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Book Madness
Charles Lamb. Engraved from a drawing by Daniel Maclise in
Fraser’s Magazine (February 1835). Author’s Collection.
Book Madness
A Story of Book Collectors in America
Denise Gigante
new haven and london

Copyright © 2022 by Denise Gigante.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
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Set in Fournier type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.

Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941424

isbn 978-0-300-24848-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I like books about books.
—C H ARL E S LAM B, May 16, 1820
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Dramatis Personae ix
Prologue 1
1. Bookmen Across the Atlantic:
Charles Lamb’s Books on Broadway 12
2. The Literary World: Publishers, Editors,
Journalists 66
3. New York Shakespeareans: Bardomania,
Testimonials, and Gift Exchange 117
4. Boston Antiquarians: American History,
Bibliography, and Bibliomania 174
5. Educating America: The Dream of a
Great Public Library 226
Epilogue 280
List of Abbreviations 293
Notes 297
Acknowledgments 361
Index 363
Dramatis Personae
Protagonists; Being Buyers of Books

from Charles Lamb’s Library Sold in New York in 1848
James T. Annan (d. c. 1859): Scottish bibliomaniac living in Cincinnati
Robert Balmanno (1780–1861): British expatriate and bardomaniac living in
Brooklyn; secretary of the American Shakespeare Society of New York;
former secretary of the Society of Noviomagus
Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882): American Unitarian minister; former
student of the Round Hill School, Northampton, Massachusetts
Charles Astor Bristed (1820–1874): American man of letters (essayist, critic,
reviewer); grandson of John Jacob Astor
William Evans Burton (1804–1860): British expatriate actor, theater manager,
literary editor and author, bardomaniac; founder of the Chambers Street
Theatre; president of the American Shakespeare Society of New York
Benjamin Casseday (d. c. 1862): American historian of Louisville, Kentucky
Joseph Green Cogswell (1786–1871): American bibliographer; librarian of Har
vard College (1821–1823); founder of the Round Hill School, Northampton,
Massachusetts; first superintendent of the Astor Library, New York
Thomas Jefferson Conant (1802–1891): American biblical scholar and professor
at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, New York
Charles Deane (1813–1889): American antiquarian with a focus on colonial New
England; bibliomaniac living in Boston
George Long Duyckinck (1823–1868): American man of letters; co-editor (with
his brother Evert Augustus Duyckinck) of the Literary World and the
Cyclopædia of American Literature
George Folsom (1802–1869): American historian, book collector, and diplomat;
served as librarian of the New-York Historical Society
ix
x dramatis personae
William Alfred Jones (1817–1900): American essayist, friend of the Duyckinck

brothers
George Livermore (1809–1865): American antiquarian, bibliomaniac, and Bible
scholar living in Cambridge, Massachusetts; “the Antiquary” (nom de plume)
George Loder (1816–1868): Expatriate British composer, colleague of William
Evans Burton at the Chambers Street Theatre, New York
George Henry Moore (1810–1870): Antiquarian and assistant librarian of the
New-York Historical Society
Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908): American man of letters from Cambridge,
Massachusetts; treasurer of the Washington Library Committee
George Templeton Strong (1820–1875): Diarist, bibliomaniac, and attorney
living in New York
Prosper Montgomery Wetmore (1798–1876): Merchant and man of letters
(poet, patron, reviewer) in New York
Horatio Woodman (1821–1879): Founder of the Saturday Club in Boston;
attorney; editor of the Boston Evening Transcript
The Reverend Alexander Young (1800–1854): Unitarian minister, book
collector, and antiquarian in Boston; historian of colonial New England
and editor of the Library of the Old English Prose Writers (book series)
Major Actors
Daniel Appleton (1785–1849): Leading bookseller and publisher in New York
John Jacob Astor (1763–1848): German-born real estate tycoon; founder of the
Astor House hotel and the Astor Library, New York
Mary Balmanno (1802–1875): Expatriate British artist and poet; wife of Robert
Balmanno
John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886): American antiquarian, bookseller, publisher,
editor, bibliographer, ethnographer, and U.S. boundary commissioner
Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854): Irish antiquary living in London
Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847): English bibliographer; founder of the
Roxburghe Club and the “father of bibliomania”
Thomas Dowse (1772–1856): American book collector and bibliophile; the
“Learned Leather Dresser” of Cambridge, Massachusetts
dramatis personae xi
Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816–1878): American man of letters (essayist and

editor); founder of the Literary World and of the book series Library of
Choice Reading and Library of American Books; founder and co-editor of
the literary journal Arcturus and the Cyclopædia of American Literature;
essayist under the nom de plume “Felix Merry”
James T. Fields (1817–1881): Boston publisher, editor, bookseller; sentimental
book collector; autographomaniac
Charles William Frederickson (1823–1897): American bibliomaniac and pioneer
of sentimental book collecting; second-generation protagonist
William C. Hall (1783–1863): Expatriate American bookseller living in London
Richard Heber (1773–1833): The English bibliomaniac par excellence
John Keese (1805–1856): American book auctioneer, editor, publisher, and wit,
New York
James Lenox (1800–1880): American bibliomaniac and founder of the Lenox
Library, a monument of Gilded Age New York
Dewitt Miller (1857–1911): American bibliomaniac and public lecturer; book
sleuth on the trail of Charles Lamb’s library
Ernest Dressel North (1858–1945): American bibliographer, editor, bookseller,
and collector with a specialty in Charles Lamb, New York
George Palmer Putnam (1814–1872): American publisher and bookseller;
business partner of John Wiley
Henry Hope Reed (1808–1854): American literary editor, lecturer, book
collector; professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania
Henry Stevens, Jr. (1819–1886): Bibliographer and antiquarian bookdealer from
Vermont who relocated to London; fourth-generation protagonist
Charles Welford (1815–1885): London-born bibliographer and antiquarian
bookdealer; business partner of John Russell Bartlett and later of Charles
Scribner; bibliographer (in the interim) for Bangs & Company
John Wiley (1808–1891): Bookseller and publisher in New York
Minor Actors
William Backhouse Astor (1792–1875): Real estate developer and philanthro-
pist; son of John Jacob Astor
xii d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e
George Bancroft (1800–1891): American historian; cofounder (with Joseph

Green Cogswell) of the Round Hill School, Northampton, Massachusetts
Lemuel Bangs (1809–1887): Leading book auctioneer in New York
John Carter Brown (1797–1874): American antiquarian and book collector
whose library is now part of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
James Ewing Cooley (1802–1882): American auctioneer and bookseller
Thomas Francis Dillon Croker (1831–1912): British antiquary; son of Thomas
Crofton Croker
Edward Augustus Crowninshield (1817–1859): American antiquarian and book
collector in Boston; third-generation protagonist
Albert Denison, 1st Baron of Londesborough (1805–1860): English antiquary;
member of the Society of Noviomagus
Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere (1800–1857): English Shakespearean
scholar and philanthropist; donor of the Chandos Shakespeare portrait to
the National Portrait Gallery, London
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882): American essayist, lecturer, and transcen-
dentalist philosopher
Edward Everett (1794–1865): American statesman, historian, bibliophile; presi-
dent of Harvard College; cofounder (with George Ticknor) of the Boston
Public Library
Charles Folsom (1794–1872): Librarian of Harvard College and later of the
Boston Athenæum
Peter Force (1790–1868): American antiquary, printer, and compiler and editor
of the American Archives in Washington, D.C.
Ogden Goelet (1851–1897): New York real estate tycoon, yachtsman; later-
generation protagonist
Horatio Hill (1807–1891): American printer and bookseller in New Hampshire,
Maine; auctioneer in New York City
Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–1884): Founder of the Knickerbocker and editor
of the Literary World in New York
William Thomas Hildrup Howe (1874–1939): Publisher, antiquarian book
collector, head of the American Book Company of Cincinnati; later-
generation protagonist
Washington Irving (1783–1859): American author; chair of the board of trustees
for the Astor Library; U.S. minister to Spain
dramatis personae xiii
Richard Charles Jackson (1851–1923): Eccentric English bibliomaniac who

assembled “Relics of Charles Lamb” and claimed to be the grandson of
Elia’s “Captain Jackson”
Abbott Lawrence (1792–1855): American diplomat, businessman, philanthro-
pist, and book collector
Jonathan Leavitt (1797–1852): New York publisher, bookseller, and binder;
brother-in-law of Daniel Appleton
Herman Melville (1819–1891): Author of Typee, Omoo, Moby-Dick
Andrews Norton (1786–1853): Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard
College; Harvard librarian; father of Charles Eliot Norton
Anthony Panizzi (born Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi; 1797–1879): Principal
librarian of the British Museum
Obadiah Rich (1777–1850): Expatriate American antiquarian bookseller in
London; specialist in American history
Horatio Rodd (1798–1858): London bookseller and dealer in antiquarian
relics
Charles Scribner (1821–1871): New York bookseller and publisher; founder of
Charles Scribner & Company and its subsidiary, Scribner & Welford
George Dallas Smith (1870–1920): New York bookdealer and third-generation
protagonist
Harry Bache Smith (1860–1936): American stage writer, composer, sentimental
book collector; fifth-generation protagonist
Jared Sparks (1789–1866): American historian; editor of the collected writings
of George Washington
Henry Stevens, Sr. (1791–1867): American antiquarian and book collector;
founder of the Vermont Historical Society
George Ticknor (1791–1871): American literary scholar; cofounder (with Edward
Everett) of the Boston Public Library; uncle of Charles Eliot Norton
Samuel Ward III (1786–1839): American investment banker; a founder of the
University of the City of New York (now New York University)
George Corbin Washington (1789–1854): Grandnephew of George Wash-
ington; seller of the books of the first U.S. president to Henry Stephens
Daniel Webster (1782–1852): U.S. secretary of state; U.S. congressman
Robert Charles Winthrop (1809–1894): President of Massachusetts Historical
Society
xiv d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e
The Lamb Circle

The Reverend Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844): Translator of Dante ’s Divine
Comedy into English; Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum;
author of Charles Lamb’s epitaph
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): Poet, philosopher, book borrower and
annotator
Mary Cowden Clarke (1809–1898): Author of The Complete Concordance to
Shakespeare; daughter of Vincent Novello; wife of Charles Cowden
Clarke; actress in Charles Dickens’s amateur acting company
William Hazlitt (1778–1830): English essayist, critic, and philosopher
Jane Hood (1791–1846): Oldest sister of the poet John Hamilton Reynolds; wife
of the poet Thomas Hood
Thomas Hood (1799–1845): Poet, wit, literary essayist, and editor
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859): Poet and literary essayist; periodical
founder, editor, and journalist; bibliophile and book collector
William Jerdan (1782–1869): British journalist and literary antiquary; editor of
the Literary Gazette in London
Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857): English literary journalist and play-
wright; wit and actor in Charles Dickens’s amateur acting company
Charles Lamb (1775–1834): Literary essayist best remembered for the essays of
“Elia” (nom de plume); poet, playwright, and wit; patron saint of book
collectors
John Lamb, Jr. (1763–1821): Elder brother of Charles and Mary Lamb; employee
at the South Sea House, London
Mary Ann Lamb (1864–1847): Elder sister of Charles Lamb and co-author (with
him) of Tales from Shakespeare
Edward Moxon (1801–1858): English publisher, bookseller, and poet; husband of
the Lambs’ adopted daughter, Emma Isola; sold Lamb’s library in 1847
Emma Isola Moxon (1809–1891): Adoptive daughter of Charles and Mary Lamb;
wife of Edward Moxon
Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867): Lawyer, diarist, and literary man about
town; founder of University College, London, and the Athenæum Club
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832): Scottish novelist, poet, literary antiquarian, and
bibliomaniac residing at Abbotsford, outside Edinburgh
dramatis personae xv
Robert Southey (1774–1843): Literary antiquarian, bibliomaniac, and British

