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Robin Myers, a prominent figure in the world of books and archives, passed away on her 97th birthday. She was a respected member of the Bibliographical Society and served as its first female president. Myers had a passion for collecting books and autograph letters, and she used her extensive knowledge to teach others about book collecting. She also played a significant role in preserving and promoting the archives of the Stationers' Company. Myers was known for her talent for friendship and her elegant writing style. She leaves behind a legacy of publications and fond memories among her many friends. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses two previously unidentified references made by Emily Dickinson in her letters. The first reference is to a friend in Dresden who expressed a dislike for wildflowers and promised to send Dickinson a meadow. The author suggests that John Mason Tyler, a neighbor and friend of Dickinson's family who studied in Germany, may be the unidentified friend. The second reference is to a Mrs. J, whose identity is uncertain but may be Harriet D. Moseley Leland, the wife of a former treasurer of Amherst College. The article provides evidence from letters and historical records to support these identifications. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a letter sent in 1549 during the Western Rebellion, a significant civil crisis in the mid-Tudor period. The letter contains the rebels' demands and has been printed and preserved in manuscript form. The authorship of the letter has long been a mystery, but the article suggests that Sir Peter Carew, a Devon-born gentleman who served in the privy chamber, is the likely author. The article also explores Carew's role in quashing the rebellion and his involvement in distributing government propaganda to discredit the rebels. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the acquisition of an authentic manuscript of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "The Garden of Proserpine" by the William & Mary library for the Sheila and Terry Meyers Collection of Swinburneiana. The manuscript, commissioned by H. Buxton Forman, is described as a fair copy and includes handwritten notes by Forman. The manuscript is compared to the printed version in Poems and Ballads (1866), noting minor differences in punctuation and wording. [Extracted from the article]

In this essay I explore relationships between Victorian artists' prolific production of autograph replicas and the wide global demand for these replicas. Autograph replicas, defined by Victorian artists as variations on a subject through changes in size, medium or image from a first version, were largely commissioned by patrons. This market was later driven by foreign collectors who avidly sought autograph replicas, believed to be original works, not copies, to raise their own nations' cultural image in the world. The functions and demands for autograph replicas have unique historical and cultural contexts, including conflicts between artists and patrons. I describe artists' surreptitious studio practices producing these works and the unique effect autograph replicas had on collecting and on art history in the context of this special issue's rethinking of British art and the global. Autograph replicas challenged boundaries between original and copy and disrupted art‐historical notions of chronology, originality, canonicity, and market intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1706 Cristóbal de Villalpando signed a painting with an unusual, intensive calligraphic flourish, and sent it from Mexico City far to the north. This essay describes Villalpando's decision to invest so much pictorial energy in letterforms against this geographic backdrop. Doing so reveals several social registers in which writing had taken on particular professional charge, and opens on to a yet broader artistic sensitivity to writing: its forms and modes of production. The Spanish Empire's extensive bureaucracy of paper made imperial subjects highly sensitive to script's visual and material qualities, such that Villalpando and his fellow artists could capitalize upon them both to produce meaning within their pictures, and to engineer particular constructions of self. In juxtaposing distinct domains of writing – notarial, educational, performative – with paintings, this essay stakes a methodological claim for considering the archive, broadly conceived, as a place just as important for looking as for reading and transcription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the Soest conductus fragments, of which five single leaves have so far been rediscovered, this article analyses the different layers of use and reuse that can be deduced. First, a detailed account of the circumstances under which these manuscript fragments travelled with (or without) their respective host volumes is given. The music manuscript must have been discarded by the fifteenth century, as a bookbinder from the Dominican convent of Soest in Westphalia reused various leaves of it in a series of autographs written by Jacob of Soest, who died in 1438. After the dissolution of the convent's library in the course of nineteenth-century secularization, further contexts of reuse and dismemberment pertaining to the fragments can be demonstrated. Secondly, the remnants of the original music manuscript are analysed. The use of the two-part conductus O crux ave spes unica (H4) as the opening piece of a fascicle can be connected to the dedication of the Soest Dominican house to the Holy Cross. In comparison to other fragmentary sources that made their way to the German-speaking area, as well as the long-known codices F, W1, and W2, the Soest music manuscript seems closest to W2. While, however, these two codices show significant parallels in terms of mise-en-page and copying process, the choice of repertory might have deliberately differed. This points to production in the same workshop, but for different commissioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reproduction of the original punctuation, spelling, and capitalization in her transcriptions of three autograph letters by English art critic John Ruskin to Robert Crozier and Henry Wentworth Acland to Ruskin. Information is presented on Crozier as an influential artist and Acland's letter to Ruskin with a job description of the post of drawing assistant at the Radcliffe Library Oxford.

