Who printed Piquet for Francis Cogan? Thank you Compositor!

(udpated 3/13 to link to Patrick Spedding's post, with his discussion of Compositor)

Last week, I watched Joseph Hone present a paper 'Secrets, Lies, and Title Pages' (now available on YouTube) sponsored by ODSECS, the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Joseph discussed how 18c printers "corrupted title pages with false names, dates, and places...to disguise the origins of dangerous  books or piracies." I recommend the talk highly. 

In general, we don't know who printed a particular book in the 18c. The imprint, if honest, tends to identify the publisher and only occasionally the printer. Several times, Joseph made reference to the Compositor database of 18c printers' ornaments which he used to unmask printers who would otherwise have stayed hidden. I knew that Compositor was an upgraded version of Fleuron, a site I had used frequently. In my online Hoyle bibliography I had links to Fleuron which no longer worked in Compositor. It had been on my list to update the links and Joseph's talk prompted me to do so. Done!

I also explored Compositor and was blown away by a new feature: "image search", with a tutorial on their blog. It allows you to take an ornament in one book and find matches in others. Sometimes, those matches will be in books that identify the printer, suggesting a printer for the original book. Before giving an example, here is some background:

• Printers ornaments are decorative elements, generally woodblocks, used in books through the late 18c. For a charming example, see the squirrely headpiece here. 

• The source for Compositor is ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a subscription database of nearly 200,000 18c books that can be accessed through most university libraries. ECCO began as microfilm and was digitized from the film. For a great history of ECCO, see Steven H. Gregg's paper "Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online" available here. The path from film to digital means that the reproductions are not always of pristine quality. 

• The Compositor/Fleuron team must have done an immense amount of image processing that I can imagine only vaguely. They extracted the ornaments from full pages, developed ornament metadata, and, most magically, allowed visual search. Well done!
  

Okay, enough talk. Let's figure out who printed Piquet for Francis Cogan. My description of the book is here. The imprint, "Printed for F. Cogan at the Middle-Temple-Gate", is silent as to the printer. Scroll down to the contents where it says ‘[headpiece] | SOME | Rules and Observations | FOR | Playing well at CHESS. | [...]’. Click on the link to see again the headpiece with squirrels and then click on "Load Ornament in Visual Search". 

Now for the part requiring some dexterity. As described in the tutorial, you can use the right mouse button to select a rectangular area in the ornament. It will highlight red as you drag, and turn yellow when you are done.  

Selecting an Ornament

When I clicked "search", I found 103 matches: 

Matching an Ornament

You can click on a match and the original image on the left and the match on the right. If you click the middle image, it will toggle between the two and you can determine whether they were made from the same woodblock. Many things can account for differences even when the block is the same: Woodblocks become worn from use. Any given impression can use more or less ink. The microfilm and digitization can introduce artifacts. Despite the differences, I'm awestruck by how well this works! Truly, this be miraculous!!

Now for the part I found a bit clunky. You can click on the filename of the rightmost image to go to a page like this and then click on the link "This ornament was extracted from this book". In this example, you see the first of ten volumes of Moliere's works with the suggestive imprint "printed by and for John Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln's-Inn Fields". One match does not a printer identify, so you'd want to look at more ornaments and more matches. That entails a lot of clicking. And a lot of keeping track of what you're seeing. Well, I wondered, couldn't I automate that?

Did you notice the little button that let you export the search results as a .csv (comma separated variable) file? Well, I saved the 103 matches to a file and dragged out some rusty Python skills to read the .csv file, visit the 103 matches, visit the book from which the ornament was extracted, extract the imprints, and print them out. Ninety minutes of coding; sixty lines of code. It took longer to write this blog post. If you run it for the 103 matches of the squirrel ornament, the first eight results are:

filename:  105540010000600_1
ornament ID:  1171998
ESTC:  T048220
publisher:  printed for F. Cogan at the Middle-Temple-Gate

filename:  005770040202750_0
ornament ID:  944832
ESTC:  T052789
publisher:  printed for H. Lintot, J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper

filename:  041920010801090_0
ornament ID:  634261
ESTC:  T064098
publisher:  printed for John Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln's-Inn Fields

filename:  025940030001100_0
ornament ID:  1028312
ESTC:  T064113
publisher:  printed for John Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln's-Inn Fields

filename:  086630010201970_0
ornament ID:  166790
ESTC:  T089176
publisher:  printed for J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper in the Strand

filename:  025940040000700_0
ornament ID:  838797
ESTC:  T064114
publisher:  printed for John Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln's-Inn Fields

filename:  094430010500090_1
ornament ID:  706629
ESTC:  T064441
publisher:  printed by and for John Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln's-Inn Fields

filename:  015270010000960_0
ornament ID:  763509
ESTC:  T063293
publisher:  printed for Jacob Tonson in the Strand 