Poet Laureate (1813–1843), residing in Keswick, Cumbria
Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854): Politician and literary journalist; executor
and editor of Charles Lamb
Thomas Westwood (1814–1888): Poet and neighbor of the Lambs in Enfield
William Wordsworth (1770–1850): British Poet Laureate (1843–1850) residing
in Rydal Mount, Ambleside, in the English Lake District
Book Actors; Being Among the Sixty Association Copies

from Charles Lamb’s Library Originally Sold in
New York in 1848, with Their Buyers
Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., The Guardian. Vol. 1 (London,
1750) and Vol. 2 (London, 1734). George Folsom.
Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., The Spectator. Vol. 9 of 9, 4th ed.
(London, 1724). Benjamin Casseday.
Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq. Vol. 1 of 2 (London, 1756).
George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead &
Company, Henry Bache Smith.
Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon’s Works (London, 1629). Horatio Woodman.
Nathaniel Bacon, Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira (London,
1681). James T. Annan, George L. Duyckinck.
Vincent Bourne, Poematia Latine Partim Reddita, Partim Scripta, 4th ed.
(London, 1750). The Reverend Alexander Young (?).
Samuel Butler, Hudibras (London, 1726). George Loder.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Nature’s Pictures, Drawn by
Fancies Pencil (London, 1656). Benjamin Casseday.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Works (London, 1664).
Prosper Montgomery Wetmore.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The World’s Olio (London,
1671). Thomas Jefferson Conant.
xvi d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet,
and Lidgate’s Story of Thebes, Speght’s Edition (London, 1598). James T.
Annan, William Evans Burton, Edward Augustus Crowninshield, Henry
Stevens, Jr., Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons.
John Cleveland, J. Cleaveland Revived: Poems, Orations, and Epistles, and
Other of His Genuine Incomparable Pieces, 12mo (London, 1668). Robert
Balmanno, William Thomas Hildrup Howe.
John Cleveland, Poems by John Cleavland (London, 1662). Robert
Balmanno, Ogden Goelet.
Philippe de Commines, The History of Philip de Commines, Knight, Lord
of Argenton (London, 1674). George Templeton Strong, Charles W.
Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Harry Bache Smith.
Abraham Cowley, The Works (London, 1693). Horatio Woodman.
John Dennis, Original Letters, Familiar, Moral, and Critical, 8vo
(London, 1726). James T. Annan, William Alfred Jones (?), Thomas
Pennant Barton (?).
John Donne, Poems, &c. by John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s (London,
1669). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead
& Company.
Michael Drayton, The Works (London, 1748). James T. Annan, Edward
Augustus Crowninshield, Henry Stevens, Jr., Charles W. Frederickson,
Harry Bache Smith.
Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, and Joseph Priestley, The
Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 8vo. George Livermore.
Euripides, Euripidis tragoediarum, trans. August Matthiae (Oxford, 1821).
Charles Eliot Norton.
Aulus Gellius. Noctes Atticæ (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1651). Charles Astor
Bristed.
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, Certaine Learned and Elegant Works
(London, 1633). Horatio Woodman.
Ben Jonson, The Works (London, 1692). George Templeton Strong,
Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons.
dramatis personae xvii
Minor Poets, bound quarto with fifteen tracts by Sir John Vanbrugh,
George Farquhar, Elkanah Settle, Andrew Marvell, Charles Cotton,
Peter Anthony Motteux, &c. James T. Annan, Joseph Green Cogswell.
Miscellaneous bound volume of tracts from the 1730s including Matthew
Green’s The Spleen (1737); William Benson’s Letters Concerning Poetical
Translations (1739); Jacob Hildebrand’s Of the Sister Arts (1734), &c.
Charles Eliot Norton.
Miscellanies, containing Antonio: A Tragedy by William Godwin;
Remorse: A Tragedy, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Antiquity: A Farce, by
Barron Field, A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham by John
Lamb; and a copy of Windham’s speech delivered in the House of
Commons on June 13, 1809. George Templeton Strong, Charles W.
Frederickson, Dodd, Mead & Company, Harry Bache Smith.
Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London,
1712). Charles Deane, Charles W. Frederickson.
Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (London,
1660). Charles Deane.
Henry More, Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul, &c.
(Cambridge, 1647). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson,
George Dallas Smith.
Old Plays. A Collection of twelve bound in one vol., 4to. James T.
Annan, George Henry Moore.
Francis Osborne, The Works (London, 1689). George Folsom.
John Petvin, Letters Concerning Mind. To Which Is Added, a Sketch of
Universal Arithmetic; Comprehending the Differential Calculus, and the
Doctrine of Fluxions (London, 1750). George Templeton Strong.
Poetical Tracts, including Poems by Charles Lloyd, 1795; Coleridge’s France,
Fears in Solitude, &c.; Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches, &c. bound in one
vol., 8vo. James T. Annan, Charles Eliot Norton.
Political Tracts, bound vol., 4to. George Templeton Strong, Charles
W. Frederickson.
Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (London, 1729). George
Livermore.
xviii d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e
Matthew Prior, Miscellaneous Works (London, 1740). Robert Balmanno,

Charles W. Frederickson.
John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against the Crying, &
Execrable Sinne of (Wilfull, & Premeditated) Murther (London, 1657).
George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
William Sewell, The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the
Christian People Called Quakers (London, 1722). Henry Whitney Bellows.
William Shakespeare, Poems, Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, &c.
(London, 1714). Robert Balmanno, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea. A Collection of All the Incomparable
Peeces (London, 1646). Horatio Woodman, Charles W. Frederickson,
Dodd, Mead & Company, Harry Bache Smith.
Jonathan Swift, Works, vol. 5 (Dublin, 1759). Robert Balmanno.
Thomas Tryon, The Knowledge of a Man’s Self the Surest Guide to the
True Worship of God (London, 1703). Charles Eliot Norton.
Edmund Waller, The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems (London, 1690).
Robert Balmanno.
The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets: Namely, Wentworth, Earl
of Roscommon; Charles, Earl of Dorset; Charles, Earl of Halifax; Sir
Samuel Garth; George Stepney, Esq.; William Walsh, Esq.; Thomas
Tickell, Esq. Vol. 1 of 2. (London, 1749). James T. Annan, Joseph Green
Cogswell.
Book Madness
Prologue
Now, Lamb . . . never much cared for collecting or collectors, properly

so-called. But collectors have long cared about Lamb—and about all
the paraphernalia of editions, prices, provenances, associations, and
auctions which happily yet surround his name and work.
—Wallace Nethery
We are not the first, and probably will not be the last, to follow the trail
of books from Charles Lamb’s library.1 Those old books have a perennial
fascination—even if, in themselves, they were not worth much. Lamb’s
friend Henry Crabb Robinson once remarked that Lamb had amassed “the
finest collection of shabby books” that he (and perhaps anyone else) had ever
seen.2 Across the Atlantic the prominent American man of letters Evert
Augustus Duyckinck could not have known about the “wizened old cobbler”
who helped Lamb repair his books, but he was right in suspecting, when he
saw them at a bookstore on Broadway, that a shoemaker had bound them.3
Despite their dilapidated appearance, however, those same books were the
relics of an author who wrote so memorably about his book collection that
he has become the patron saint of book collectors ever since. “Saint Charles,”
as William Makepeace Thackeray dubbed him, had a knack for making
readers fall in love with all the tattered and dog-eared volumes on his shelves.4
This story of book collectors in America, by focusing on the dispersal of
Charles Lamb’s library in New York in 1848, brings together and recalls to
life the leading figures from the transatlantic book world at midcentury, a
time when Americans were busy assembling libraries, public as well as
private, from masses of old books in circulation.
For American bibliophiles, Lamb provided the inspiration as well
as the language necessary to combat the idea that bookishness was an Old
1
2 prologue
World affectation incompatible with life in the New. It is telling that the
library sale catalogue of virtually every major American book collector in
the nineteenth century who owned books from Charles Lamb’s library—no
matter how vast or valuable the collection, no matter how deep in historical
time or how lavishly embellished with the arts of the bookbinder—appealed
to its audience by boasting of its association with Saint Charles. As a biblio-
phile motivated by his own tastes, Lamb was as little interested in setting
literary trends as in following them, immune (as he made clear in the voice of
“Elia,” his best-known essayistic personality) to reigning ideologies of what
a “gentleman’s library” ought or ought not to contain.5 And yet at the time
our story is set, Lamb was trendy. He was a model for book collectors of all
stripes in America.
To some degree, his popularity was owing to the fact that he was a
working man of letters: he served as a mouthpiece for all those whose week-
days were spent in the grind of economic survival but whose evenings and
fugitive hours were all spent with books. The category included merchant
scholars, midnight historians, scribbling civil servants, and attorneys who
preferred literature to the law. Lamb himself had clerked in the accounting
office of the British East India Company, then the ruling symbol of British
mercantile capitalism, and he well understood what it meant to be condemned
to “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood.”6 But as a literary essayist, most
memorably under the pen name “Elia,” he transformed his everyday experi-
ence in a way that profoundly touched many readers. On both sides of the
Atlantic working men of letters turned to literature, books, and other bookish
individuals as an escape from the disenchanted pragmatism of modernity, and
Lamb spoke to them from the midst of their own world in the voice of child-
hood enchantment. Among likeminded bibliophiles, there naturally arose
social and scripted communities in which books, like sturdy old cobblestones,
formed pathways between them. This is the rationale for grouping our protag-
onists together into clusters of shared affinities in the chapters that follow.
In the language of the book trade, the books from Charles Lamb’s
library have a special name: association copies. Unlike the pristine book in
its original wrappers prized by a certain kind of collector, an association
copy comes trailing clouds of glory through signs of previous ownership
and use. While any old book with a cracked skin and foxing (bibliographical
age spots) can bespeak the singularity of individual experience, standing out
against the anonymity of commodity culture, an association copy of a book
prologue 3
is one whose chronicle is of general interest because the people involved

in the life of the book are known to the public. Singed by smoke, soaked
with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of pictures, and bescribbled,
Lamb’s books bore—and still bear—all the marks of readerly engagement
that define a literary life. Once, in lending his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge
a pile of books that included a two-volume edition of Milton, Lamb warned,
“If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of
right Gloucester blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure a
stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that passage more espe-
cially: depend upon it, it contains good matter.”7 An association copy of a
book reflects the ever-changing world in the life of that book, and the older
it is, or the more signs of life it contains, the greater the potential for the
stories it can tell beyond the substance of its own textual content.
In his essay “On Reading Old Books” (1821), Lamb’s friend William
Hazlitt described the associations that can build up in the life of a book
through the experience of rereading. Each new reading—whether cursory or
profound, solitary or communal—constitutes a singular event with sensory
and mental associations. It recalls “the same feelings and associations” which
one had in first encountering the book, and which one can never have again
in any other way. Those associations connect through memory and, as the
cognitive theory of association would have it, work to define who we are. Old
books thereby become, according to Hazlitt, “links in the chain of our
conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our
personal identity. They are land-marks and guides in our journey through
life.” In rereading, “not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work
brought back to my mind in all their vividness; but the old associations of the
faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their life-time—
the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of
the air, the fields, the sky—return, and all my early impressions with them.”
Hazlitt’s essay was published in the London Magazine where Elia’s essays were
then appearing. Around the same time, a writer in the New Monthly Magazine,
sitting down before some old books in the library of the British Museum,
imagined that he could “clearly perceive the fluid, which, according to the
Cartesian doctrine, conveys the impressions from the page to the brain. From
some of the volumes, which I discovered to be the old and the black letter, it
arose, rich like incense, exhilarating the features and enlivening the eye; every
thought that it communicated seemed to generate associations ad infinitum.”8
4 prologue
As a book moves through the world, moreover, passing from one indi-
vidual to another, it can prompt more thoughts and memories—as well as
commentaries, confessions, self-reflections, poetry, pictures, and other
responses, which can in turn trigger further associations. In the nineteenth
century, association copies also had the peculiar quality of connecting one
person to another, forging chains of relation that resulted in clubs, memo-
rials, testimonials, publications, and monuments.9 The Scottish essayist John
Hill Burton found that associations formed through books at this time
reshaped the very nature of human subjectivity: “He, the man—to himself
the ego, and to others the mere homo—ceased to revolve around the center of
gravity of his own personality, and, following the instincts of his adhesive
nature, resolved himself into an associative community.”10 The key point to
keep in mind is that an association copy of a book is something that connects.
It connects the past to the present, the material to the immaterial, and the
experiential to the imagined. Charles Lamb’s library was a living nexus of
association, and its dispersal in New York in 1848 offers a unique opportu-
nity to explore different pockets of book collecting in midcentury America.
We offer this story of book collectors in America as a narrative experiment
in associational literary history that views literature (in the manner of the
bibliophiles who comprise it) as a lived phenomenon.
To be sure, 1848 was a watershed year on both sides of the Atlantic.
The California Gold Rush began in January, luring thousands of Easterners
and European immigrants across the continent to fantasies of wealth in the
West. The following month, the Mexican-American War ended, initiating a
renegotiation of the southern border of the United States. John Russell
Bartlett, a partner in the bookstore that dispersed Lamb’s library, left his life
as a bookseller and publisher and headed to El Paso, Texas, in his new role as
the U.S. boundary commissioner. As these events were transpiring, political
upheaval was tearing through the European continent. The February Revo-
lution of 1848 began in Paris, where the last French king, Louis-Philippe,
was chased from his throne. The seizure of the royal palace by revolution-
aries triggered rebellion in other European states against unconstitutional
forms of government—in Vienna, Berlin, Bavaria, The Hague, Warsaw,
Naples, Copenhagen, and elsewhere.
More than one of our protagonists were in Paris at the time of revolu-
tion. The Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows recognized what was at
stake in the event that would forever change the face of Europe: “Revolution
prologue 5
in France, riots in England, ominous heaving around ancient volcanoes in

