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Honnold Library Record: The Harleian Miscellany
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 4, Number 2. Fall 1961:
The Harleian Miscellany
This library possesses, as do most scholarly libraries, a set of the Harleian Miscellany. The Honnold has the ten-volume edition of 1808–1813 rather than the eight-volume first edition of 1744–1746.
In 1742 Thomas Osborne, a London bookseller, purchased the library of the second Earl of Oxford which had in fact been gathered by his more illustrious father, Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford. The library contained more than 20,000 volumes and Osborne paid £13,000 for it. He then began exploiting it for all it was worth, and if he was a rather shabby man in many respects, this bookseller knew how to make money out of books. He conceived the idea of reprinting some of the rare pamphlets contained in the collection, and engaged William Oldys, who had been literary secretary to the Earl of Oxford, to make the selection. He was also successful in inducing that giant of the literary world, Dr. Samuel Johnson, to write the preface. It is not true, by the way, that Dr. Johnson at one time seized a folio in Osborne’s shop, hit him over the head with it, knocked him down, and then stamped on him. “Sir,” said Johnson to Boswell, “he was impertinent to me, and I beat him. But not in his shop: it was in my own chamber.” But Johnson needed work as much as Osborne needed a great man, and the preface to the Harleian Miscellany is one result.
The eight volumes composing the first edition of the Miscellany are a hodge-podge. A sixteenth-century pamphlet will be preceded by one from the eighteenth century and followed by one from the seventeenth. A treatise on the Spanish Armada will be sandwiched between a description of the inhabitants of Madagascar and a short work on the general problem of how to be happy though married. There is design in this choice. As Johnson pointed out at great length and in ponderous language, by reprinting in the first volume, pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects, something would be offered to a wide variety of readers, and thus many readers could be induced to buy the second volume, and so on through all eight volumes.
In the more than 600 items contained in the set in Honnold, certainly all tastes are satisfied. There are reprints of pamphlets on rape, adultery, murder, treason, and international affairs; the love letters of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are included, and a learned account of tobacco, a description of coffee houses, and a very valuable essay on the herring fishery. As Johnson remarks, these pamphlets “preserve a multitude of particular incidents . . . which are to be considered as sparks of truth, which, when united may afford light in some of the darkest scenes of state.” It is certainly true that for more than two centuries the Harleian Miscellany has proved a mine of valuable information for the historian and can be an unending source of entertainment for the general reader.
The materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information on those materials, contact Special Collections.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | March 21, 2008 06:38 PM | The more you know