It would have been easy and useful to extract the title and date. And to replace the ' with an apostrophe. But that would have taken more than 90 minutes. Had I done so, you would have seen the first item listed is the source book Piquet. Only one of the eight imprints identifies the printer: "printed by and for John Watts...". Of the 103 entries, 31 of them include "printed by" and in all cases, the printer is John Watts. I've visually inspected a good number of the ornament matches and similarly checked other ornaments from Piquet. I'm completely confident that I have identified the printer. 

There are some caveats in working with ornaments to identify printers. The printing of a book may be shared by more than one printer. A printer may loan out his ornaments. You have to be careful about when a printer died--another printer may have inherited the ornaments. My sense is that these caveats are mostly (repeat mostly) theoretical, but you should be aware of them. 

In fact I had done a lot of pre-Compositor ornament searching and had already identified Watts as the printer of Piquet. But with this new tool, I have identified printers for some of the Dublin Hoyles and for some non-Hoyles in my collection. 

Thank you Compositor! And thank you Joseph for the nudge!

For Patrick Spedding's take on Compositor, see his blog essay here.

Hoyle Bibliography: technology update (part 3)

For background to this short post, please see part 1 and part 2 of the technology update. I've pretty much finished the work of producing MS Word from my XML files, but my approach is quite different from the one I expected.

I thought the model would be XML->HTML for the web and XML->MS Word for the print version. It turns out to be easier, much easier, to go XML->HTML->MS Word!

To look at the sample file, the HTML version of Whist.3 is here. Below is the translation to MS Word:

(click to enlarge)

Now you'll notice there isn't much in the way of formatting: no borders on the table, no nice margins or spacing, no bold table headers, etc. That's deliberate. One can always add styling later and it can be quite hard to remove if there's too much. What I have done is get all the text rendered correctly: smallcaps, italics, superscripts, etc. And the crazy table with the rows and columns that span cells. [Aside: As you can learn here, spanning columns is simple; spanning rows is much more difficult.]

Other than spanning rows, the hardest thing was managing whitespace. There is a whole section in my XSLT/XPath book on whitespace including a subsection "Solving Whitespace Problems" with subsections "Too Much Whitespace" and "Too Little Whitespace". I had problems with both. It was necessary:

• to have the XML->HTML transformation use stricter <xsl:output method ="xml"> rather than "=html"
• to have the HTML->MS Word transformation use <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
• to write a function to "normalize" all text data--that is, collapse consecutive white space into a single space, but allow an initial leading and trailing space.

 Okay, TMI, I know. But I wanted to write it all down so I wouldn't lose it.

There may well be better ways to do this. I found myself frequently at the boundaries of my knowledge. But with a lot of Googling and reading, I've found that many others have been down this path and come up with similar solutions.

OK, enough technology. Back to bibliography!

Hoyle Bibliography: technology update (part 2)

Another techie update...

In my last essay, I gave an overview of the technology I am using for the Hoyle bibliography. One of the claims I made is that storing the descriptions in a highly-structured format would allow me to render them both on the web and in a word processing document. If truth be told, until quite recently, I had never tested that claim, except on the most trivial data. But now I'm ready to declare success!

To review the acronyms briefly, I am storing each bibliographical description in an XML file. I use another language, XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) to translate the data into HTML for display on the web. I've always assumed that I could modify the XSLT to translate the data into a MS Word file, but had tested that only for unformatted text. It remained to deal with the annoyances of superscripts, subscripts, italics, tables, etc.