Italy and Sicily—all Europe trembling and darkened at the shadow of what is
to come—absolutism and freedom, after portentously eyeing each other
from afar and some preliminary playing with petty passing at each other,
getting now close together and terribly measuring their swords.”11 George
Long Duyckinck, who would become a prominent American man of letters
like his brother Evert, was also in Paris, watching many of his countrymen
duck for cover, including the bibliographer Charles Welford, business partner
of John Russell Bartlett. Welford, who had acquired Lamb’s book collection
in London and shipped it to New York, was working out of a Parisian college
basement as those books were being sold in February 1848.
Charles Eliot Norton, another collector and protagonist of this story,
was walking up State Street from Boston Harbor on March 18 when he heard
the paperboys crying the news of revolution. “Nothing could have been
more unexpected than such news,” he thought, as he ran with a copy of the
Daily Evening Traveller to his uncle George Ticknor, finding him “in his
delightful library,” and, he noted, “his astonishment was great, for . . . there
had been no forecast of the overthrow of Louis Philippe.”12 That same day
Evert Duyckinck was walking down Broadway in Manhattan, thinking of his
younger brother in Paris. He wrote to George that in New York the revolu-
tion was “a thing of excitement . . . having imparted to every one that
vivacity of eye, quickness of intelligence and general exhilaration which
great public events extend to private ones.”13 The American librarian Joseph
Green Cogswell sailed in the opposite direction as the news, hoping to take
advantage of the distracted state of affairs in Europe to buy books cheaply
for the Astor Library, the country’s first major public library.
Against this backdrop of political and social turmoil, our story of book
collectors in America takes place. It begins with the booksellers who, in ship-
ping books across the Atlantic, risked lives and fortunes in a business where it
has always been difficult to make money. We’ll see Bartlett and Welford open
a bookstore on the ground floor of the Astor House on Broadway, where they
dispersed the last sixty association copies that remained in Charles Lamb’s
library at the time his sister, Mary Ann Lamb, died in 1847. The story shifts
back in time to the years leading up to Charles’s own death in 1834, as Charles
and Mary dragged their old books (and a favorite childhood bookcase)
around from one house to another, accumulating more books, friends, and
associations along the way. We’ll meet the Lambs’ adopted daughter, Emma
6 prologue
Isola, who married the English publisher and poet Edward Moxon. Moxon’s
prestigious publishing career began with Charles Lamb’s Album Verses in
1830. Fourteen years later he scandalized his countrymen by letting Elia’s
books go to New York. In October 1848, after those books had been sold in
the Astor House, roughly a third of the collection was resold by the auction-
eers Cooley, Keese & Hill, located a few doors down from the Astor House.
Thus the last relics of the quintessential book lover’s library were scattered.
New York City by 1848 had become the book capital of the United
States and gave rise to an emergent class of literary professionals—editors,
publishers, journalists—to whom our story turns. That same year the Duyck-
inck brothers, Evert Augustus and George Long, sons of one of the longest-
established printers in the city, together purchased the Literary World, a
biweekly paper founded by Evert, and began transforming it into a premier
organ of tastemaking in the transatlantic world of letters. Evert also edited
the “Library of Choice Reading,” a series of reprinted European books, for
the publishers John Wiley and George Palmer Putnam, which included works
by Charles Lamb and his fellow English essayists Leigh Hunt and William
Hazlitt. The motto he chose for the series (“Books That Are Books”) alluded
to Elia’s “books which are no books—biblia a-biblia” in Lamb’s well-known
essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822). Professor Henry
Hope Reed of the University of Pennsylvania had agreed to edit “The
Coleridge Miscellany” for the Library of Choice Reading, and Reed recog-
nized the “magic power” of Elia’s books to forge connections when Evert sent
him Coleridge’s marginal notes on those books to include in the anthology.14
Coleridge, who coined the term marginalia, was himself the genre’s undis-
puted master, and he left enough commentary in the books he borrowed from
Lamb’s library to make the literary world of New York sit up and take note.
Our protagonist George Templeton Strong, who snapped up all of Elia’s
volumes from the store of Bartlett & Welford with notes by Coleridge, gave
Evert permission to publish those notes, which Evert eventually did in the
Literary World, by which means they returned to London.
New York was then not only the book capital but also the theatrical
capital of the country and the city was home to a robust society of literary
antiquarians whose interests centered on Shakespeare. The bardomania
(as we shall call this species of bibliomania) involved not only old books
and manuscripts but old rings, old goblets, old gloves, old glass panels, old
oak tiles, and other Shakespeareana. The most prominent American
prologue 7
bardomaniac, the English expatriate William Evans Burton—actor, theater

manager, and first president of the American Shakespeare Society of New
York—built a three-story Temple to Shakespeare behind his home in down-
town Manhattan to house his old books and relics. His friend Robert
Balmanno, another protagonist and secretary of the American Shakespeare
Society, obtained the only book by Shakespeare remaining in Lamb’s library
by the time it arrived in New York. These men were “amateurs” who moved
in a world of testimonials, transatlantic gift exchange, and extra-illustration,
the final stage of the book disease. Through Balmanno, we’ll meet the Irish
antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker, who discovered Shakespeare’s betrothal
ring in 1848, and Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, who acquired the
famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare in 1848 and donated it to the British
government to become the first painting in the National Portrait Gallery.
From the bustling streets of New York, the story shifts to the shady
tranquillity of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where another pocket of literary
antiquarians were busy gathering bibliographical relics at midcentury. Rather
than the English bard, the Boston antiquarians were focused on the early
colonial history of America, particularly New England. The Massachusetts
Historical Society was the hub connecting them to one another and to other
historical societies springing up throughout the United States in the 1840s.
Among them was Charles Deane, a bibliomaniac who scattered memoranda
of his historical research on loose slips of paper throughout the ten thousand
volumes of his library; George Livermore, a biblical bibliomaniac who
published under the pseudonym “the Antiquary”; and their mutual friends
Alexander Young and Edward Augustus Crowninshield, also antiquaries
with an interest in American history. We ’ll see Deane and Livermore engage
in a debate about an obscure point in the New England Primer that almost
turned bloody, and we ’ll follow Livermore to London in 1845 to meet
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the father of British bibliomania. While in
England, Livermore visited the princely library of George John Spencer,
2nd Earl Spencer, at Althorp, Northamptonshire. There, with his arm resting
on the most expensive book in the world, Livermore wrote a letter home to
a friend, a gesture that will introduce us to one of the most unusual biblio-
philes of our story: Thomas Dowse, the “Learned Leather Dresser” of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, who contributed to the contemporary book
world in more ways than one. For while the sheepskins he cured and tanned
became the fine bindings that graced the shelves of learned society, his own
8 prologue
private library became the centerpiece of the nation’s oldest historical society,
the Dowse Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a lasting monu-
ment to self-culture.
While the greater part of the story explores the culture of private
collecting in America, it is also true that on both sides of the Atlantic at
midcentury the public library movement was gaining steam. Two of our
protagonists, Henry Stevens, Jr., and Joseph Green Cogswell, were major
figures in the development of public libraries in America. In the spring of
1848, Stevens addressed the Library Committee of the British House of
Commons about the many different types of libraries serving the public in
the United States, from mercantile libraries to subscription libraries to
lyceum and athenaeum libraries to the Library of Congress. His own relent-
less work as a bibliographer and bookdealer did much to stock those libraries.
With funds bequeathed by the real estate tycoon John Jacob Astor on April
15, 1848, Cogswell focused his efforts on acquiring books for the Astor
Library, the forerunner of the New York Public Library. His work inspired
his friends in Boston, George Ticknor and Edward Everett, to establish the
Boston Public Library that same year as the nation’s first major public library
with circulating books. Around the same time, Stevens made the most spec-
tacular purchase of his career: the association copies from George Washing-
ton’s library in Mount Vernon. When he announced his intention of selling
them to the British Museum, he roused the fighting spirits of a group of
Boston bibliophiles, including George Livermore and Charles Eliot Norton,
who worked to keep the library of the leader of the American Revolution in
the city where that revolution began. Today it resides in the Boston
Athenæum as another monument of self-culture.
Our story finds its end by way of its beginning in the epilogue. Spurred
by the sale of Charles W. Frederickson’s sentimental library in New York in
1897, the American bibliomaniac Dewitt Miller began tracking down all the
books from Charles Lamb’s library in America. The bibliomaniacal Freder-
ickson, while still a young man, had visited the store of Bartlett & Welford in
the Astor House and seen the books from Charles Lamb’s library. Although
his working wages as a printer did not allow him to buy any, he vowed that
someday he would own some, and “well he kept that sacred oath, for eventu-
ally he possessed ten of them.”15 After his death, those association copies
spilled back into the freewheeling bibliospace of the transatlantic book
market, and Miller’s book sleuthing began. He produced an Elian book-bible
prologue 9
of sorts by binding William Carew Hazlitt’s book The Lambs (1897) together
with the fifty-eighth imprint of the Dibdin Club of New York’s Descriptive
Catalogue of Lamb’s library (1897) and crammed his own notes into the
margins. He communicated with the author of the former, William Hazlitt’s
grandson, who knew more than anyone else at the time about Lamb’s books.
He also contacted purchasers like Charles Eliot Norton and bibliographers
like Ernest Dressel North, who had written the introduction to the Freder-
ickson sale catalogue. He clipped out letters and articles related to the sale
and pasted them into his book. The resulting patchwork volume, now in the
Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries, was the
original inspiration for this story of book collectors in America.
The story takes its name from the book madness—at once a parody and
a pathology—that raged in Elia’s day and swept across the Atlantic.16 The
Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a bibliographer as eccentric as his name,
popularized the craze for collecting rare and antiquarian books that suffused
Britain in the first decades of the century. His best-known work, The Biblio-
mania; or, Book-Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms,
and Cure of This Fatal Disease (1809), took the form of an epistle to Richard
Heber, Esq., an English bibliomaniac who filled not just one but nine houses
with books—some in England (Hodnet Hall in Shropshire, houses on York
Street and in Pimlico, London) and others in continental Europe, where
he frequently went on book-buying expeditions (Paris, Louvain, Leyden,
The Hague, Brussels, and Antwerp).17 For bibliomaniacs like Heber, one
copy of a book was never enough. “Why you see,” he explained, “no man
can comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for his
show-copy. . . . Another he will require for his own use and reference; and
unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the
injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his
friends.”18 The dispersal of Heber’s library after his death in 1833 marked the
end of what Dibdin called “the grand era of Bibliomania.”19
The second quarter of the century was “a period of retrenchment in
British book collecting, a bear market after the bull market of the earlier
decades of the century and the Bibliomania so famously hymned by Thomas
Dibdin,” as the British librarian David Pearson explains.20 In the 1830s, the
father of bibliomania himself turned from singing the praises of the book
madness to lamenting what he called the “Bibliophobia.” Dibdin’s work of
1832 by that title bore the explanatory subtitle: “Remarks on the Present
10 p r o l o g u e
Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade.” That work,
also, took the form of a letter, addressed this time not in cheerful comradery
to the bibliomaniacal Heber but with rueful irony to himself, “the Author of
the Bibliomania.”21 Yet this was the time that American collectors entered the
transatlantic book market in full force, infusing it with new money and new
interests. The American book market heated up in the 1840s, as antiquarians
sought the materials to write New World history, wealthy bibliophiles
amassed the book collections that would become the basis of major institu-
tional libraries today, and librarians, bookdealers, and bibliographers worked
to fill what Henry Stevens called the “hungry alcoves” of American public
libraries.22
We have seen William Hazlitt describe the associative nature of books,
and it was likely his friend Leigh Hunt—the man who never went anywhere
without a book in his pocket as a precaution against boredom—who wrote,
“If there be one word in our language, beyond all others teeming with
delightful associations, Books is that word.” But what, after all, is a book?
According to Roger Chartier, a pioneer of academic book studies, books are
works that “take on a certain density in their peregrinations . . . about the
social world.” A text may be an abstract linguistic structure, reproducible in
print or digital forms, but a book obtains unique layers of meaning in its
wanderings through time and space, making it a resource “for thinking about
what is essential: the construction of social ties, individual subjectivity, and
relationship with the sacred.”23 The books from Charles Lamb’s library are
literary works as well as objects, and we will be considering them as such—
moving beyond titles to content, without forgetting title pages, covers,
flyleaves, marginalia, and other bibliographical features that make up a book.
“Is book history a subset of textual interpretation or vice versa?” asks the
literary historian Leah Price.24 There is no universal answer to this question,
nor perhaps should there be. What is needed is more tension between them.
For sentimental collectors too, the value of a book lay in the accidents,
or unpredictable circumstances, that result from its embeddedness in the
social world around it. For Walter Pater, Charles Lamb was “a true ‘collector,’
delighting in the personal finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or
print gets for him by the little accidents which attest previous ownership.”25
We might remember that it was the “moving accidents” of Othello’s stories
that attracted Shakespeare ’s Desdemona to him, and Elia was equally sensible
of “the becoming accidents, as they may be called, of books.”26 As the books
prologue 11
from Lamb’s library follow trajectories that intersect, overlap, and form
tangents with one another and the collectors in this story, they reflect the
accidental nature of life in a culture of letters. “Nowadays authors are to be
found ‘autographing’ their books before perspiring crowds in department
stores,” one bookseller complained in 1937, when the sentimental taste for
association copies had gained a hold in the American culture of collecting.
“These are not real association copies. They convey no sentiment of inti-
macy. They are advertising products and should be so rated.”27 While such
books were actually intended to simulate “presentation copies,” what is true
of one is true of the other: a book with genuine sentimental value cannot be
manufactured like a commodity. The sixty association copies from Lamb’s
library sold in New York in 1848 were all “real association copies,” and liter-
ature, for all our protagonists, was a real way of life.28
Of course, this story does not presume to address all cultures of
collecting in the United States at midcentury. Nor do all the buyers of asso-
ciation copies from Charles Lamb’s library sold in 1848 figure in it, for not all
of them are known. Who, for instance, was the “Bateman of Philadelphia”
who purchased a volume of dramatic works that included Joanna Baillie’s
Plays on the Passions and Coleridge ’s translation of Wallenstein (a trilogy of
plays by Friedrich Schiller) from Bartlett & Welford? What “Stranger”
walked off from the store with Lamb’s copy of A Tale of a Tub? Bookstore
clerks were not always accurate, and since American auction rooms were
noisy and crowded, people jotting down names and prices in sale catalogues
did not always hear the same thing. Occasionally, books would migrate
silently from one collection to another, leaving no written record of the
transaction. Given the inevitability of gaps and discrepancies in the histor-
ical record, this story of book collectors in America has been shaped
according to what is known, accepting the presence of bibliographical
enigmas and leaving those association copies that fall through the cracks to
another day, another author—with confidence that, in the event, the shadows
that play over the books from Charles Lamb’s library will continue to give
them their aura of intrigue and associative potential.
1. Bookmen Across the Atlantic
Charles Lamb’s Books on Broadway
What would Charles Lamb think if he could know how the shabby
old books which he saved from the paper-mill would be made
immortal by their short sojourn upon his shelves?
—Luther Samuel Livingston
New York City at midcentury was witnessing unprecedented growth as

