mayoralty. An early docket on the verso (legible with ultra-violet light) reads: ‘The Pedigree of Stephen Jenings’.
The youngest member of the Offley family shown is John (b. 1586). He was educated at Middle Temple and married in 1605. He was knighted in April 1615, served as sheriff of Staffordshire in 1616-17 and was a magistrate for the county by 1621. 1625-6 he was MP for Stafford. Another contemporary version of the pedigree is described in the Staffordshire Visitation of 1614:
‘Quarterly — 1. Argent, on a cross fleurettée azure a lion passant-guardant or [OFFLEY]; 2. Azure, a chevron between two eagles displayed in chief and a lion passant in base or [NECHELLS]; 3. Argent, a chevron gules between three plummets sable [JENNINGS]; 4. Azure, a tiger passant or [LANE]. CREST— A demi-lion rampant-guardant or, holding an olive branch vert, fructed gold’ (’Heraldic Visitations of Staffordshire in 1614 and 1663-64’, in History of Staffordshire, 1884).

An antiquary’s heraldic manuscript of the arms of the archbishops of Canterbury from Lanfranc (d. 1089) to Charles Manner-Sutton (installed 1805) copied from a manuscript made for John Whitgift (archbishop 1583-1604) which is still in the library of Lambeth Palace (MS 555). Much of the heraldry relating to the archbishops of Canterbury is displayed in the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth in London, near to the London seat of the archbishops. The manuscript records the arms, together with some etymological explanations of names, and opens with the arms of the See of Canterbury. Included are the arms of Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton, Simon Sudbury, Thomas Cranmer, Reginald Pole, Matthew Parker, John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and William Laud. This copy was in the collections of Sir Charles George Young (1795–1869), officer of arms who served in the heraldic office of Garter King of Arms, the senior member of the College of Arms in England, from 1842 until his death in 1869.

Nuit pleine, while characteristic of De Bournazel’s astonishing unique books, also signals new directions. A profound black occupies many of the spaces between the teeming figures inhabiting each page, and on close examination they emerge from this darkness through negative spaces. The pages mirror several of her recent panel paintings where figures are revealed from blackness in the same way. Nuit pleine seems to explore a more contemporary scene than many of her books and among the the hybrid figures we surely find protesters among the crowds with placards, flags and even a cellphone. Angular structures in the puzzle-like backgrounds suggest an urban rather than rural scene, and yet timeless figures of mermaids, jesters and death itself anchor the book in a cyclical timeless continuum.
Diane de Bournazel (b. 1956) creates books as ‘poems without words’ in her unique pen, ink and gouache style, filling each page with mazes of vegetation, mysterious borders, structures and figures, opening windows within pages allowing us to see behind and beyond them, suggesting a series of alternative worlds and narratives. Drawing on the universals of the cosmos, the natural world, of childhood and human relationships each of her books invite careful ‘reading’ and multiple interpretations. Collectors have found the books to speak for themselves, and the artist writes of her work simply as:
‘Poésie sans paroles.
Il s’agit bien de ça.
Mettre en images le monde et l’arrière monde,
Comme un poète mais sans mot dire’.
De Bournazel has recently been the subject of an essay by French medievalist and cultural historian, Michel Pastoureau, entitled ‘Fenêtres sur le rêve’ (2024) written to introduce the artist’s first major Paris exhibition. Following a deep consideration of the artist’s visual world he concludes: ‘The reading of Diane de Bournazel’s work takes a deliberately plural path, as in a fairy tale or a dream. It is obviously this way that she wants to lead us. And herein lies the magic of her art, an art that is both bewitching and bewitched, absolutely original, impossible to photograph and still less describe or explain. Her creations appeal not only to our imagination but to all our senses at once. You have to look at them, listen to them, feel them, breathe them and, ultimately, savour them’.

Fatrasie is a twenty-first century visual interpretation of a rare and highly distinctive medieval poetic form of satirical nonsense verse. In the Fatrasie form, early French rhymers subjugated meaning to the rhythm of repeated sounds and syllables and yet were able to hide piquant criticisms of prevailing power structures within their verses. It is a particularly apt title among Diane de Bournazel’s unique artist’s books, which frequently conceal their narratives and meanings within the artist’s dense iconography.
Diane de Bournazel (b. 1956) creates books as ‘poems without words’ in her unique pen, ink and gouache style, filling each page with mazes of vegetation, mysterious borders, structures and figures, opening windows within pages allowing us to see behind and beyond them, suggesting a series of alternative worlds and narratives. Drawing on the universals of the cosmos, the natural world, of childhood and human relationships each of her books invite careful ‘reading’ and multiple interpretations. Collectors have found the books to speak for themselves, and the artist writes of her work simply as:
‘Poésie sans paroles.
Il s’agit bien de ça.
Mettre en images le monde et l’arrière monde,
Comme un poète mais sans mot dire’.
De Bournazel has recently been the subject of an essay by French medievalist and cultural historian, Michel Pastoureau, entitled ‘Fenêtres sur le rêve’ (2024) written to introduce the artist’s first major Paris exhibition. Following a deep consideration of the artist’s visual world he concludes: ‘The reading of Diane de Bournazel’s work takes a deliberately plural path, as in a fairy tale or a dream. It is obviously this way that she wants to lead us. And herein lies the magic of her art, an art that is both bewitching and bewitched, absolutely original, impossible to photograph and still less describe or explain. Her creations appeal not only to our imagination but to all our senses at once. You have to look at them, listen to them, feel them, breathe them and, ultimately, savour them’.