Well, I'm quite relieved to be able to report that everything works! In the last essay, I showed the XML for the collation formula for Whist.3, which is displayed as:

12^o: A–D¹² E⁴ [$½ (-A2,B2) signed; missigning B4 as B5]; 52 leaves, pp. [8] [1] 2–96

You can see the full bibliographical description on my website here, rendered as HTML. I wrote a new XSLT program reads the same XML and plops the collation formula into a file that MS Word can read. More on that program in a moment. Here is the output, readable by MS Word:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml">
   <w:body>
      <w:p>
         <w:r>
            <w:t>
               <w:rPr>
                  <w:i w:val="on"/>
               </w:rPr>A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist<w:rPr>
                  <w:i w:val="off"/>
               </w:rPr>, printed for F. Cogan, third London edition, 1743.<w:p/>
               <w:p/>
               <w:t>Collation: 12<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="superscript"/>
                  </w:rPr>o<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="baseline"/>
                  </w:rPr>: A–D<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="superscript"/>
                  </w:rPr>12<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="baseline"/>
                  </w:rPr> E<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="superscript"/>
                  </w:rPr>4<w:rPr>
                     <w:vertAlign w:val="baseline"/>
                  </w:rPr> [$½ (-A2,B2) signed; missigning B4 as B5]; 52 leaves, pp. [<w:rPr>
                     <w:i w:val="on"/>
                  </w:rPr>8<w:rPr>
                     <w:i w:val="off"/>
                  </w:rPr>] [1] 2–96 </w:t>
            </w:t>
         </w:r>
      </w:p>
   </w:body>
</w:wordDocument>

All those impenetrable tags beginning <w:....> are the incantations that MS Word needs for formatting.

For the ambitious, you can copy that text into a file and save it as Whist3.xml or some such. Note that the file extension must be .xml. Then launch MS Word and open the file. You should get something that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Notice that I've dealt with paragraph breaks, superscripts, italics, and more. Success!

Not shown in this example are other things I'll need to do: tables, headers, etc. Fortunately, I've solved those items as well. 

Back to the program. The really good news is that there is about an 80% overlap between the XSLT used to translate to HTML and to MS Word. Now that I am learning which parts of the XSLT are the same and which must be customized, I can recode the XSLT a bit more intelligently so that the common 80% is in one file, and the two 20% specializations are in other files.

I can't say I was ever worried about getting my descriptions into MS Word, but it's awfully nice to know it works!

Hoyle Bibliography: technology update

While it has been ages since I last posted on this blog, I have been monumentally busy with Hoyle. Last November, I announced that I would be starting an online descriptive bibliography of Hoyle. This post highlights the progress I have made, both with content, and with the supporting technology.

Underlying Approach

The bibliography nears a major milestone. I have completed descriptions of all but a handful of the 18th century editions of Hoyle, the task I had originally contemplated. Inevitably, my scope has expanded, and I’m well into the 19th century. It is difficult to find a graceful stopping point. In addition to the content, the bibliography is a significant and apparently unique effort in the digital humanities. So far I have created 170 bibliographical descriptions, storing each in a file for validation, processing, and display. The programming effort has been substantial and is ongoing, but continues to pay for itself many times over. This blog essay discusses the technology I have developed in the course of compiling the Hoyle bibliography.

My primary goal was to create bibliographical descriptions of the books that could be presented in multiple ways—initially as a web site and then in a word processing document leading to print publication. I expect that others will be able to extract data programmatically from my descriptions if  desired—perhaps a library wishes to update its catalogue or a collector wishes to build a checklist. This goal, one data source with multiple presentations, dictated storing the descriptions in a highly-structured way.

A second goal was to avoid errors and inconsistencies in bibliographical descriptions and their presentation. As to the descriptions, collation formulas and pagination statements should total to the same number of leaves. Deletions and signing errors should refer to leaves actually in the collation formula. Signature references and page references should point to the same page. I have seen each of these errors in printed bibliographies—mistakes are inevitable. Formatting is equally error prone. Fredson Bowers’ Principles of Bibliographical Description is the standard for descriptive bibliography, including the collation formula and pagination statement. Bowers requires dexterous use of brackets, italics, commas, semicolons, superscripts and subscripts. Proofreading is hardly...foolproof. It seemed as though there should be better solutions.