waves of dazed and seasick immigrants, driven by famine and political insta-
bility in Europe, clambered from the bowels of ships in the harbor. In 1848
alone, nearly two hundred thousand immigrants arrived at the Port of New
York, many lacking the means to move farther. Within five years, that
number had grown to nearly three hundred thousand new arrivals annually.1
These were the “crampless” groupings—the prolific, energetic sprawl—
that Walt Whitman sings about in Leaves of Grass. In 1846, a young Mark
Twain, looking down from a fifth-story window in Lower Manhattan where
he worked as a printer’s apprentice, marveled at the “ ‘forest of masts,’ with
all sorts of flags flying” in the harbor: “You have everything in the shape of
water craft, from a fishing smack to the steamships and men-of-war; but
packed so closely together for miles, that when close to them you can scarcely
distinguish one from another.”2 The city was growing in the robust, head-
strong fashion that the American bard celebrates, and from Downtown to
Midtown there was never “such creaking of blocks, such pulling of ropes
and such caulking of seams.”3 A mere two decades earlier, the intersection of
the city’s two busy thoroughfares, Broadway and the Bowery, was still farm-
land. But a walk down Broadway, especially at lunch hour, by the mid-forties
had become a challenge. Twain observed that “to cross Broadway is the
rub—but once across, it is the rub for two or three squares. My plan . . . is to
12
bookmen across the atlantic 13
The juncture of Broadway and the Bowery, New York, c. 1828. Drawing from John Jacob Astor:
Landlord of New York (1929) by Arthur D. Howden Smith. Courtesy of the Department of
Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
get into the crowd; and when I get in, I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded
along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs; and when
I get out, it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together
again.”4 Amidst all this urban hubbub, one bookstore tucked away on the
ground floor of the Astor House at 229 Broadway (beneath the American
Hotel, the nation’s premier luxury hotel, built by John Jacob Astor) gained a
reputation as a beacon of taste.
The bookstore, owned by John Russell Bartlett and Charles Welford,
had a commodious reading room, and the rare book collector James Carson
Brevoort (future superintendent of the Astor Library) described it as a “cozy
nook.”5 Throughout the 1840s, it attracted a circle of literary lights. Bartlett
recalled that it “was the resort of literary men not only from New York, but
from all parts of the country.” The poet Fitz-Greene Halleck and novelist
James Fenimore Cooper were daily visitors, sometimes remaining for hours
in conversation. “Others would come in and look over the new books. There
was scarcely a literary or scientific man in the city who did not pay frequent
visits to our store, and the same class of men from other cities generally
made us an early call on visiting the city to see what there was new among
books.”6 Among the out-of-towners was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in
1848 was on a lecture tour in Britain. The following year he stopped in the
store and Welford’s wife, Mary Anne, found it “too provoking” to have
missed him.7 The booksellers in the Astor House were intellectuals as well as
14 b o o k m e n a c r o s s t h e a t l a n t i c
businessmen. While Welford fielded questions across a range of ancient and

modern literature, Bartlett served as a resource for those interested in Amer-
ican history, ethnography, and philology. “Before the days of the Astor
library,” wrote Evert and George Duyckinck, “there was no better resort for
literary information in the city than the well furnished bookstore at No. 7
Astor House.”8 Particularly in Bartlett’s area of early American history, the
demand for old books was on the rise, causing Bartlett to wonder at “the
improvement in taste among us.”9 By the end of the decade, the store had
become a legend in the literary world of New York.
Bartlett & Welford