A unique album written and illustrated by the artist and illustrator W. Graham Robertson for Marion (‘Binkie’), daughter of artist Arthur Melville who had died in 1904. It is one of several (another is in the Ray collection in the Morgan Library, New York) devoted to the young girl who became Robertson’s muse in the years following Melville’s tragic death. It comprises ‘Six Songs of the Day’ and ‘Six Songs of the Dusk’, the typed poems accompanied by his illustrations, usually depicting himself ‘Ba’ and the infant Binkie, and bear titles such as ‘Glad Day’, ‘Sea Pinks’, ‘Sand Castles’, ‘The Nowhere Place’ and ‘The Lady Dream Come True’. The larger watercolours are on Robertson’s Rutland Gate stationery.

A superbly executed manuscript miscellany of short works by the eccentric antiquary and bibliophile Laurent de Crozet (1809-1872). The volume was edited posthumously by his son Amédée de Crozet (1847-1896) and is in the hand of a master scribe, Alphonse Pelletier of Marseille. The choice of contrasting quires of coloured papers aptly reflects some of the author’s curious bibliophilic practices. A prolific author of pamphlets and articles, it was said that he preferred to have each work printed in small editions by different printers, sometimes even ordering different gatherings from different printers. His aim was to make collecting his works as challenging as possible, so that only he and one other ever achieved a complete collection. Notably modest, de Crozet also published anonymously and adopted pseudonyms (such as the ‘Chevalier Apicius à Vindemiis’), a characteristic alluded to in the the author’s portrait (’Auctoris vera effigies’ which mentions a limitation of 50 copies) depicting a man sitting on an immense barrel, his pockets stuffed with pipes and bottles and his head in a book, so that his face is entirely obscured). De Crozet was a major collector of earlier French books (Perrier, Bibliophiles et les collectionneurs provencaux, 1897).
The contents comprise: Volume I: Du Coeur de l’homme selon la Philosophie ancienne; Reflexions; Notes de voyage (Hôtels, Registres des Etrangers; Enseignes; Voyageurs en Suisse, L’Amateur); Sur Cicéron; Lucrèce Borgia; Les Fiancés par Manzoni; Messe en Fa de Chérubin; Cicéron et Lord Byron; De la Décentralisation littéraire; Pensées; Histoire de l’Angleterre par Hume; Considérations sure les premiers siècle de notre histoire; Sur la foi. Volume II: De la Recherche des plaisirs’ De la Connaissance de Dieu; De l’Esclavage en Turquie; Memoires d’un Président de Conférences; Réponse de Mr. Casimir Bousquet; Notes sur Haitze’ Rapport; Notes bibliographiqes.

A delightful, accomplished and idsiosyncratic illuminated manuscript in neo-gothic style by a French woman, one Sophie Mallet, probably as a wedding gift for a female friend or relation: Jeanne or ‘JMN’. The texts include familiar words of advice for a young wife, scriptural and otherwise, while a section titled ‘Vie du monde’ includes personal and original advice addressed to ‘ma Jeanne’. Among the texts are: ‘Qui trouvera une femme forte?...’ (Proverbs 31 [incorrectly given as Ecclesiasticus here], ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies’); ‘Bienheureux les pauvres d’esprit...’ (Matthew 5, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven); ‘Faites comme les petits enfants qui de l’une des mains se tiennent à leur père’ (St Francis of Assisi, ‘Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me’), and there are excerpts from the Imitation of Christ and from St Bernard.

The real pleasure of the manuscript lies in its illumination, expertly done with unusual and quirky details. The borders include numerous recognisable birds, insects and flowers rendered in impressive detail. Colours are applied very skilfully as are metallic highlights, including burnished and liquid gold, often on raised or otherwise textured grounds. Best of all is the colophon or tailpiece, which includes an entwined pair of longtailed dragons looking more like dinosaurs than medieval beasts.