The author discusses the personal library of Canadian poet Al Purdy. He mentions Purdy's collection of the works of Canadian authors, marginalia and inscriptions that appear in the books, and his relationships with other Canadian authors.

The author presents a literary criticism of the English play "Sir Thomas More." He discusses the previous research on the authorship of the play, the debate as to whether Anthony Munday or Henry Chettle was the author, and the question as to whether the handwriting of the play bears any relationship to its composition.

Conservation problems can reveal unsuspected complexities in the ontological make-up of modern and contemporary artworks. Using a problem in the conservation of one of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings as my starting point, I argue that Goodman's well-known and often criticized distinction between autographic and allographic art can be fruitfully used to articulate the different options in conservation dilemmas, but only if used in a non-disjunctive way and in the context of a biographical approach to the works under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until a new letter of François Couperin’s was discovered in a collection of papers that once belonged to the dramatic author Louis Fuzelier, we possessed no document at all—apart from a few signatures—in the hand of the celebrated composer. This letter, in addition to providing a sample of his handwriting, offers the advantage of also including a musical manuscript with the second stanza of a previously unknown drinking song for bass, O Souvent dans le plus doux sort (‘Often in the sweetest circumstances’), no doubt copied for Louis Fuzelier himself. To this document are attached three further parodies of pieces by Couperin, published by Jean-Baptiste Christophe Ballard between 1718 and 1720 in his Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire, whose texts—because of the conspicuous ways in which they diverge from the printed versions—are probably by Fuzelier. Although the composer’s signature here differs slightly from those we already know from their appearance on various official documents, the musical characteristics of the bass melody, notably its rhythmic nuances, prove that the signature on the letter can be none other than François Couperin’s. This ‘musical letter’, probably written between 1720 and 1724, further demonstrates that the composer, far from being offended by parodies of his music, as one might assume he might have been (from a comment he makes in the preface to his third book of Pièces de clavecin), actually invited them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas most critics of Thomas Hoccleve’s poetry have focused on elucidating the author’s particular mode of self-presentation, this essay sets out to demonstrate that few fifteenth-century readers beyond the poet’s initial addressees enjoyed his artful self-portraiture per se. Until now, Hoccleve Studies have been dominated by the texts preserved in the autograph manuscripts produced by the poet towards the end of his life. When we turn to the non-autograph traditions of his works, however, it becomes clear that Hoccleve’s poems were preserved in a variety of forms and contexts and that medieval readers’ experiences of these texts must have been considerably more varied than has typically been allowed. While Hoccleve’s own exemplification of the link between self-fashioning and book production in the Series may have provided an important stimulus for the selective reception of this work, I explore the possibility that the highly unusual nature of the poet’s most personal texts led to their sidelining in the reproduction of his corpus. Accordingly, I suggest, consideration of the fifteenth-century transmission and reception of Hoccleve’s personal poetry can illuminate not only the often deeply self-serving nature of reading and textual reproduction in late medieval England; it can also provide a fresh indication of the extent to which some of Hoccleve’s texts depart from the norms of the literary and codicological cultures in which their author participates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an earlier study that identified previously unrecognized writings of the young Thomas Hobbes, questions were raised about the authorship of some of Francis Bacon’s published works. This article reports a follow-up study in which two independent statistical analyses of Bacon’s English works both conclude that, whereas Bacon’s autographic writings show clearly that they are authored by the same person; almost none of his published works can be matched statistically with the autographs. The most likely explanation for this dramatic finding is that Bacon’s well-known reliance on secretaries may have been sufficiently extensive that his writing patterns are obscured or replaced by theirs. This finding suggests a far simpler explanation for a wide array of anomalies in Bacon’s works than others have offered. The study further identifies some of Bacon’s works written during a period when Thomas Hobbes was his secretary, which match Hobbes’s writing pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Alphonse Daudet's novel L'immortel, based on a notorious nineteenth-century forgery scandal, the