At age thirty-five, John Russell Bartlett found himself trading in books, much
as his father had traded in sugar, hardware, liquor, flour, iron, steel, stationery,
saddles, boots, and other dry goods at a general country store in Rhode Island.
As a child, he had helped his father unpack crates that floated down the Seekonk
River from Canada. As an adolescent, he worked in his uncle’s country store
in Providence, awaking every morning to sweep the shop, light the fire, and
unlock the front door to customers. But after hours, he indulged in his favorite
studies among his books. He attended public lectures, including those spon-
sored by the Franklin Society, which like its namesake aimed “to embrace the
whole range of the sciences and of general literature.”10 He joined the Histor-
ical Society of Rhode Island, and in 1831 he helped establish the Providence
Athenæum, another institution devoted to fostering the lifelong process of
self-culture. He worked to build the Athenæum’s fledgling library, and five
years later, when the Athenæum merged with the Library Company of Provi-
dence (a subscription library like the Library Company of Philadelphia
founded by Benjamin Franklin), its library swelled with books, pamphlets,
periodicals, and manuscripts that had been accumulating for nearly a century.
With bookkeeping experience in retail and banking, Bartlett moved to
New York and took a job with Jessup, Swift & Company, building supply
merchants with a branch in Providence. After a few short months, however,
the financial Panic of 1837 put an end to the building boom in America and
consequently to Bartlett’s job. “In such times as these few can weather the
storm,” wrote his friend John Russell from Bluffdale, Illinois; “I learnt with
deep regret that your house had also yielded to the pressure that is fast pros-
trating, not only the mercantile interest but the whole business of our
country.” The bull market of the 1830s had gone bust. “The West is just
beginning to feel it,” Russell reported in June, auguring more “disastrous
and untried scenes . . . before us.” Andrew Jackson and his successor Martin
Van Buren (who became the eighth U.S. president in March) were lucky they
were not in Europe, Russell believed, or their heads would have paid the
price for “the wide spread ruin that is now sweeping over our country in its
length and breadth.”11
Bartlett’s bookkeeping services were no longer needed by his
employers, but libraries and book collectors in Providence continued to rely
on him. He scanned sale catalogues, attended evening auctions, and eventu-
ally began to think he might channel his commercial and bibliographical
knowledge into a new career. Surely books could be traded with as much
ease or difficulty as other commodities. But his friend William C. Hall, an
American bookdealer in London, warned him otherwise: “The book trade is
the most dangerous of any, and not one out of 100 succeed at it in this country
or any other.” Like Bartlett, Hall had begun his career at a New England
country store. He was able to explain that while the logic of retailing such
things as cotton, tea, rum, and molasses was straightforward—stock no
goods that did not turn a profit—booksellers frequently sacrificed quantita-
tive logic to sentiment and taste. By piling up authors, subjects, historical
periods, and even bindings that appealed to them, they ran the risk of accu-
mulating inventories that were “of little or no value, and not worth one
twentieth” of the price they had paid. Flooding the market with unwanted
books was not only “bad for the owners,” but bad for the business in general
since “no trade is so bad as books when forced into the market.”12
The greatest reason for the sluggish sale of new books in Britain in the
1830s was the slew of “cheap literature” flooding the marketplace, a phenom-
enon enabled by technological innovations like steam-powered printing and
machine-made paper. The Panic of 1837 compounded the slump in the
British book trade by making cash scarce on both sides of the Atlantic. On
December 18, 1838, Hall warned Bartlett, “Send out a man with the very best
knowledge of the market & a large capital of ready cash. . . . I doubt whether
he will be able to make enough to pay his board and lodging. . . . [O]ne thing
is certain, all that have attempted amongst English books have become bank-
rupt.”13 The shelf life of a new publication was not long, and if the first print
run did not sell out, the remainders would go for a fraction of their original
retail price. Three years later, in November 1841, only 750 copies (of a print
run of 1,000) of William Wordsworth’s most recent book had sold, causing
the poet to fear that “the wretched state of the Book trade and the heavy
stock” his publisher Edward Moxon had on hand would discourage Moxon
from publishing a new volume of poems he was preparing for the press.14 In
the New Year, he confessed to Moxon that Moxon’s own “account of the
depressed state of the book-trade” had made him “almost indifferent about
publishing the volume.”15
Yet while Moxon continued to publish new books, Hall shipped his
remaining stock to Bartlett to be sold on commission in New York, happy to
“quit a dangerous and an impossible business in which . . . very few get rich
but many are poor.”16 American bibliomania was on the rise, and Bartlett was
convinced the books would sell with enough margin for him to send Hall his
5 percent commission (half the usual bookdealer’s markup). “New York is
certainly infected with the Bibliomania,” attested George Templeton Strong
after one book auction on March 15, 1839; “I never saw anything like the
eagerness to buy, and the prices given.”17 Three months before that, Hall had
said the same thing of the book market in London: “Old books are becoming
extremely scarce and generally very dear.” Prices in the previous six years
had doubled, and he estimated that more antiquarian books had been offered
for sale during a single month at the start of the decade than in six months
combined by the end.18 In 1841, Bartlett suggested that the prices of anti-
quarian books had increased, and in many instances doubled again, since
1836. But the American market for such books was robust. “In this country
the number of book collectors has greatly increased and in whatever depart-
ment of literature a man’s taste runs, he wants a few specimens of early
printing,” observed Bartlett.19
The time was ripe, and what Bartlett needed was a partner whose bibli-
ographical expertise ran beyond American history and ethnography. As it
turns out, he was prescient in his choice of Charles Welford. For while
Welford was then still a young man in his mid-twenties, he would become a
leading bibliographer in the transatlantic world of books, eventually part-
nering with Charles Scribner. As the son of a London bookseller, he had
grown up around books. His father, John G. Welford, had moved the family
to New York when Charles was eighteen, opening a bookstore at 424 Grand
Street, where Charles worked for three years, until the age of twenty-one. At
that point, he landed a job as a clerk with Daniel Appleton, then the leading
bookseller in the city, at 200 Broadway. “All he knew he learned by
experience,” said one who knew Welford; he “was entirely self educated,
having had no time to go to school or college.”20 His friendly disposition
masked an “extraordinary knowledge of books and a wonderful memory
which enabled him to answer puzzling questions off-hand.”21
A daily customer in Daniel Appleton’s bookstore was George
Templeton Strong, who stopped in on his way from school on March 8, 1836,
and met Charles Welford. “I can’t conceive what this Mr. Welford is doing as
clerk in a book store,” wrote the sixteen-year-old Strong in his diary: “He
seems to know something about everything—talks about Sanskrit roots,
Polyglots, scarce editions, boustrophedon inscriptions, and everything of
the sort . . . and seems moreover perfectly well acquainted with the works of
many authors not often read, and well versed in all sorts of literature. I
should think he might find a better situation than that of a clerk.”22 However,
as the book historian Michael Winship explains, being a bookstore clerk in
nineteenth-century urban America required some bibliographical expertise:
“The general stock was chiefly shelved behind counters and not accessible
for browsing. Customers depended on sales clerks for advice and service.”23
Welford constantly surprised those who knew him best with the “the extent
and exactness of his knowledge,” and others saw him as a “walking
cyclopædia.” According to one London bookseller, Edward Marston, “if he
did not know the contents of many books, he knew at least all that it was
necessary to know about them for the practical purpose of buying or selling.
. . . He had a peculiar faculty of seizing the leading features of a book, and
his strong memory retained them.”24
When George Templeton Strong spoke with Welford at Appleton’s
bookstore, their conversation drifted from old books to old coins, and
Welford promised to bring coins from his own collection to the store to show
the young bibliophile. “Coins of Alexander the Great, Philip, Cassander,
Hiero, Abgarus, and of Etruria, Carthage, Phoenicia, the Mamertines, Libya,
Syracuse and Messana, &c., &c., are not to be met with every day,” Strong
marveled when he saw them. He made it known that he “would give any
thing to get them,” although Welford did not seem willing to part with his
relics of the ancient world. Perhaps it says something about Welford’s
personality that three weeks later Strong walked off in elated spirits with
thirty-seven coins, for which he had paid fifty cents each.25
Like any business, the book trade was a small world in which the
leading figures knew one another, and reputation went a long way toward
determining success. Whereas Welford “was most kindly, and greatly liked
by all who knew him,” his boss Daniel Appleton had a more mixed reputa-
tion.26 In London, Appleton was known as “the old screw” and in Paris as “a
very good liar.”27 He had been accused of delaying payment, of refusing to
settle his accounts, of indiscreetly bragging about low prices he had been
offered, of attempting to evade shipping fees, and of insisting that volumes
were missing from boxes of books he had been shipped. European book-
sellers had become wary of dealing with him, and Appleton complained that
the only books he could import from Europe were “worth only for throwing
down the scuttle” (with the coal to light the fire).28 William C. Hall, who
considered his bibliographical knowledge “very limited,” claimed to find, on
one of his business trips to New York, books in Appleton’s cellar that had
been stripped of their leather bindings and discarded but that were worth
more than others for which he had paid inflated prices in London.29 The
Parisian booksellers were more skeptical, suspecting that he “allowed himself
to be imposed upon with his eyes open,” buying poor books at exorbitant
prices to raise his commission with wealthy American clients.30
Charles Welford, on the other hand, was no more willing to overpay for
books than he was to undervalue them when he sold them. “He was shrewd at
a bargain, and could, on occasion be pretty stiff in maintaining his own
ground,” observed Roger Burlingame, a former book editor of Scribner’s
Magazine who knew Welford through Charles Scribner’s Sons. Yet for all
his shrewdness, Welford “was a man with whom it was quite impossible to
quarrel.” To an ingrained English politeness, he joined a “quick intuition
about people, knew their frailties and prejudices and could tell a visiting
American precisely how to cajole and how not to irritate some of the great
and formidable men who ruled London publishing houses.”31 He had not only
the knowledge, in short, but the character to succeed in the book business.
In 1840, Bartlett & Welford set up shop at No. 2 Astor House, on
Broadway facing City Hall Park. Determined to build the most spectacular
hotel in America, John Jacob Astor, the first real estate mogul of New York,
had gobbled up all the buildings in the square-block area where his own
home had stood—on Broadway, between Barclay Street to the north and
Vesey Street to the south, with Church Street as the eastern side of the
square. There was only one holdout: John Gerard Coster, who lived imme-
diately north of Astor on Broadway. Coster, a Dutch immigrant, had made
his fortune as a shipping merchant in the United States and had no need of
The Astor House, Broadway and Vesey Street, New York, 1842. Colored lithograph from
Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, no. 5, new series (1921). Author’s Collection.
the old German immigrant’s money. His wife liked their home, and he
refused to sell at any price. But Astor, having pocketed the other lots in the
vicinity for under fifteen thousand dollars each, approached his neighbor one
day and said, “Coster, I am going to build a hotel. I want the ground upon
which your house stands. It is of no particular use to you; you can go up
Broadway, above Canal Street, and build a palace with the money I will pay
you.” Thus, for the sum of sixty thousand dollars, Astor had his way.32
Before long, New Yorkers were crossing the street to avoid the dust and
debris flying from the demolition site.
The American Hotel (sometimes referred to as the Astor Hotel or the
Park Hotel) opened in 1836, with retail stores lining the streets on the ground
floor. They sold a range of products, from satin scarves and Oriental robes to
wigs, combs, and hair products; china, glass, and earthenware; bandages and
surgical instruments; artificial flowers and perfumes; and four years later, in
May 1840, Bartlett and Welford opened their “Antiquarian Bookstore and
Repository for Standard Literature.”33 Visitors lounged in the store’s reading
room and marveled that the firm stocked not only old and rare books but
incunabula (books printed before 1500), which were rarely seen in America.34
“We will not tantalise our Bibliomaniacal friends by particularizing all the
varieties to be found at this tempting repository,” a local journalist wrote four
months later, “but recommend each and all to inspect for themselves such
curiosities as rarely meet the eye in this country.” By 1843, the business had
moved from No. 2 Astor House to a larger space at No. 7, which could accom-
modate its inventory of more than four thousand books.35
Bartlett and Welford originally advertised themselves as “Booksellers
and Importers of English Books, Ancient and Modern.” They printed their
early sale catalogues with Robert Craighead on Fulton Street and focused
their energies on acquiring, cataloguing, and selling fine, rare, and anti-
quarian books. But most booksellers at the time doubled as publishers, and
Bartlett had ambitions in that area. In 1844, as we shall see, he sent Welford
to London to scout for antiquarian books while he began publishing new
books under the imprint of Bartlett & Welford, mainly volumes that reflected
his own interests. A random sampling of their early titles yields the Canadian
military journal of John Graves Simcoe; a map of Oyster Bay, Long Island,
during the American Revolution; an atlas of American Revolutionary battles;
a collection of U.S. presidential addresses; a treatise on international copy-
right law; the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (cofounded by
Bartlett and Albert Gallatin); Gallatin’s observations on the “semi-civilized”
nations of Mexico and Central America; and a geological study of burial
mounds in West Virginia and the Mississippi Valley by Henry Rowe School-
craft. When our protagonist Robert Balmanno sent a copy of this last to his
friend, the Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker, in 1848, three years after
it was published, the latter replied in a burst of enthusiasm that characterized
the literary antiquarianism of the time: “I can scarcely convey to you, by
anything I can write, my extacies at receiving . . . the Mounds of the Missis-
sippi Valley.”36
In the meantime, while Bartlett and Welford were still unknown
figures in the contemporary book world, William Hall advised them to
acquire “a few good old books” that would do credit to their store even
if they did not yield direct profits, and the partners seem to have followed
his advice. On June 3, 1840, just after Bartlett & Welford opened at
No. 2 Astor House, Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York and a biblio-
maniac to boot, stepped into the store and purchased two sets of old books
that caused him much delight. The first was a six-volume illustrated edition
of The Works of William Shakespear (1743–1744) by Sir Thomas Hanmer,
which Hone considered “a fine old Oxford copy of Shakespeare.”37
The other was an eleven-volume edition of Homer and one of only three
first editions that the Astor librarian, Joseph Green Cogswell, would consider
necessary for a great public library. (The other two were the Gutenberg
Bible, popularly, if inexactly, known as the world’s first printed book,
and the first collected edition of Shakespeare ’s plays, the so-called First Folio
of 1623, which Bartlett & Welford would have in their store for sale in
1847.)38
Commissioned by the London bookseller Bernard Lintot, the work
Hone purchased was the original subscription copy of Pope’s translation of
Homer, consisting of six folio volumes of The Iliad (1715–1720) and five
folio volumes of The Odyssey (1725–1726). Pope translated the whole of the
Iliad, and he later collaborated with William Broome and Elijah Fenton on
the Odyssey. Like many readers before and after him, Charles Lamb preferred
the Iliad, judging “the confederate jumble of Pope, Broome and Fenton
which goes under Pope ’s name” to be “far inferior.”39 But from the perspec-
tive of a collector, the complete folio set in eleven volumes was a surprise on
the streets of New York: “a most rare and valuable old book, in fine preser-
vation, beautifully printed, and containing many quaint but well-executed
engravings.”40 The bookstore in the Astor House was on its way to becoming
a landmark in early American culture. One year into the venture, Evert
Augustus Duyckinck pronounced in his column “The Loiterer” that Bartlett
& Welford in “every way deserve to take the lead” among booksellers in the
literary world of New York.41
The Lambs and the Moxons

Charles Lamb’s literary reputation had been growing steadily in America
since his death in 1834. But only after Mary Lamb’s death more than a dozen
years later, in May 1846, did the public become privy to the bloody scene
of matricide and madness that had shadowed Charles and Mary Lamb
throughout their adult lives. Charles’s executor, Thomas Noon Talfourd,
had published Lamb’s literary works, letters, and a sketch of his life with
Edward Moxon in 1838, but since Mary Lamb was still living, he did not
include all the letters. A decade later, when he published his Final Memorials
of Charles Lamb: Consisting Chiefly of His Letters Not Before Published, with
Sketches of Some of His Companions (1848), again with Moxon, the stunning
letter of September 27, 1796, from Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
hit the press: “My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the
death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife
out of her grasp.”42 Whatever Mary’s mental illness might be labeled today,
it was not helped by the burdens placed upon her by an impoverished family
that included a father with growing signs of dementia, a mother who had
become an invalid and required constant attention, and the financial respon-
sibility of maintaining them both through such poorly paid menial labor as
needlework. Her elder brother, John, employed at the South Sea Company,
felt no such responsibility, and Charles, who had just completed a trial period
of employment at the British East India Company, earned little.
By way of introducing the letter, Talfourd printed a newspaper account
from Monday, September 26, 1796, of the coroner’s report of the murder
that took place four days earlier:
It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were
preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case knife laying on
the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her appren-
tice, round the room; on the eager calls of her helpless infirm mother
to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks
approached her parent.
The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the
house, but too late—the dreadful scene presented to him the mother
lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly
standing over her with the fatal knife, and the venerable old man,
her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead
from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks
she had been madly hurling about the room.43
Fearing that his closest friend Coleridge would hear about the tragedy from
another source, Lamb had written to him the day after the news appeared in
the London papers. Responding immediately, Coleridge confessed, “Your
letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and
stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man
who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other
consolation.”44
These events never surfaced explicitly in the essays published under
the pseudonym Elia, but they helped to explain their strange tone. Readers
had always recognized a taint of melancholy in Lamb’s mischievous humor.
Charles was twenty-one at the time the event that permanently changed their
lives took place, Mary nine years and nine months older. He would forever
regret that he had returned home only minutes too late to snatch the knife
from his sister. The madness in the Lamb family was probably hereditary.
Only four months before Mary’s more violent attack of mental illness,
Charles had spent six weeks at the largest private lunatic asylum in London,
located at 34 Hoxton Street. “I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite
any one,” he wrote to Coleridge on May 27, 1796: “But mad I was—and
many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if
all told.”45
While his was merely a “temporary frenzy,” Mary had long been
conscious “of a certain flightiness in her poor head” and never passed Bedlam
(Bethlem Royal Hospital) without fearing that she would end her days in one
of its cells. She had already suffered one breakdown, and in the days leading
up to the matricide she had exhibited enough symptoms of mental illness that
Charles had gone to consult her physician, David Pitcairn, that morning,
unfortunately not finding him at home. A little over a week after the ghastly
scene in the Inner Temple, Mary came to her senses in a private asylum,
where Charles was relieved to find her sober and resigned, able to distinguish
rationally “between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy, and the
terrible guilt of a Mother’s murther.” But her fits of frenzy would recur,
lasting longer and becoming more frequent as the lives of the Lambs wore
on. “Tis the eleventh week of the illness, and I cannot get her well,” Charles
would lament on December 15, 1827; “the world is full of troubles.”46
Over a decade later, on May 1, 1848, the British Quarterly Review
published a review of Talfourd’s edition of the formerly unpublished letters,
and readers on both sides of the Atlantic were shocked. Daniel Appleton
rushed to reprint Talfourd’s edition under the title Literary Sketches and
Letters; Being the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848) as the American
newspapers circulated the story under the headline “A Secret in Charles
Lamb’s Life.”47 Reading about it in the British Quarterly Review, Evert
Duyckinck shared the news with his friend, the American literary essayist
William Alfred Jones, that “Bridget Elia in a fit of insanity murdered her
own mother. That was the ‘strange calamity’ of which I think Wordsworth
speaks.”48 In his letter to Coleridge communicating news of the matricide,
Lamb had spoken of “the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family,”
and in a poem written in 1796, “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,”
Coleridge echoed the phrase, portraying Lamb as making his way through
life, “With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain / and strange
calamity!”49 (Duyckinck, drawing on his memory, mistook Wordsworth for
Coleridge.)
Yet Wordsworth was one of the few in the Lambs’ inner circle who
knew the “secret,” and his elegy for Charles Lamb echoed Coleridge by
referring to the “troubles strange, / Many and strange, that hung about his
life.” Charles was seen as the victim of duty, chained to the “strict labours of
the merchant’s desk,” in order to maintain his sister.50 In fact Charles had
secured Mary’s release from custody—and the public hospital where they
both feared she would wind up—by assuming legal and financial responsi-
bility for her. Their elder brother, John, would have preferred to see Mary
permanently confined on the charge of the state, though he, like their mother,
Elizabeth, “never understood her right,” as Charles put it, saying that their
parent “would always love my brother above Mary, who was not worthy of
one tenth of that affection, which Mary had a right to claim.” After the matri-
cide, Mary wrote to Charles from the asylum where she was confined,
assuring Charles that she had no more “terrifying dreams”: “The spirit of
my mother seems to descend, and smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy
the life and reason which the Almighty has given me—I shall see her again
in heaven; she will then understand me better; my Grandmother too will
understand me better, and will then say no more, as she used to do, ‘Polly
what are those poor crazy moyther’d brains of yours thinking of always?’ ”51
The reference was to her maternal grandmother, Mary Field, and ironically
the term “mothered” here means not nurtured but befouled or full of dregs.
Charles Lamb’s status as a working man of letters, defined by his life-
long employment in the accounting office of the British East India Company,
was made necessary by his personal tragedy. Shortly before the “day of
horrors,” Coleridge had asked Lamb whether he might include some of
Lamb’s poems with his own in a volume he was preparing that would also
include some by their friend Charles Lloyd. In a postscript added to his letter
informing Coleridge of the tragedy, Lamb responded, “Mention nothing of
poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as
you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name
or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.”52 Coleridge did publish
Lamb’s poems, though not anonymously, in Poems by S.T. Coleridge, To
Which Are Now Added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (1797). The
internal title pages of the volume, moreover, marked a difference: “Poems,
by S.T. Coleridge,” “Poems, by Charles Lloyd,” and “Poems, | By |Charles