A spectacular and unique interpretation of Baudelaire by Neville Lytton including twenty original watercolours with illuminated borders. Each of Lytton’s images is in the visionary tradition ―most have an otherworldly quality, and some border on Surrealism.The twenty poems comprise: Le Calumet de la Paix - Bohémiens en voyage - La Géante - Le Cygne - La Beauté - L’Idéal - La Vie antérieure - Sisina - Un Voyage à Cythère - XVIII - A une Passante - L’Albatros - L’Ennemi - Bien loin d’ici - Une gravure fantastique - L’Amour et le Crâne - La Cloche fêlée - Le Voyage - Le Balcon - Les Bijoux.
Most of the poems are given in two calligraphic versions, one probably written with a steel nib, the other with an oblique nib, perhaps a quill-pen. Three poems appear in only one version: La Cloche fêlée in steel nib version only and Le Balcon and Les Bijoux only in quill pen.
Neville Bulwer-Lytton (1879-1951) was grandson of the novelists Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Rosina Doyle Wheeler and his siblings included the suffragette Constance Lytton and Emily Lutyens. He was a man of many parts: a military officer, cricketer, Olympic athlete and artist ― educated at Eton and the École des Beaux-Arts. He was also an accomplished morris dancer and played an ivory flute.
Among several notable portraits, he painted George Bernard Shaw in papal robes (in imitation of Velazquez) and a series of fashionable women in sumptuous velvets and silks, but he is best known for the series of First World War frescoes for the Victory Hall at Balcombe, Sussex. Throughout his career he also painted watercolour miniatures, intensely detailed with a distinctive coloration ― a style entirely suitable for these Baudelaire illustrations. His first wife was Judith Blunt, daughter of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (divorced in 1923), and he was an important member of circles of artists and connoisseurs around the turn of the 20th century. He was friendly with Sydney Cockerell, spent weekend with the Churchills, and Eddie Marsh claimed that it was meeting Lytton that inspired his love of collecting. In 1924 Lytton married Rosa Alexandrine (Sandra) Fortel of St Rambert-en-Bugey, near Lyon and settled in France, asborbing himself deeply in French artistic culture. He wrote: ‘‘I love France because I am an artist, and in this glorious country artists are considered to be sacred --- to them gratitude is shown for the renouncing of material wealth and worldly values and the adoption of a life of struggle which as a rule is only understood by a small number of contemporaries’ (‘Reasons why I love France’ in Life in Occupied France, 1942).

A striking and moving memorial to a young boy, a vision of a child’s paradise with chromolithograph scrapbook cuttings of birds, horses, children, dancers, flowers and foliage, together with cuttings of hair (some woven). It combines two popular Victorian domestic crafts of hair art and scrapbooking, within an accomplished (but probably also domestic) wooden frame in the gothic style. With its supersized hair-carrying birds dwarfing diminutive dancers this is an inadvertently unsettling piece of Victorian naïve art.

An extensive cookery and domestic and medical receipt book once bound as a notebook, now loose but substantially complete with circa 120 complete recipes in several hands. Though mostly undated, two entries later in the collection are recipes copied from magazines of 1815. It is not possible to identify the owner of compiler, Mrs Barber, and the entries include a wide variety of regional and local recipes making it almost impossible to suggest a region of origin — though Dorsteshire and Somersetshire are both referred to.

