Recent Books

The Baylors of Newmarket: The Decline and Fall of a Virginia Planter Family. By THOMAS KATHEDER. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. 2009. xix + 277 pp. $31.95. ISBN 978 1 4401 22 6.

John Baylor IV (1750-1808) was born into one of Virginia's most privileged families: his grandfather was the state's wealthiest slave trader and his father developed tobacco plantations in order to support his passion for Arabian thoroughbreds. The younger Baylor turned his attention from horses to books, amassing a substantial library comparable only with those of Jefferson and William Byrd II and especially rich in French publications. The collapse of the family fortune in the wake of the Revolution led to the dispersal of the library, but Thomas Katheder is able to say much about the collection from the evidence of a list surviving in the Baylor family papers. Only one book from the library is known today: a copy of William Newton's translation of Vitruvius owned by the Virginia Historical Society with a watercolour depicting an immensely grand five-bay country house. This was the folly that Baylor dreamt would house his library, but its construction never continued beyond the foundations and walls, and its master died in a debtors' gaol.

Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries. Ed. by JOHN HINKS and CATHERINE ARMSTRONG. (Print Networks.) New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library. 2008. xiii + 265 pp. £25. ISBN 978 1 58456 229 0 (USA); 978 0 7123 5064 8 (UK).

Comprises: J. Feather, 'Others: Some Reflections on Book Trade History'; A. McShane, 'Typography Matters: Branding Ballads and Gelding Curates in Stuart England'; S. Randall, 'Newspapers and their Publishers during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis'; V. Gardner, 'John White and the Development of Print Culture in the North East of England, 1711-1769'; J. Caudle, 'Young Boswell and the London Stationers: The Authorial Collaboration of James Boswell with William Flexney, Bookseller, and Samuel Chandler, Printer, 1763'; S. W. Brown, 'Indians, Politicians and Profit: The Printing Career of Peter Williamson'; J. Archbold, 'Periodical Reactions: The Effect of the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union on the Irish Monthly Periodical'; E. Cass, 'The Printing History of the Peace Egg Chapbooks'; P. Smith, 'The Chapbook Mummers Play: Analysing Ephemeral Print Traditions'; F. Felsenstein, 'What Middletown Read: Print Networks in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest' (on the archives of the Carnegie Library, Muncie, Indiana); L. Peters, '"Welsh Obscurity to Notoriety": Lloyd George, the Boer War, and the North Wales Press'; E. Jackson, 'Sievier's Monthly (1909): Pseudonyms and Readership in Early Twentieth-Century Popular Fiction'.

Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print since the Fifteenth Century. Ed. by ROBIN MYERS, MICHAEL HARRIS, and GILES MANDELBROTE. (Publishing Pathways.) New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library. 2009. xvi + 191 pp. £25. ISBN 978 1 58456 265 8 (USA); 978 0 7123 5085 3 (UK).

Proceedings of the thirtieth annual Book Trade History conference, comprising: L. Hellinga, 'Sale Advertisements for Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century' (including a catalogue of forty-four such advertisements); J. Simpson, 'Selling the Biblia Regia: The Marketing and Distribution Methods for Christopher Plantin's Polyglot Bible'; M. Harris, 'Printed Advertisements: Some Variations in their Use around 1700'; P. Plock, 'Advertising Books in Eighteenth-Century Paris: Evidence from Waddesdon Manor's Trade Card Collection'; C. Benson, 'Many Good Books: Advertising and the Book Trade in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland'; A. Powers, 'From Protection to Promotion: The Uses of the Book Jacket'; P. Straus, 'The Use and Effect of Literary Prizes in the Late Twentieth Century'; U. Göllmann, 'Advertising Books Online: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow'.

The Macclesfield Alphabet Book, BL Additional MS 88887: A Facsimile. Introduced by CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL and PATRICIA LOVETT. London: The British Library. 2010. 32 pp. + 46 fols. £30. ISBN 978 0 7123 5804 0.

A fifteenth-century English manuscript labelled 'Old Alphabets' was among the most exciting of the many discoveries to come out of the dispersal of the library of the ninth Earl of Macclesfield at...