Lamb, | Of the India House.”53
This was not the last time Coleridge would use the phrase that identi-
fied his friend as a representative of a mercantile house of trade in one of his
publications. The first printing of “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”
(1800) included the subtitle “Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India-
House, London,” and Lamb had not been happy about it. He demanded that
in any future printing Coleridge cross out “Gentle-hearted Charles” and
added, “Damn you, I was beginning to forgive you and believe in earnest
that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional on your
part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the face Charles
Lamb of the India House.”54 It is unclear whether he found the emasculating
gentle-heartedness or the association with the East India House as a class
marker more condescending in a poem by a friend who was himself making
his way in the world in the more lofty role of poet and philosopher. When
Coleridge republished the poem seventeen years later in his collected poems,
Sibylline Leaves (1817), he eliminated the subtitle.
In his period of crisis, before he found his voice as an essayist and
learned to throw the film of imagination over the tragic events of his life,
Lamb leaned heavily on the Bible. When he announced to Coleridge that he
was abandoning poetry, he quoted Revelation 21:4: “ ‘The former things are
passed away,’ and I have something more to do than to feel.” In that same
verse, Saint John relates his vision: “God shall wipe away all tears . . . and
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”55 Lamb’s allusion
was likewise biblical when he remarked that, like Cain after the fratricide of
Abel, he and his sister were “in a manner marked.” In Genesis, God condemns
Cain to a life of wandering. Cain becomes “a fugitive and a vagabond” from
the land that has absorbed his brother’s blood—a type of forlorn exile
adopted by Coleridge in his prose “Wanderings of Cain” (1797) and by
Byron in his verse drama Cain (1821). As if to prolong his trials, “the Lord set
a mark on Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”56 For once having
spilled his brother’s blood, there could be no hiding or turning back.
Such was true of the scene in the Inner Temple. For the rest of their
adult lives, Charles and Mary Lamb pursued a migratory path together in the
manner of the wandering Cain, shuttling between asylums and homes. Many
families and private individuals at the time rented rooms to the mentally ill,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
VESICULAR IRRUPTION IN PIGS. PITCHY
AFFECTION. SEBORRHŒA.
This also affects the young and is characterized by the successive

appearance of vesicles, pustules and scabs or crusts. Friedberger and
Fröhner associate it with debility from youth, disease or neglect,
from articular rheumatism, rachitism, hog cholera, etc., but also as a
result of lying on manure, and the accumulation of sebaceous matter
and filth of all kinds on the skin.
Symptoms. Among the symptoms of general disorder are dullness,
inappetence, prostration and slight fever. There is red eruption with
vesicles and even pustules on the early rupture of which the
discharge concretes into a black pitchy layer. It may be at first most
marked on the ventral aspect of the body, but usually extends to the
whole integument.
Treatment. Where it is not dependent on some grave internal
disorder, this commonly yields to soapy washes, generous food and a
clean pen.
GRANULAR ERUPTION IN SWINE.
Zschokke describes a disease of this kind affecting the ears, back

and croup, and caused by a micrococcus in the epidermis and
papillary layer of the derma. It appears in the form of patches, often
of the size of the palm, showing bluish gray papules which dry up
without forming pustules. It runs a chronic course and produces
little or no itching.
Treatment would consist in absolute cleanliness, soapy or alkaline
washes, and the free use of solutions of the hyposulphites, sulphites,
or other antiseptics which are neither irritant nor poisonous.
Urticaria is met with in swine as already noticed.
Scleroderma occurs in boars especially in the region of the
shoulders and back.
ACUTE ECZEMA OF THE DOG.
Prevalence and forms. Red Mange. Causes: constitutional, hereditary, races most
susceptible, short-haired, delicate skins, 1st and 2d years, flesh fed, overfed, spiced
food, secondary to internal disorders, heat, cold, dust, irritants. Symptoms: blush
inside elbow, thigh, belly, heat, tenderness, itchiness, scratching, vesicles,
abrasions, sores, skin thickens, wrinkles, moistens. Diagnosis: from demodex,
distemper, mange. Treatment: change diet, restrict in quantity, from flesh, or
stimulating food, one meal daily, laxative, bitters; locally, cleanse skin, antipruritic
non-poisonous dusting powders or lotions, starch, magnesia, bismuth; with
muzzle, phenol, lead, thymol, thiol, later creolin, oil of cade, lysol, etc. Acute
general eczema. Causes as in red mange. Symptoms: Common on head, ears, back,
rump, eyelids, lips, scrotum, arms, digits, crusts and depilation, large vesicles,
bleeding digits. Treatment.
In none of our domestic animals is this condition so common as in

the dog, and of all skin affections of this animal this is the most
frequent. As in other animals it may show itself in all forms or grades
from simple erythema, through the papular, vesicular, pustular and
scurfy or scabby, and all of them may often be seen at the same time
in one animal. Yet special names have been given to different forms
and localizations and it seems convenient to retain some of these for
every day use.
Eczema Rubrum. Red Mange. This form is familiar to dog
fanciers as one of the acute types of this disease.
Causes. Among these are recognized a constitutional
predisposition, so that the disease appears in successive generations
in the same family, without apparent reason for charging the trouble
on any particular feeding or management. While not confined to any
race or group of races it has been noticed especially in greyhounds,
setters, pointers, fox hounds, harriers, bulldogs, St. Germains and
braque hounds. It is especially common in dogs in their first and
second years, and those that are nervous and lively, with a delicate
and naturally dry skin. Again, the dog fed largely on flesh, and above
all the house dog fed thrice a day or oftener on highly spiced animal
food from the table, or on cakes, rich in fat, is a frequent victim.
There is besides that tendency to irritation of the skin which comes
from hereditary peculiarities and idiosyncrasy, from diseases of the
stomach, intestines, liver or kidneys, from faults in sanguification,
nutrition and secretion, agencies that disturb the circulation in the
skin, like excessive heat or cold, irritant dust, dessicated perspiration
or sebum, overheating and subsequent plunging in cold water. These
acting locally may serve to precipitate that which was otherwise
imminent from a generally acting cause.
Symptoms. There is first erythema, usually on the inner side of the
elbow, or thigh, with redness, heat and tenderness, which soon
extend to the belly, breast and intermaxillary region, but it confines
itself as a rule to the ventral aspect of the body where the hair is
sparse and delicate, and the skin thin and sensitive. The symptoms
are more marked in white haired dogs. The tender skin is more or
less (usually intensely) itchy, causing violent scratching with the
development of minute vesicles and even open sores. The skin may
become moist, thickened and wrinkled, but is rarely encrusted to any
degree. Spontaneous recovery may take place under a change of diet
(restricted or vegetable), or an outdoor life in summer with liberal
exercise, or the disease may last indefinitely so long as the etiological
conditions are unchanged.
Diagnosis. The affection is easily distinguished from demodectic
acariasis which attacks a different part of the body, namely, the head,
the eyelids, the feet, and the back, whereas, this form of eczema
confines itself to the ventral aspect of the trunk. From the eruption of
distemper it is diagnosed by the absence of the hyperthermia and
catarrhal symptoms of that disease, and by the very small size of the
vesicles; those of distemper are broad, flattened and often have dark
colored contents. From acariasis it is differentiated by its
confinement to the ventral aspect, in place of attacking the head,
ears, neck and back, by the less severe and incessant itching, and
above all by the absence of the acarus, and the element of contagion.
Treatment. A change of diet is a prime consideration. It may be in
the direction of simple restriction, but usually also in the avoidance
of meats that are highly peppered or spiced. A change to vegetable
food,—biscuit or mush and milk, is of great importance, but in some
animals a little fresh plainly cooked steak or raw lean meat may be
essential. In other cases a little beef juice or gravy well skimmed of
fat may tempt the patient to eat mush. In the same way it may be
necessary to temporize in the matter of meals. Some dogs can be
safely put on one meal a day, while for others accustomed to frequent
feeding it may be needful to give two and restrict the amount. For the
overfed or dyspeptic animal a laxative, at the outset, serves to
remove irritating and fermenting ingesta, and to place the stomach
and liver, and indirectly, the skin in a better condition for recovery.
Any persistent indigestion should be treated in the ordinary way.
Locally it may be requisite to first clean the surface by sponging
with tepid water, to be followed by soothing and antipruritic agents,
due care being taken to avoid such as when licked will poison the
patient. Starch powder, magnesium carbonate, and bismuth oxide
may be used without apprehension. The same is true of limewater
and to some extent of zinc oxide. When we advance to others we
must take the precaution to use a close wire muzzle, to prevent the
ingestion of the agent. Carbolic acid lotion (1–2 ∶ 100) acts as a local
anæsthetic, and often materially lessens both licking and scratching.
Lead acetate or thymol or both (1 ∶ 100) have a similar action. Thiol
20, glycerine 50, water 50, often acts as well. When the acute
symptoms have subsided the more stimulating agents may be
employed: Creoline (2 ∶ 100); oil of cade 1, vaseline 5; Canada balsam
1, vaseline 5; zinc ointment, or lead acetate ointment.
OTHER ACUTE ECZEMAS IN DOGS.
Apart from eczema rubrum, the acute forms have been designated
according to their seat and the nature of the attendant eruption.
Acute General Eczema. This may be often traced to various
causes of irritation local or general: overfeeding, over-stimulating or
spiced food, digestive, hepatic, or urinary disorders, irritant dust or
inspissated secretions on the skin, hot seasons, over exertion, cold
baths when heated, skin parasites and scratching.
Symptoms. The whole skin, or a portion thereof is the seat of
pruritus, causing active scratching and on separating the hairs on the
affected parts there is found redness, congestion, and swelling with
the formation of papules or vesicles, abraded, or moist surfaces, and
scales or crusts. These patches are common on the back, the head,
ears, rump, (Caudal eczema), the palpabræ, the lips (eczema
labialis), the interdigital space (interdigital eczema), the
scrotum, or the anus.
Sometimes the formation of crusts and the loss of hairs is to be
noted, sometimes the eruption of large vesicles which burst and
discharge a honey like fluid (impetiginous eczema), sometimes
blood escapes from the irritated surface and concretes in dark crusts.
The vesication and moist exudation is especially common about the
head, ears, eyelids, and rump, while bleeding is especially seen
around the claws and in the interdigital spaces in connection with
running on rough ground, snow or stubble. The impetiginous form
often bears a strong resemblance to vesicles caused by a burn with
hot water. The treatment of these different forms does not differ
materially from that of eczema rubrum, being first dietetic and
hygienic, then soothing, and finally stimulating.
CHRONIC ECZEMA IN THE DOG.
Follows acute. Same general causes. Symptoms: skin thickens with papules,
vesicles or pustules, scurf, crusts, depilation, surface glossy, abraded, scratched,
raw, rough, fœtid, itching, emaciation, exhaustion. Chronic eczema of the back.
Fat, old, gluttons. Symptoms: circumscribed patches on back, loins, quarters, tail,
intense itching, skin thickened, cracked, raw, encrusted, black, folded, rigid, fœtid,
hair broken, erect, shedding. Very inveterate. Chronic eczema of elbow and hock.
Causes: friction on summits of prominent bones, filth, infection, predisposition.
Symptoms: red, thickened, bare, indurated, calloused skin, cracks, sores,
discharge. Inveterate. Chronic dry eczema of head, ears, neck and limbs.
Circumscribed area, slow progress, thick, rigid, folded skin, hairless, dry, scaly,
moderate itching. Treatment: Fresh eruption like acute form. For old chronic form,
stimulating astringents, silver, mercury, copper, boric acid, tannic acid, iodoform:
for dry and scaly, ointments of oil of cade, tar, green soap, zinc, cresol, lysol,
chloro-naphtholeum, sulphur, sulphur iodide, ichthyol, salicylic acid, chrysarobin,
naphthalin, naphthol, resorcin.
While acute eczema may recover permanently under hygienic