The desire to avoid errors led to the same design decision suggested earlier, highly structured data. Following other digital humanities projects, particularly TEI (about which more below), I chose XML as an underlying technology. A brief excerpt from one of my book descriptions will show how structured XML data can reduce error. Consider Whist.3 (my description is online here), which has one of the simpler collation formulas:

12^o: A–D¹² E⁴ [$½ (-A2,B2) signed; missigning B4 as B5]; 52 leaves, pp. [8] [1] 2–96

The data used to produce the collation formula is:

        <collation>
            <format>12</format>
            <collationFormula>
                <gatherings>
                    <gatheringRange signed="true">
                        <sigStart>A</sigStart>
                        <sigEnd>D</sigEnd>
                        <leaves>12</leaves>
                    </gatheringRange>
                    <gatheringRange signed="true">
                        <sigStart>E</sigStart>
                        <leaves>4</leaves>
                    </gatheringRange>
                </gatherings>
                <signatureLeaves>$½</signatureLeaves>
                <anomSignatures>
                    <anomSignature>
                        <anomType>-</anomType>
                        <sigRef>A2</sigRef>
                    </anomSignature>
                    <anomSignature>
                        <anomType>-</anomType>
                        <sigRef>B2</sigRef>
                    </anomSignature>
                </anomSignatures>
                <signingErrors>
                    <signingError>
                        <sigRef>B4</sigRef>
                        <badSig>B5</badSig>
                    </signingError>
                </signingErrors>
            </collationFormula>
            <totalLeaves>52</totalLeaves>
            <pagination>
                <pageRanges>
                    <pageRange numbered="false" range="true">
                        <start>8</start>
                    </pageRange>
                    <pageRange numbered="false">
                        <start>1</start>
                    </pageRange>
                    <pageRange numbered="true">
                        <start>2</start>
                        <end>96</end>
                    </pageRange>
                </pageRanges>
            </pagination>
        </collation>

XML is a hierarchical structure: elements have values (the book's format is 12, a duodecimo) and attributes have values (page 1 is unnumbered, pages 2-96 are). Everything is text and therefore readable by humans, particularly when indented in an outline form that reveals the structure. In the example above, the collation consists of format, collation formula, total leaves, and pagination. The collation formula consists of gatherings, signature leaves (indicating normal signing), and anomalous signatures. Each gathering range within the gatherings has a starting signature (sigStart), an optional ending signature, and a number of leaves. A gathering range may be signed or unsigned. The pagination section is similar. More complicated books will use other optional elements.

How does this encoding help avoid error? First, the data it is validated against an XML schema I created. The schema is formal description of the rules for describing a book. The schema requires elements such as collation, collation formula, signature leaves, etc. The element anomalous signatures is optional, as are elements for signing errors, duplicated signatures, doubled alphabets, insertions, deletions, and free form notes. Failure to include a required element or inclusion of an unexpected element will generate an error.

Moreover, the XML schema restricts each element as to allowed types values. For example format is limited to a small set of values such as 8 for octavo, 12 for duodecimo, etc. Entering 13 into the format field will generate an error. The schema is rather complex, but does an admirable job of preventing errors.

One might expect that all of the tags, required structure, and rules for allowed values would add substantial effort when inputting data. Indeed the above snippet of XML for Whist.3 is much more verbose than the collation formula. Surprisingly, there is much less data entry. Much less. Modern tools will read the required structure contained in the XML schema, insert most of the tags, and suggest allowed values for the data. Most of the typing is done for you. And as we shall see below, you don’t have to worry about brackets, italics, superscripts and the like—that is handled elsewhere.

Once the data is structured and individual elements are known to have valid values, it is possible to check them for internal consistency. For example, I have written a program to read the collation formula statement, count the number of leaves it implies, and compare it with the element signature leaves, flagging any discrepancy as an error. Similarly, the pagination statement implies a total number of pages that is expected to be twice the number of leaves. In the example above, there are four gatherings of 12 leaves and one of 4, totaling 52 leaves and 104 pages. Check.

Much more validation is possible. For example, I give references in terms of both signature and page, such as A5v–E4r (2–95) for a range or E4v (96) for a page. Once we are certain that the collation formula and pagination statements are consistent, we know the page number for each leaf. I was able to write a program that verifies that leaf A5v is page 2, E4r is page 95, and E4v is page 96. It is no exaggeration to say that the program has detected hundreds of errors. Perhaps thousands. By entering both the signature and page reference, I have to make two errors that are consistent with one another before mistakes of reference appear in the bibliography.

I only wish there were a similar way to validate quasi-facsimile transcription!

XML works with another language called XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) to render XML in other formats such as text or HTML. It is an XSLT stylesheet that transforms the collation as expressed in XML into Bowers format. All the “knowledge” of Bowers' rules is in one program. As a result, when entering the collation for a book, I do not have to type brackets, italics, or superscripts—a major time saving for data entry.