A Receipt for Blacking; To make a Cake with Custard; To preserve Damsons; To pickle Pork; To make a Cake; To make White sauce for Fowls; Plum Cake; Treacle Beer; Rice Cheesecakes; To lake Muffins; Mrs. Gilks’s receipt to make a Cake; To make a green Ointment; Yellow Pickle; Currant Wine; Apricot Jam; For a Cough; To make a Mead; To make Raisin Wine; To pickle Salmon; A common Rice pudding; To make little Cakes; To make Breakfast Cakes; To make Snail Milk; For a scald or Burn; Shrub; Ratafia; Goldbold’s Vegatable Balsom; To make Nankeen Dye; Friend Day’s Receipt to make Parsnip Wine; Nitrous Fever mixture; Milk of Roses; Fine Sope; Gargle for a Sore Throat; Hiera Piera; A Plaister to be worn for pain restraint; Daffy’s Elixir; Stoughtons Elixir; For the Piles; Bread Pudding; Blanc Mange; Cure for Cancers; Yellow Pickle; To make Macceroons; To make Rattifies; Shrewsbury Cakes; Mint Drops; For a Violent Lax; M. Smith’s way to make Ginger Wine; S. Cash’s way to make Cowslip wine; Directions and outward Applications for all Wounds without Inflamations; Application for Swellings that are likely to break and come to a Wound; For a Cough; Nurse Jones’s Receipt for the Rheumatism; To make Potatoe Cheesecakes; To make Vinegar; To make Raspberry Jam; To make Banbury Cakes; Mr. Bickmore’s receipt for light batter puddings; Currant Wine; Another Way; To Keep Damsons; Chese of Damsons; Receipt for the Jaunders; ED receipt for the ague; Plumb Cake; Cousin Crabbs way to make Ginger Wine; To make a sere cloth plaster; To make Gingerbread; To make a Melbet Pudding; Susanna Barrats way to make Walnut Ketshup; To make Elder Ointment; To make Lime water; A Receipt for the Rheumatic Complaint; Pound Cake; To make Yorkshire tea cakes; For a cough; To make Oat or Hava Cakes; [?] Tutty’s reciept for a Cake; N. Taylor’s reciept for minced pyes; Rev’d Bishops Biscuits; Cousin Townsends receipt for British Madeira; To clean Stoves; Another way to clean Stoves; To make wash Ball; Cheap and Excellent Custards; To make Sprats taste like Anchovies; Black Currant Wine; Soft Cheese; M. Garrards Ginger bread Cakes; Fr. Ransomes Cake; To Pickle Walnuts; The manner of cureing the Bread-bag in Dorsetshire for making Cheese; Somersetshire Frumity; A method of preserving Cream; To prevent milk & Butter from tasting of Turnips; To make a Cake Fr. Moore’s way; To boil Coals in milk for Rheumatism; Preservative from Moths in Books & Clothes; Aromatic Vinegar; [4pp. on the treatment of coughs]; Doctor Badeleys first prescription for [?S or L. Martin] aged 15 supposing the fits were occasioned by indigestion. 16pp. Dell’s prescription for M Matthew’s Shortage of breath; For [illegible] or other weaknesses; November’s magazine,1815 From the practice of J. Want late Surgeon to the North London Despensary 11 North Crescent Bedford Square [followed by a disqusition on the symptoms and treatment of epilepsy and coughs, and the possible significance of variations in weather, prompted by Want’s Monthly Report of Diseases in N.W. London: from November 24 to December 24, 1815, in The Monthly Magazine, No. 277]; For Infectious Fevers Fumigation; Good Family Pills; An excellent Fever mixture; To ease a cough; To Polish Horns; For a weak Stomach; To make Calomel Ointment; A Receipt for the Scurvy; For the Rhumatism; Huxhams Tincture of Bark, 2 separate leaves and 4pp., probably formerly part of (ii). Leaf 1: Duke of Buckinghams Pudding; Duke of Cumberlands Pudding; Red Currant Wine as made in 1818; Potatoe Pudding; Elder Rob. Leaf 2: Monthly Report for October 1816 From August 24 to Sept 24; Eye Water. 4 pp: [3pp. (partial) treatment instructions]; Ginger Beer from the Monthly Magazine.�

This attractive fragment includes the opening of the prayer to the Virgin ‘O intemerata’ (O Immaculate), commonly included (with the ‘Oscecro te’) in a medieval Book of Hours. Folio Society, Collectors Corner (n.d, ?1960) £2.

Slavery in France was abolished during the Revolution, but was reintroduced by Napoleon in 1804 and not finally abolished until 1838. In April 1826 Charles X had signed a treaty formally recognising the independence of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and it seems likely that these notes were written for a speech given shortly after that date. Barante notes that some viewed the treaty as an act of submission, but he states that the king and the negotiators who signed the treaty had ‘une horreur sincère pour cet infame trafic’ and that the loss of the colony was no threat to France. In the light of the treaty, Barante believes that this was a favourable moment to advance the cause of abolition. Towards the end he refers to the famous saying of Robespierre: ‘Périssent les colonies plutôt qu’un principe’ (though he simply writes ‘périsse les colonies...’ here) but he goes on ‘ces paroles sont atroces — le premier de tous les principes est l’horreur du crime... Cependant ce principe auquel on faisait des sacrifices humains était un principe et de cruauté’. For Barante therefore the fight against the injustice and cruelty of the slave trade is of the highest importance, and these eight pages clearly reveal his humanity and support for the cause of abolition.
Prosper de Barante (1782-1866), a prominent liberal voice in nineteenth-century France was variously a diplomat, politician, statesman, historian and writer. From 1807-9 he was a ‘sous préfet’ in the department of Ardèche, and from 1813-15 prefect of Loire-Inférieure at Nantes. He made several diplomatic visits to Spain and Poland and was a close friend of liberal thinker Benjamin Constant. He was also a member of the Coppet group in the circle of Madame de Staël.