measures alone, yet any case is subject to relapse and the new
eruptions may succeed each other so persistently that the affection
becomes essentially chronic. Like the acute, chronic eczema may be
general or local and be named accordingly.
The same general causes as produce acute eczema are operative in
maintaining the disease indefinitely. Faults in diet, overfeeding,
unhealthy kennels, foul air and surroundings, hot weather, licking
and scratching are among the common causes.
Symptoms. Under the continued inflammation the skin becomes
thick (on the back it may be double or treble its normal thickness), it
has a general angry congested appearance, papules, vesicles and
pustules coexist or succeed each other and as these dry up, scales and
crusts accumulate. The hair drops off over extensive patches, leaving
a somewhat shining skin. What hair remains is largely twisted or
broken by rubbing and scratching. Hypertrophy of the papillary layer
is not uncommon giving a rough uneven aspect and feeling to the
skin. A common feature is an offensive odor from the affected skin,
and which may betray the persistence of the disease when it has been
supposed that all eruption has been overcome. While not prepared to
follow Cadeac in making this a diagnostic symptom from other skin
diseases, yet as an evidence that an eczema is not yet entirely healed
it serves a very useful purpose. In oldstanding cases the continued
irritation, the unintermitting itching, the absorption or circulation of
morbid products, and the constant nervous excitement may lead to
emaciation, exhaustion and death.
Chronic Eczema of the Back in Dogs. Rodent Eczema is a
disease of fat, old, voracious dogs. It appears in circumscribed spots
and patches on the back, loins, croup or tail and is marked by
inveterate itching, congestion and thickening of the skin, cracking of
its surface, bristling, breaking and shedding of the hair, exudation
from the surface and its dessication in the form of crusts. These
crusts may be black from contamination with dust or blood, and the
affected surface is more or less fœtid. The skin may be puckered into
irregular folds, thick and inelastic. Not infrequently the malady may
remain dormant for some time, only to break out again and again
with renewed energy. It is very obstinate and intractable.
Chronic Eczema of the Elbow and Hock in Dogs. This
attacks the summit of the olecranon or calcis and is manifestly
connected with compression and friction on these parts when lying
down, and perhaps with foul and irritating matters on the ground.
This need not be looked on as the sole cause but only as the occasion
for the localization of a predisposition which was already present in
the general system. The skin becomes red, thickened and indurated,
the epidermis undergoing hypertrophy to form a callus, in which a
few cracks and sores may form, giving rise to a discharge which
encrusts the surface and adds to the thickness and induration. The
affection is very inveterate.
Chronic Dry Eczema of Head, Ears, Neck and Limbs in
Dogs. The dry eczema of the head, neck and limbs is characterized
by its slow progress and its restriction in the majority of cases to one
or more of these parts. The small affected patches, have some
thickening and folding of the skin, which is usually dry, scaly and
largely divested of hair. Itching is moderate only, and the hairs are
shed less rapidly than in the encrusted forms.
Treatment. When there has been a fresh irruption it may be
requisite to treat chronic eczema, for a time, after the manner of the
acute, so as to avoid any tendency to aggravation of the already
existing irritation. A careful regulation of the diet is as essential in
the chronic forms as in the acute and in the inveterate types,
especially those of a squamous character, alteratives like arsenic are
often of value. In the acute stage or during a recrudescence the mild
dusting powders (starch, zinc oxide, lycopodium, magnesia
bicarbonate, bismuth oxide, thiol) may be applied, or bland unguents
(zinc, benzoated zinc, lead, vaseline, glycerine, spermaceti and
almond oil, paraffin, wax), or sedative lotions (lead, opiate, thymol,
thiol, carbolic acid).
In the more advanced and moist forms astringents and stimulants
may be adopted: silver nitrate (2 ∶ 100), applied with soft cotton,
mercuric chloride (1 ∶ 1000), or black wash (calomel 1 : lime water
60) care being taken to use a close wire muzzle to prevent licking.
Copper sulphate (1 ∶ 100) is at times useful, and boric acid, and
tannin may be tried. Iodoform 1 part and tannic acid 5 has a good
effect in many cases.
For the dry and scaly forms, and indeed for many of the others, as
well, the more stimulating ointments and liniments are called for.
Cadeac recommends oil of cade, tinctures of cantharides, or a tar
liniment made with alcohol, as a supersedent to produce an active
inflammation and displace the unhealthy eczematous one. The agent
is rubbed upon the skin and the resulting scabs are left for a week
when it is washed off with tepid water and the skin is found healthy
or greatly improved. As a rule a second dressing of the tar is then
applied. Müller strongly recommends Hebra’s treatment with green
soap and alcohol (2 ∶ 1) to be rubbed on the affected surface and
washed off the following day when all scales and crusts will come off
with little trouble. He follows with zinc oxide or lotions of mercuric
chloride or silver nitrate. Friedberger and Fröhner use cresol 2 parts,
green soap 2 parts, alcohol 1 part; also creosote in alcohol (1:10) or in
paraffin (1 ∶ 10). Zuill looks upon sulphur iodide as virtually a
specific: sulphur iodide 1 part, sublimed sulphur 7 parts, cod liver oil
7 parts. This is applied once and repeated at the end of ten days, if
necessary. Application is made to the whole skin healthy and
diseased alike, and rarely requires to be repeated.
Ichthyol is commended by Müller in cases which show great
cutaneous thickening with cracks and fissures. It may be made with
water (1:5) or in glycerine or lanolin of the same strength. Müller
combines it with lime water and olive oil and applies it daily.
Other agents in use are salicylic acid in olive oil (1:3): chrysarobin
in paraffin ointment (1:4): naphthalin or naphthol (1:10): resorcin in
water (2:100)
LICHEN. HEAT PAPULES. PRICKLY HEAT.
Horses, cattle, sheep and dogs suffer in hot season or hot stables. Nervous
temperament. Delicate skin. Over-driving. Heating foods. Cold water when heated.
Unwholesome food. Indigestion. Chronic affections of stomach, liver, kidneys, etc.
Symptoms: Clusters of small papules on neck, back, croup, or thighs, crest, tail,
exudate concretes, lifts hairs from follicles, depilation in round spots, or patches,
abrasions, ulceration, corrugated skin. Diagnosis; sudden eruption, its isolation,
subsidence on the coming of cold weather, and re-appearance with the hot, intense
itching. Treatment: As in eczema. Protect against friction, give shade, and spray
with cold water.
Under this name has been described a papular eruption occurring

in horses, cattle, sheep and dogs in the hot season, but also
occasionally, in winter, in hot, confined stables.
It is seen especially on the neck, back, croup and thighs, is
common in fine bred horses with delicate skins, and nervous
temperament, and is pre-eminently a disease of hot weather. Over-
driving, heating food, a drink of cold water when heated or
indigestion connected with unsuitable food may be the occasion of its
irruption or tend to perpetuate it. In the same way different chronic
affections of the stomach, liver, kidneys or other organs may be
causative factors.
Symptoms. The affection usually begins with a few minute
papules, isolated or in clusters, which dry up into scales or crusts.
These are mostly situated at the roots of the mane or tail or on the
sides of the neck, withers or trunk, and as a rule produce a pruritus,
resembling that of scabies in its intensity. When the exudate
agglutinates a tuft of hair, enclosing it in a dense crust, the hairs may
be lifted from their follicles and thus small, round spots of depilation
appear. If recovery ensues and new hair starts, it differs in color from
the old and gives a dappled appearance to the skin. In many cases,
however, the points of eruption and encrustation become confluent
and an extensive area of bareness, with more or less abrasion, and
even ulceration may be formed.
Megnin mentions two cases and the author can adduce another in
which the eruption appeared in vertical lines, so that the skin of the
trunk was raised in a series of elevated lines or ridges, running
transversely to the body, like the stripes of a zebra. In the author’s
case the skin seemed to be thrown into a series of folds to the
production of which the cutaneous muscle evidently took part. The
itching was doubtless the immediate cause.
Diagnosis is based largely on the suddenness of the eruption; on
its limitation to a given area instead of spreading from the primary
seat of invasion as in acariasis; on the fact that it is usually confined
to a single animal and has not spread with the use of the same brush,
comb and rubber; and on the absence of acari and vegetable
parasites from the affected parts. The absence of chicken roosts or
manure is another valuable indication.
Prognosis. Appearing in spring or early summer, the disease is
liable to persist until the advent of cold weather in fall, and even after
a winter’s intermission there is a strong tendency to its re-
appearance on the following spring or summer. The intolerable
itching interferes seriously with docility and steadiness in harness,
and the loss of hair renders the subject very unsightly, and as a
family or driving horse practically useless.
Treatment. As in cases of eczema the general and special causes
should be corrected by hygienic and general medicinal measures,
laxatives, diuretics, antacids, tonics, and in the advanced stages,
alteratives coming in as important factors. (See under acute eczema).
Great care should be taken to prevent irritation by pressure of the
harness, and shade and daily cold spraying may be availed of.
PITYRIASIS: SQUAMOUS SKIN DISEASE: HORSE.
Dry, scaly, or powdery affection. Causes: Fine, thin, dry skin with little hair, race,
Arab, Barb, racer, trotter, nervous temperament, age, dry summer heat, dry winter
cold, foul skin, caustic soaps, ingestion of salt, iodides, bromides, etc.,
derangement of internal organs bacteria or cryptogams. Symptoms: scurfy patches,
general or circumscribed, where little hair is, where harness rubs, depilation of
ears, crest, tail, shoulder, back. Diagnosis, from eczema by lack of pruritus, of rapid
extension, of thickening of the skin, from acariasis by absence of acarus.
Treatment: correct disorder of stomach, liver, or kidneys: green, succulent or
nutritive food; alkalies; arsenic; tonics; locally potash soaps, ointments of tar, birch
oil, creolin, creosote, naphthalin, lysol, mercury, iodine, salicylic acid, zinc oxide.
This is a skin disease characterized by excessive production of