An amusing example demonstrates the strength of the approach. At Rare Book School, I learned to describe signing errors by saying “missigning B4 as B5”. Bowers prefers “misprinting B4 as B5” and has no objection to quoting the erroneous signature, writing “misprinting B4 as ‘B5’”. (See Bowers p270). Regardless of which is preferred, I can change the output for all 170 book descriptions by making a minor change to one XSLT stylesheet and not all 170 descriptions. Neat!

A third goal was to automate the production of indices for the bibliography. The top-level index classifies works as (a) separate works; (b) publishers’ collections of works published separately; and (c) collected editions. It is produced programmatically. Other programs produce other indices:

• An index of short titles and short imprints
• A chronological list of all editions and issues
• A list of games and subjects treated in Hoyle with a chronological list of books for each game or subject
• An index by publisher or printer
• A list of institutions holding copies of Hoyle (see here, for example, for libraries in the British Isles) and the books held at a given library (for example, the Bodleian, which has the largest collection of Hoyles in the world)
• Lists of Hoyles in each of the standard gaming bibliographies, such as Horr, Jessel, and Rather and Goldwater.

Each time I add a new bibliographical description, I can regenerate all of the indices and indeed the entire website by running one program.

The final goal is perhaps the most ambitious—to develop a platform that other bibliographers can use. I have no intention of turning the technology into a commercial product, and have built it with laser-like focus on my needs rather than as a general solution to bibliographical description.  I would expect, however, that hobbyist programmers familiar with the technologies I used should have little difficulty extending it to their needs. I would be eager to hear from anyone who is interested.

Afterword: A Note on Technology

I initially explored the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as a way to encode book descriptions. I found that, as the name suggests, the standards were focused on encoding text and other contents, rather than encoding characteristics of the physical book. A TEI Work Group on physical bibliography made a good start at encoding a collation statement, but their work did not proceed to completion and did not become part of a TEI release.  I used theirs as a starting point for my own work. 

I am using early and well-supported versions of products in the XML suite: XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, and XSLT 1.0 (including XPath 1.0). While there are some attractions to using later versions, they are not always supported by browsers, and I wanted the web version to work with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari, not all of which support more recent versions of XSLT and XPath.

I use oXygen XML Editor 17 as an XML development environment. It is an awesome tool and I fear that I am only using a fraction of its capabilities.

Where I need to insure consistency of the book descriptions beyond what XML Schema provides, I write programs in Python 3.4. Python also creates the various indices I described earlier. Python is a general purpose programming language that excels in handling text and has excellent libraries for reading and writing XML files.

More from the database: another bad seller

In may last essay, I described the database I had built with many sources of information about the Hoyle copyright. In the past couple of weeks, I have been loading more newspaper advertisements into the database. Rerunning the reports I shared earlier, I have a new example of a Hoyle that remained in print for a long time. Well, sort of a Hoyle...

The book is Dew's Treatise on Billiards (Jones.2-1), published in 1779. There is not a word of Hoyle's in it, but it must be considered in a discussion of the publishing history of Hoyle. As I discuss in "The most important Hoyle after Hoyle", the 1779 Charles Jones book Hoyle's Game Improved, incorporated a number of other gaming works--William Payne's works on whist and draughts (checkers) and Dew's on billiards.

In "A Research Trip to Cleveland" there is a section on challenges for the Hoyle bibliographer. There I note books written by Hoyle that appear without attribution and books attributed to Hoyle that he or his publishers had nothing to do with. Dew's book represents a third case: it was printed at the same time as Hoyle's Games Improved from the same setting of type used for its appearance there. Perhaps you can imagine the printer saving the pages of type after printing HGI, changing the page numbers and adding a new title page for Dew. Because it is the same setting of type, the separate treatise is bibliographically part of the same edition of HGI, but is a separate issue. It is part of the same business venture and must be treated in a Hoyle bibliography.

As to their reception, HGI sold reasonably well, with the next edition appearing in 1786, seven years later. Dew's treatise was nowhere near as popular. It was never reprinted excepted as part of the Jones Hoyle and advertisements can be found as late as 1794, staying in print for 15 years.

Update December 21, 2014:

Make that 17 years! I just noticed a footnote in the 1796 edition of the Hoyle's Games Improved (p232) "[The Dew] treatise may be had separate, price 1s."

A database for the Hoyle copyright

I'll return shortly with the sequel to "What was the Hoyle Copyright Worth? (part one)." Perhaps this essay will make clear the reasons for the delay.

