Link to Short Catalogue 163, on Children's Items and Material from WV, PA, OH

Martin Wetzler's 1859 Fraktur bookplate
for Elizabeth Johns.

When I started this blog, I planned to have a couple regular features: Shelfie Wednesday, where I'd share a photo or two of an item I'd recently acquired, or sometimes of a whole shelf of things. I also planned to feature what I thought of as "mini-catalogue Mondays" where I would post a little mini-list of ten or twenty items in a focused area, on as many Mondays as I could manage.

On Fridays, I'd try to write a "Post-Academic" piece of some sort.

Well, of course, I haven't managed any of those things on a truly weekly basis.  But this week, I think for the first time, I will post a mini-catalogue link on a Monday, just one week after my last Monday catalogue.

Wonderful 1880s Lithograph
Reward of Merit

This week, I have a selection of (mostly) unusual or interesting items, either children's books, or items from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and including a number of great items that fit into both groups. 

While there's nothing from the middle ages here, there are nevertheless some interesting manuscript items from the nineteenth century, a couple of scarce nineteenth-century Welsh-language almanacs printed in Pittsburgh, two items signed by one of the very few Jewish Pennsylvania German fraktur scriveners known, and a spectrum of the other kinds of oddball items I can't stop myself from picking up.

Sixteen-year-old Cornelius Hayes's
frontispiece for a bound collection of
exemplary student work, ca. 1894

I hope some of my readers out there enjoy looking through these items: I've learned a lot from these books.

Here's a link to the catalogue.

New Post-Kalamazoo Mini-Catalogue

Wise's 1722 Asser Edition

Here's a link to a little illustrated catalogue, with various items of interest or potential interest to scholars, students, or collectors of the middle ages. Mostly these are items I had offered for sale at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo last month, but there's a couple more recent acquisitions, too, including a copy of Francis Wise's 1722 edition of Asser's Life of King Alfred, which includes the only facsimile of the Asser manuscript that was lost in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire that destroyed so many Cotton manuscripts. 

The painted initial on the
Peruvian Missal leaf.

Also, this list includes what is probably the finest manuscript leaf I've ever owned, from Otto Ege's fine "Perugian Missal" which he dated to 1351. It has a truly beautiful pained initial, and exemplifies exactly the kind of fine book that Ege could (and did) purchase and repurpose.

But there are other odd-ball items, as well, at a variety of price points.

As always, just email me (the address is in the catalogue) if you are interested in any of these items. And I hope you enjoy looking over the items, regardless.