Vrain-Lucas affair. It explores how Daudet uses the idea of the fake not only to frame a critique of a specific social formation (the milieu surrounding the Académie française, to which he had failed to secure election, and which is presented as a sclerotic, moribund institution), but also to articulate an attack on naturalism as practised by Zola and his acolytes. It argues that L'immortel can be read as an intervention in a long-running debate about the status of mimesis, a debate that received fresh impetus in the nineteenth century with the emergence of realism and naturalism. It suggests that Daudet's text reformulates the Platonic condemnation of mimesis to condemn naturalism as a degraded and aesthetically bankrupt form, belonging to the regime of the fake. At the same time, it promotes an alternative, Aristotelian conception of mimesis as an imaginative appropriation and transfiguration of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the catalogue of keyboard manuscripts connected with 17th-century Rome, which derives from her doctoral dissertation, Swiss musicologist Christine Jeanneret claims to have identified five new Frescobaldi autographs, both musical and text. Reviewing her book in the November 2010 issue of Early Music, Frederick Hammond has confirmed that claim authoritatively, but unsatisfactorily. He does not explain why, for example, when working on his own books on Frescobaldi and Barberini musical patronage, he had come across four out of the five autographs in question without recognizing the composer’s characteristic text-hand. According to Jeanneret, those four autographs were mainly copied by Frescobaldi for didactic purposes, and in similar cases he would adopt, for clarity’s sake, musical and text hands very different from his usual. The weakness of this theory, which leads her even to regard three published motets by Virginio Mazzocchi as unknown sacred pieces by Frescobaldi, is so evident that I conclude Jeanneret has in fact unearthed just one new Frescobaldi autograph—an anonymous keyboard tablature now held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of handwritten characters that are selected from an anonymous letter and written material from a suspect is an open problem in forensic science. The individualization of handwriting is largely dependent on examiners who evaluate the characteristics in a qualitative and subjective way. Precise individual characterization of the shape of handwritten characters is possible through Fourier analysis: each handwritten character can be described through a set of variables such as the surface and harmonics as demonstrated by Marquis and co-workers in 2005. The assessment of the value of the evidence is performed through the derivation of a likelihood ratio for multivariate data. The methodology allows the forensic scientist to take into account the correlation between variables, and the non-constant variability within sources (i.e. individuals). Numerical procedures are implemented to handle the complexity and to compute the marginal likelihood under competing propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent publication, Köller et al. (Probability Conclusions in Expert Opinions on Handwriting. Substantiation and Standardization of Probability Statements in Expert Opinions. München: Luchterhand, 2004) elaborate recommendations as to how forensic scientists should evaluate their findings in the specific field of comparative handwriting examination. The proposed procedure is intended to standardise the calculation of posterior probabilities of propositions which are of interest to members of the court, e.g. the proposition of a certain individual being the author of a questioned handwritten sample. Köller et al. (2004) also claim that such an approach may analogously be applied in other forensic disciplines. The present paper discusses some of the compromising effects that these recommendations may have on a coherent evaluation of scientific evidence. Drawbacks of posterior probabilities for describing the probative force of evidence are contrasted with insights offered by other evaluative frameworks. Inadequate implications of posterior probabilities are illustrated and discussed in the context of examples that focus on selected aspects of combining evidence. Graphical probability models, i.e. Bayesian networks, are used with the aim of clarifying the rationale underlying the arguments presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the imaginative writing which increasingly became understood as expressing the marketable personality of the writer. Modern authorial autobiography emerged as a generic recognition of this interpretive paradigm. No American writer more completely and enthusiastically embodied this overlap between the cultural performance of authorial personality and the generic reliance on authorial autobiography than the writer Mark Twain. More than any other author of the nineteenth century, Twain's life story was inextricably entangled with his writing, which in turn dictated the popular and critical reception of his texts. Twain's signature may not be a legally registered trademark, but the trademark, as a signifier of corporate ownership, is the best description of its significance for American public culture.