In "Researching Copyright" I discussed the many tools I used for learning who owned shares in the Hoyle copyright. They were the Stationers book of registry, imprints, publisher's records, bookseller trade sales, receipts, and newspaper advertisements. I have many examples of all of these for Hoyle, including more than 500 newspaper advertisements for 18th and 19th century Hoyles. I tend to have PDF files of the various sources reasonably well organized on my computer. To compile and analyze the data, I rely on dozens of Word documents and Excel files. As the data have become more numerous, it has been harder and harder to keep the Word and Excel files in sync.

I have been contemplating putting everything in a database for a long time and finally started a couple of days ago. I built a database to manage the copyright data: books, booksellers, imprints, advertisements, and more. For the technically minded, I built the database in sqlite3 and use python where extra processing is required. It took about 25 hours to get something useful and I'm pretty pleased with what I can do. Here are a few examples of questions I can now easily answer:

From the 1740s until the 1860s, many booksellers bought and sold pieces of the Hoyle copyright. Which booksellers held pieces for the longest time?

bookseller  from_date   to_date     years     
----------  ----------  ----------  ----------
Baldwin     1755-12-24  1835-05-27  80        
Longman     1800-05-15  1868-07-09  68        
Lowndes     1771-11-12  1821-01-02  50        
Wilkie      1767-12-12  1814-01-11  47        
Newbery     1771-11-12  1800-05-15  29        
Crowder     1757-12-22  1785-12-08  28        
Mawman      1800-05-15  1826-03-26  26        
Bladon      1771-11-12  1796-03-05  25        
Payne       1779-11-13  1804-05-12  25        
Scatcherd   1796-03-05  1821-01-02  25        
Stewart     1796-03-05  1820-02-18  24        
Osborne     1745-10-26  1767-12-12  22        
Law         1775-06-09  1796-03-05  21

The Baldwin firm comes out on top, ahead of Longman, Lowndes, and Wilkie.

Of course these were not individuals, but families or firms who held the copyright for the better part of a century. One can see the evolving names in imprints and advertisements:

from_date   to_date     first_name    last_name     suffix                             
----------  ----------  ------------  ------------  -----------------------------------
1757-01-01  1767-12-12  Richard       Baldwin                                          
1771-11-12  1813-12-24  R.            Baldwin                                          
1820-02-01  1826-03-26                Baldwin       Cradock, and Joy                   
1835-05-27  1835-05-27                Baldwin       and Cradock                        
1800-05-15  1803-08-03                Longman       and Rees                           
1808-05-24  1808-05-24                Longman       Hurst, Rees and Orme               
1813-12-24  1820-02-01                Longman       Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown        
1826-03-26  1826-03-26                Longman       Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Co.         
1835-05-27  1835-05-27                Longman       Rees, and Co.                      
1842-03-02  1842-03-02                Longman       Brown, & Co.                       
1847-03-03  1868-07-09                Longman       and Co.                            
1771-11-12  1779-11-13  T.            Lowndes                                          
1785-12-08  1820-02-01  W.            Lowndes                                          
1771-11-12  1779-11-13  J.            Wilkie                                           
1785-12-08  1796-03-05  G. and T.     Wilkie                                           
1800-05-15  1803-08-03  G.            Wilkie                                           
1808-05-24  1813-12-24                Wilkie        and Robinson                                

It would be possible to research the history of these booksellers in the British Book Trade Index to see if what I'm seeing for the Hoyles accurately reflects deaths, and successions.

I've written elsewhere about the 1774 case of Donaldson v. Beckett, eliminating the common law perpetual copyright in England. Who owned a share of the Hoyle copyright before that decision?

Booksellers with a share in the Hoyle copyright

For a number of reasons this report was hard to produce--it took some help with python. Note the disposition of Thomas Osborne's share with his death in 1767 and the proliferation of owners shortly thereafter. The report is even more interesting when it is extended in time, but that would be hard to display here.

Another question: Which book stayed in print the longest? I looked for books which were advertised the longest after publication date. The results are preliminary, as I've entered only a subset of advertisements in the database, but even the early results are interesting:

book                  publish_dt  advert_dt   years     
--------------------  ----------  ----------  ----------
1745 Laws of Whist    1745-10-26  1751-11-12  6         
1750 Osborne 10       1749-10-21  1755-12-24  6         
1761 Chess            1760-12-30  1766-01-08  6         
1761 Chances          1760-12-24  1764-01-18  4         
1800 Jones Direction  1800-05-15  1804-05-12  4         
        

Remarkably, most of the Hoyles were in print three years or less. The exceptions are worth more research and more discussion.