epidermic scales, and depilation without any attendant elevation of
the skin. The desquamation may be of fine scales like wheat bran, or
of a fine dust like flour.
Causes. The disease is especially characteristic of animals in which
the skin is naturally fine, thin and dry and covered sparsely with hair.
It is therefore more common in the Arabian, Barb, English racer,
American trotter and other breeds of a nervous organization than in
the heavier draught breeds. Old horses in which the skin is drier and
the hair thinner are more subject to it than the young. Again it has
been especially noticed in the heats of summer with thin coat and a
withering action of radiant heat on the skin, and less frequently in
winter when the blood is driven from the surface by cold. Much also
depends at times on the lack of grooming, on the accumulation of
dust and dried up secretions about the roots of the hair, and on
washing with caustic irritant soaps especially in long-haired regions.
It has even been claimed that the ingestion of salt, potassium iodide,
or bromide, etc., contributes to the affection. There is undoubtedly a
certain individual predisposition to the disease, shown as already
stated in certain breeds, but also inherent in particular families and
even animals, and associated not only with the character of the skin,
but also probably with variations in the activities and products of
various internal organs. In man pityriasis versicolor is associated
with a specific fungus, and in the horse Megnin has described cases
in which the surface of the skin and especially the hair follicles show
a mass of epidermic cells mingled with mycelium and an abundance
of spores.
Symptoms. The scurfy product and depilation may be found in
patches scattered indiscriminately over the body (generalized), or
confined to particular regions (circumscribed) as to the head, ear,
crest, tail, or the parts that receive the friction of the harness. It may
commence as a dry, rigid, state of the skin under the headstall with
loss of hair and the excess of dandruff. From this or from another
point the extension takes place slowly and with comparatively little
irritation or itching. The hair is pulled out with great ease, and from
its spontaneous evulsion, more or less baldness appears progressing
slowly from the original centres of the disease. It may leave the whole
crest divested of the mane, or the tail of its hairs (rat tail), or the ears
may become bare and scurfy. Again the parts subject to friction like
the back of the ears, the crest, in front of the shoulder, or the seat of
the saddle may be the main seats of depilation and baldness.
It is to be distinguished from dry eczema mainly by its tendency to
spread over a larger area in place of confining itself to circumscribed
patches, and more particularly by the absence of the marked
thickness and rigidity of the skin which characterize eczema. From
acariasis it is distinguished by the lack of the intense itching, of the
tendency to more or less moist exudation and above all by the
absence of the acari.
Treatment. It is well to correct any disorder of any of the internal
organs, notably of the stomach, liver or kidneys, and to encourage a
free circulation in and secretion from the skin. To fill the latter
indication green food, ensilage, roots, sloppy mashes of bran, oilcake
and the like may be given. Also bicarbonates of soda or potash or
other alkaline diuretics, and in certain obstinate cases a course of
arsenic. The alkalies tend to eliminate offensive and irritant matters
and to lessen the irritation in the skin. A course of tonics is often
valuable.
Locally Cadeac recommends potash soaps rubbed well into the
affected parts. If this should fail some of the stimulant ointments as
of tar, oil of tar, oil of white birch, oil of cade, creoline, creosote,
lysol, naphthalin, may be tried. Megnin strongly recommends a
combination of ointment of biniodide of mercury, 1 part, to
mercurial ointment 3 parts. Others advocate salicylic acid (10 to
20%) mixed with Lassar paste which is compounded of 1 part each of
zinc oxide and starch in 4 parts vaseline.
PITYRIASIS IN CATTLE.
On neck and dewlap; Causes: anæmia, debility, spoiled food, starvation,

constitutional predisposition. Symptoms: shedding hair and scales without skin
thickening, or itching. Treatment: green soap, tar, creolin, lysol, naphthalin, etc.
Alkaline lotions: generally nutritive, succulent food, bitters, iron, arsenic, etc.
This is noticed especially on the neck and dewlap in connection

with anæmia, low condition, unsuitable, innutritious and spoiled
fodder and a constitutional predisposition. It has the same general
characters as in the horse, an excessive production of dandruff or dry
scales without any marked change in the thickness of the skin or in
its circulation. Treatment consists in the application of green soap,
pure or medicated, with tar, creolin, lysol, or other empyreumatic
product. Lotions of carbonate or bicarbonate of potash are often
effective. Any disorder of digestion, or of the urinary or hepatic
functions, or of general nutrition should be corrected, and in most
cases, a course of bitters, with iron and arsenic is desirable. A good,
indoor hygiene or a run on succulent grass in the open air may be
resorted to with benefit.
PITYRIASIS IN THE DOG AND CAT.
Head, neck and back of overfed, old house dogs. Symptoms: floury dandruff,
with little itching or redness, on limited areas; in cats over the whole back, where
stroking causes electric development, the collecting of the hair in tufts, and
insufferable irritation. Hair constantly shedding without necessarily bare patches.
Treatment: simpler, restricted diet, correct internal disorders, laxatives, arsenic,
locally solutions of alkalies, borax, potassium sulphide, sulphur iodide, baths.
In dogs this affection attacks especially the head, neck and back of
pet and house dogs gorged with dainties, and particularly in those
that are already becoming aged. The affected parts are covered with a
floury or branlike product lying upon a dry surface usually devoid of
irritation or congestion, though it may be distinctly congested and
reddened, and even the seat of pruritus. The affection is usually
confined to limited areas, more or less destitute of hair, and without
showing a disposition to active extension. In the cat, however, it may
affect the whole dorsal aspect of the body, being associated with
extreme electrical susceptibility, so that on being stroked the hair at
once collects in tufts, crackles, and in the darkness sparkles, and the
animal at first fawning on the hand, will fly at and scratch it after a
few strokes. The scaly product is excessive and drops off abundantly
when handled, without, however, leaving thin or bare patches.
Treatment is mainly in the line of a simpler and more natural diet,
the avoidance of sugar and cake, the correction of disorders of the
digestion, or of the hepatic or urinary functions, the exhibition of an
occasional laxative, and of alteratives, especially Fowler’s solution.
Locally, alkaline lotions, carbonate or bicarbonate of soda or
potash, borax, sulphide of potassium and iodide of sulphur are often
useful. A moderately strong solution of common salt with glycerine
in water is an useful alternate, and a warm saline or bran bath may
soften the skin and modify its nutrition.
CONTAGIOUS PUSTULAR DERMATITIS IN THE
HORSE. ACNE.
History. Cause: bacillus. Symptoms; incubation 6 to 15 days, skin tenderness,

heat, swelling like peas, hazel nuts, vesicles, pustules, exudation, concretions
among hairs, depilation, healing in 15 days. Leaves white spots with lighter hair.
Extension by grooming: general eruption: subcutaneous swelling, sloughs, delayed
healing. Lymphangitis. Diagnosis: from chaps and bruises, from horse pox, from
impetiginous eczema, from urticaria, from farcy. Prevention, quarantine new
horses, separate diseased, disinfect skins of the unaffected, disinfect stables and
harness. Treatment: soapy wash: germicide lotions.
This has been largely described as an imported disease thus on the

European continent it is the English variola, and in England the
Canadian contagious pustular affection. Yet the first authentic
account dates back to 1841–2 when Goux found it attacking an entire
squadron of the French army in a fortnight. Axe described it in
England in imported Canadian horses in 1877, and Weber observed
it in the same year on the continent, where it was attributed to
imported English horses. In 1883 it was noted by Schindelka, in 1884
Siedamgrotzky inoculated it from the horse on two rabbits and two
Guinea pigs, and to horse and goat. The rodents developed a
“malignant œdema” at the point of inoculation and died in six days.
Grawitz and Dieckerhoff cultivated the bacillus on ox or horse serum
and found it 2μ in length, dividing by segmentation into round or
ovoid refractive spores, which may remain connected as diplococci or
short chains and which color deeply in fuchsin. It grows most rapidly
at a temperature of 37° C., growth ceases at 17° C., and it is destroyed
in half an hour at 80° to 90° C. Preserved, dry, it remained virulent
for four weeks and produced the characteristic eruption when
rubbed on the skin of the horse, ox, dog, sheep or rabbit. It proved
fatal to all rodents, including white mice. The microbe is found
abundantly in the pus and crusts and is easily shown when these are
treated with potash. It produces no putrid fermentation.
Symptoms. When inoculated it had an incubation of six to fifteen
days followed in mild cases by swelling heat and tenderness of the
skin with collection of the hair in erect tufts. Next day there are
rounded elevations like peas or hazel nuts, discrete or confluent on
the swollen patches. These nodules, at first firm and resistant soon
become soft in the center, forming vesicles and finally pustules,
which burst in five or six hours and exude an abundant liquid which
concretes in a thick amber colored mass. The hairs in the center of
the resulting raw surface are easily detached leaving bare spots the
size of a dime, with often times a slough attached in the center. When
this is finally eliminated the surface gradually cicatrices and recovery
may be complete in fifteen days. The skin remains long dappled from
the partial discoloration of the epidermis in the seat of the pustules.
The malady is local and hyperthermia is rarely seen. The
submaxillary and pharyngeal lymph glands are usually swollen and
indurated, but this disappears speedily after the subsidence of the
eruption.
In certain cases the extent of the primary eruption is greater from
the first, or it extends through reinfection by combs, brushes and
rubbers used in grooming or by friction by the harness, the affected
skin is hot, painful, congested and thickened throughout its entire
substance, the pustules are much more numerous, often confluent,
and may even implicate the subcutaneous connective tissue. The
crusts formed on the sores may acquire a breadth of 1 inch to 1½
inch. Considerable abscesses may be formed and the lymph glands
communicating with the affected part are hot and swollen. Even after
the opening and discharge of the abscess, the base of the sore
remains indurated and indolent, and centres of softening and
caseation may appear so that healing is delayed for one or two
months or more. In such cases extensive cicatrices remain after
recovery. Lymphangitis is a common accompaniment with even
abscess of the lymphatic glands.
Diagnosis. From chafing and bruising by the harness, this is easily
recognized by its appearing also on other parts than those covered by
the harness, by the development of the characteristic pustules, by its
following a regular cycle of eruption and subsidence covering a
definite period of usually 15 days, and by the indisposition to
maintain itself indefinitely under the friction of the harness.
From horsepox it is distinguished by the habitual avoidance of the
common seats of election of that disease (heels, lips, nostrils, buccal
and nasal mucosæ, lips of the vulva), by the absence of hyperthermia,
and by the comparative absence of the remarkable amber-like
concretions which characterize horsepox in the lower limb.
From impetiginous eczema it is diagnosed by its contagious and
inoculable properties, by the absence of the early falling of the hair
from the circumscribed rounded nodules, and by the absence or
moderate character of the pruritus which is usually intense in the
eczema.
The eruption of urticaria appears much more suddenly, shows no
tendency to form vesicles nor pustules, is not inoculable, and
subsides often as suddenly as it appeared when the irritant food
materials have been expelled from the alimentary canal.
From acute farcy it is distinguished by the moderate degree of the
implication of the lymph vessels and glands, by the white creamy
nature of the contents of the pustules, as compared with the glairy,
oily nature of the farcy discharge, by the absence of coincident nasal
ulcers, submaxillary nodular swellings or other lesions of glanders,
by its short course and tendency to spontaneous early recovery, and
by the absence of reaction under the mallein test.
In all cases the known prevalence of the contagious pustular
dermatitis in the locality, or the introduction of strange horses which
exhibit sequelæ of the lesions will assist greatly in the diagnosis.
Prevention. If animals are introduced from an infected or
unknown locality they should be kept apart from others for two
weeks. In a stable where it has already appeared the diseased and
healthy should be carefully separated and the skins of those as yet
unaffected may be washed with a solution of mercuric chloride (1 ∶
1000) or creolin (1 ∶ 100). The walls of the stable should be
whitewashed, and all stable utensils disinfected in boiling water or
one of the above named antiseptics. The harness demands particular
attention.
Treatment. This is essentially germicide. After a soapy wash, any
one of the usual disinfectants may be used: aluminum acetate, (1 ∶

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The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and

new haven and london

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,

Set in Fournier type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941424

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992

Protagonists; Being Buyers of Books

William Alfred Jones (1817–1900): American essayist, friend of the Duyckinck

Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816–1878): American man of letters (essayist and

George Bancroft (1800–1891): American historian; cofounder (with Joseph

Richard Charles Jackson (1851–1923): Eccentric English bibliomaniac who

The Lamb Circle

Robert Southey (1774–1843): Literary antiquarian, bibliomaniac, and British

Book Actors; Being Among the Sixty Association Copies

Matthew Prior, Miscellaneous Works (London, 1740). Robert Balmanno,

Now, Lamb . . . never much cared for collecting or collectors, properly

is one whose chronicle is of general interest because the people involved

in France, riots in England, ominous heaving around ancient volcanoes in

bardomaniac, the English expatriate William Evans Burton—actor, theater

New York City at midcentury was witnessing unprecedented growth as

businessmen. While Welford fielded questions across a range of ancient and

Bartlett & Welford

The Lambs and the Moxons

by S.T. Coleridge,” “Poems, by Charles Lloyd,” and “Poems, | By |Charles

This also affects the young and is characterized by the successive

Zschokke describes a disease of this kind affecting the ears, back

In none of our domestic animals is this condition so common as in

While acute eczema may recover permanently under hygienic

Under this name has been described a papular eruption occurring

This is a skin disease characterized by excessive production of

On neck and dewlap; Causes: anæmia, debility, spoiled food, starvation,

This is noticed especially on the neck and dewlap in connection

History. Cause: bacillus. Symptoms; incubation 6 to 15 days, skin tenderness,

This has been largely described as an imported disease thus on the

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