Focuses on the revision underwent by the manuscript promptbook of the play "The Second Maiden's Tragedy," by Thomas Middleton. Assumption of every scholar to consider the play that the additional passages are authorial; Identification of the reviser's handwriting; Discovery of potentially significant variants between the additions and the original manuscript.

The article presents discussion on the assertion by Samuel A. Tannenbaum that Thomas Heywood was the author of the additions to Sir Thomas More in Hand B. Robert Adger Law found evidence unfavourable to an identification of Hand B with that of the two autograph Heywood plays, "The Captives"and "The Escapes of Jupiter." As the pertinent text samples are old-spelling texts, with the proverbial latitude in spelling before English written conventions were standardized, it is reasonable to examine the letter frequencies of the texts.

The article discusses British forger William-Henry Ireland (1775-1835), focusing on an Elizabethan forgery he created in 1794 and its written description in the 1796 published account "An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts, &c." It was displayed at the Great Tudor Exhibition of 1889-1890 at the New Gallery on Regent Street in London, England and the exhibition description of the work indicates it is an English translation of a 1590 French work notable for bearing the signature of Queen Elizabeth I of England on its cover. The book was lent to the exhibition by the widow of collector Henry Cunliffe and was acquired by the British Museum.

The article discusses an example of William Shakespeare's signature appearing at the end of the poem "Let the bird of loudest lay," also known as "The Phoenix and the Turtle," which was published in the 1601 volume "Love's Martyr," edited by Robert Chester. This example is hyphenated, showing the author's last name as "Shake-speare." The author suggests that this signature is from Shakespeare's own hand, citing evidence related to the wording on the title pages of the Chester's volume and signatures of other authors whose work appeared in the volume, such as Ben Jonson and Chester himself. Also discussed are other examples of Shakespeare's authorial signature such as those in the dedications of the quartos "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece."

Features the autograph letters of litterateur William Shenstone addressed to Jane Bennet in Birmingham, England. Preservation of the letters at the Birmingham Public Library; Critique of the letters; Excerpts of the letters.

The author presents a literary criticism of a tract written in response to the rebellion in Cornwall in 1549. He mentions the disputed authorship of the tract, presents textual evidence that Nicholas Udall wrote it, and supports this claim with autographic evidence.

The article reviews the music release "Fantasy and Sonata in C minor: Interactive Recording from the Autograph on Mozart's Own Fortepiano," by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The article focuses on the unpublished holograph versus by C. Day Lewis. These previously unknown light verses by C. Day Lewis are inscribed in the autograph book of Norman Wright, a day-boy at the Larchfield School, Helensburgh, Scotland from 1928 to 1932. Day Lewis taught English there between September 1928 and March 1930. The book also contains lines by W.H. Auden, who succeeded him in the post, and a water-colour of the school by the Headmaster's wife.

The article discusses author Samuel Pegge. The Index of British Library Manuscripts lists several letters and other items by Samuel Pegge, most of them in his own hand. All other letter forms found in the annotations to the printed copy, including alternative forms where those exist, are identical with forms found in the manuscript autographs, and the general character of the hand is the same. Pegge was a curate and then a vicar in Kent from 1730 until 1751, when he was inducted into a rectory in his native Derbyshire.

The article presents information related to an autograph of the novelist Samuel Richardson. Several fragments of literary interest are preserved among the papers of the late writer Raymond Richards. These have obviously been collected as autographs of the famous. With these is a small slip in the small, finely formed handwriting of the novelist Samuel Richardson. From internal evidence, this undated, unsigned clipping is written to his correspondent Susanna Highmore. One might deduce from this clipping is that it comes from a lost letter possibly sometime during 1750.

The article focuses on poet David Mallet's short will, which probably was drawn up hastily before he left for Paris and which was apparently witnessed by poet William Collins. A comparison of the signature of William Collins on the probated will with the signatures of the poet William Collins on a number of documents indicates that the hand that signed those legal documents did not sign Mallet's will. Since, however, the poet's handwriting may have been altered significantly by illness, dissimilar signatures may not be conclusive evidence.

The article offers information on the Hunt Botanical Library which was opened by Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 1961. It states that the Hunt Library building was given by botanist Roy A. Hunt from Pittsburgh who also gifted the library of books in the plant sciences, the Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt Botanical Library. It mentions that the financial structure of the library is independent of CIT operation and development funds and is subject to review and approval by CIT as well as the Hunt Foundation. It mentions that the library has about 11,000 titles of bound volumes and 2,500 of pamphlets and collection of botanical prints and paintings, autograph letters of 18th and 19th century botanists and manuscripts, and portraits of botanists.

A thorough search of late nineteenth century Sotheby sale catalogues, undertaken for quite different purposes, has incidentally unearthed some references to autographs of early sixteenth-century literary figures, all of extreme rarity. Autographs themselves have not been located and until they are their authenticity must rest on the authority of Sotheby cataloguers. However, since they are unlisted by the Index of "English Literary Manuscripts" it may be that specialists in that period will have some interest in them.

Presents information on J.A. Stargardt, a German autograph dealer, who on November, 27, 1979 sold an autograph letter signed (ALS) of Oscar Wilde. Undiscovered identity of the collector; Contents of the letter.

The article presents information on the copy of the book "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt," by George Gordon Byron. It lies in the University of London Library and is autographed on the title-page "F. T. Palgrave 1854," and contains at least two pencilled notes and many marks presumably by Palgrave, perhaps of passages considered, but not used, for the Golden Treasury of 1864. On page 11, the printed note to the title of the dedicatory poem "To Lanthe" is Lady Charlotte Harley, who had not completed her eleventh year when these lines were addressed to her, in the autumn of 1812.