I identified The Laws of Whist and Directions for Breeding Game Cocks as poor sellers from another source, catalogues from bookseller trade sales. In the essay "The (missing) Laws of Whist Designed for Framing" I noted that the Osborne sale of 1767 offered 325 copies of the Laws more than twenty years after it was published. See the discussion below for further evidence of the slow sales of the Laws. Similarly in "Hoyle's Games Improved, Charles Jones (1800)" I noted there that Directions was a poor seller, with bookseller Wilkie's remaining stock going unsold at an 1814 bookseller's trade sale. It is comforting to note that trade sale catalogues and newspaper advertisements tell the same story.

[Aside: In my research I have focused on the trade sales primarily for sales of the Hoyle copyright, and have not searched exhaustively for the much more frequent sales of books unless copyrights were offered at the same sale. I'm only beginning to appreciate how much could be learned from this unimaginably time-consuming effort. That work would disclose more examples of poor sellers and could also help estimate print runs. For an example, consider the "eleventh" edition of Hoyle's Games. Six months after it was published, 350 copies were offered at the Hodges trade sale. As Hodges had owned a one-third share, the print run was likely 1250 or 1500 copies. See The Hoyle Copyright in Hoyle's lifetime."]

The database helps another way: in the essay on Hoyle's Games Improved, I speculated that the price for Directions might have been a shilling or two. In fact, advertisements shows it sold for sixpence, something that if I noticed before, I had not recorded on the right spreadsheet.

The appearance of the "10th" edition of Hoyle's Games on the list does not tell the full story. In fact the "10th edition" is a reissue of the "8th" edition dating back to 1748. See "Reissues of Mr. Hoyle's Treatises (1748-1755)." I have not yet done the work to connect multiple issues when they are the same edition (and indeed, it can be difficult to tell which issue is being advertised). I've often wondered whether Osborne overestimated the demand when he had the "8th" edition printed, or whether there was standing type and multiple impressions were made.

Interestingly, Chess and Doctrine of Chances do not appear to have been great sellers. For more on the latter, see this essay.

A last example: What books were advertised at more than one price? Here, I would expect to find situations where the booksellers were forced to lower prices.

book                  CNT                 
--------------------  -----
1745 Laws of Whist    2                   
1751 Laws of Brag     2                   
1757 Osborne 11       2                   

Three books where advertised at multiple prices. Checking the specific advertisements, I find:

date        paper                 book                  s.   d.
----------  --------------------  --------------------  ---  ---
1745-10-26  London Evening Post   1745 Laws of Whist    1    0      
1746-01-14  London Evening Post   1745 Laws of Whist    1    0      
1747-11-07  London Evening Post   1745 Laws of Whist    1    0      
1748-03-05  Whitehall Evening Pos 1745 Laws of Whist    0    6      
1748-04-30  London Evening Post   1745 Laws of Whist    0    6      
1751-11-12  London Evening Post   1745 Laws of Whist    0    6      
1751-01-22  General Advertiser    1751 Laws of Brag     2    6      
1751-01-25  General Advertiser    1751 Laws of Brag     2    6      
1751-02-28  Whitehall Evening Pos 1751 Laws of Brag     1    0      
1756-12-21  London Evening Post   1757 Osborne 11       3    0      
1757-06-10  Public Advertiser     1757 Osborne 11       3    0      
1757-12-22  Public Advertiser     1757 Osborne 11       3    6      
1757-12-24  Public Advertiser     1757 Osborne 11       3    0      
1757-12-27  Public Advertiser     1757 Osborne 11       3    0      
1760-01-03  Public Advertiser     1757 Osborne 11       3    0         

As I observed earlier, the Laws of Whist did not sell well, and Osborne lowered the price from a shilling to sixpence in 1748. Jolliffe had the same problem with the Laws of Brag, lowering the price from two shillings sixpence to a shilling almost immediately. Brag itself likely had the same problems, but I only have inferential evidence of its price. As far as the "eleventh" edition of Hoyle's Games, apparently the printer made an error in setting the December 22 advertisement.

I have a lot more data entry to do, primarily advertisements and trade sale data. Once I do that, I'll be ready to do a better job of  part 2 of "What was the Hoyle copyright worth?"

Well, I'm enjoying my new toy. What other questions should I be asking?