John Bagford

Bibliography

John Bagford and His Collections, by W. Y. Fletcher, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1898)

https://archive.org/details/transactions04bibluoft

Bagford -- brought up as a shoemaker; believed to have written "Art of Shoemaking and Historicall Account of Clouthing of ye foot," Harley manuscripts

employed by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, Sir Hans Sloane, and John Moore, Bishop of Ely

participated in 1707 in founding of Society of Antiquaries

amassed two great collections: ballads (Bagford Ballads), and collection of title pages, fragments of books, specimens of paper, catalogues, book-plates, drawing, engravings, bindings, advertisements, and various interesting and curious pieces"

was going to write a history of printing; 1707, published "Proposals for printing an Historical Account of that most universally celebrated, as well as useful Art of Typography

this proposal is printed on a half-sheet, with a Life of William Caxton, first printer in the Abbey of Westminster and a list of his books

Bagford's Notes on Bookbinding, by Cyril Davenport (1903)

Wanley describes Bagford's collection in Philosophical Transactions; later by A. W. Pollard

1707, Bagford attempts to secure subscriptions to his history of printing (with help of Sloane and Wanley); outline of project printed in Philosophical Transactions 1706-7 and in "Proposals for printing an historical account of that most universally celebrated, as well as useful art of typography," a pamphlet to attract subscribers with life of Caxton attached

"Of booke binding ancient" (Harl. 5910 f 131 a) -- vellum rolls and waxen diptychs; boards, pasteboards, boards made of old ropes, and sewing and headbandings; chained books are condemned

"Of Booke binding modourne" - explains processes of collating, folding, beating the leaves, ruling the books with red; at beginning of Harl 5943 are 20 pgs of thick blue paper, pasted with various speciens of bindings and MS notes; Bagford's handwritten notes on pg 8-9; "some [bindings] may have been added since, but none have been taken away" (126)

John Bagford as Collector and Disseminator of Manuscript Fragments, by Milton McC. Gatch (1985)

detailed bibliographical account of various Bagfordian collections and their locations

Two volumes: fragmenta manuscripta at Unniversity of Missour at columbia, Fragmenta varia at Cambridge; deposited around 1707 in Thomas Tenison's library with invitation to interested persons to inspect the materials; "Re-bound and re-mounted in the mid-nineteenth century, the Fragmenta manuscripta and Fragmenta varia were sold to separate buyers when the Tenison library was broken up in 1861; and both passed through the hands of several different owners before reaching their present repositories." (95)

Bagford "famous (or infamous -- depending on one's view of how he got his materials) mainly as a collector of title-pages from printed books" -- at least 544 pre-1701 items in Bagford's title page collection that aren't in STC

article is about how Bagford obtained his mss and fragments

"The fact that Bagford deposited the Fragmenta manuscripta and varia in the Tenison library as a kind of advertisement for his history of printing may suggest that, in addition to selling fragments in the usual market, he made gifts of fragment collections or sold them to potential patrons." (97)

see spreadsheets for more on mss and Bagfordiana tracked by Gatch

see Gatch also for list of subscribers to Bagford's project to complete a history of printing; account book at MS Harley 5998 helps verify information from subscribers; also includes at fol. 104 a printed blank form for subscribers to fill out

at MS Harley 5910.iii, fol 120, is "Of Several sorts of Ink not only used to write with; but Printers Ink", where Bagford "acknowledges his indebtedness as a collector to the respected bookseller Christopher Bateman --

"at all times hath given me the liberty of looking over when he hath bought any parcels, & for his time he hath had more good and valuable books pass through his hands than all the Booksellers in England. Besides he always gave me notice when he had any waste boosk to sell, & freely gave me Liberty to take out of them what I thought fit, as the blank leaves at the beginning of them, old pieces of MSS, Titles, Frontispieces, borders, Printers' devies, & by this civility hath very much added to my collection." (qtd 107)

where did he get his fragments?

"As Bagford's own account would lead one to believe, the majority of his materials came from bookbindings. Bagford's friend Humfrey Wanley had understood the potential value of the pieces from manuscripts taht were frequently used in the bindings of books 'in former ages'; and, like Wanley, Bagford (who preserved a copy of Wanley's paper on the subject in one of his albums) saw nothing wrong with dismembering bindings to retrieve the leaves and strips of manuscript preserved therein. At least seven cases can be documented in which fragmenta from Bagford's collection come from the same manuscripts as fragmenta in other collections. In four of these instances, the non-Bagford fragmenta elsewhere cannot at present be connected with Bagford, and it is unlikely suhc a conneciton will be discovered." (108)

outlines other fragments that are connected to other fragments

"Making allowance for the standards of his time, one must probably conclude that John Bagford's own account of his acquisition of his collection is correct and that, with regard to manuscripts at least, he can be credited with having preserved fragments and leaves that would otherwise almost certainly have been lost. Most of his manuscript fragmenta came from bindings, and they derived from volumes that ahd been cut up in the sixteenth century. A few others came from codices that were almost certainly pillaged -- usually for their decorative pages -- before Bagford came into contact with them. The cases in which his activitie are most questionable concern leaves from already-damaged or partially incomplete mss, which Bagfrod may have removed before selling the manuscripts theemselves to two of his most distinguisehd patrons, Bishop Moore and Samuel Pepys. It is difficult to imagine, in view of the apparently high esteem in which those two patrons held him, however, that Bagford would have damaged books he was selling to Moore and Pepys in ways that would also have damaged his relationship with people on whom his livelihood depended." (114)

John Bagford, Bookseller and Antiquary, by Milton McC. Gatch (1986)

19c saw Bagford as a biblioclast, "yet balanced scholarship in the present century has found Bagford to be a credible dealer and collector, despite his manifest shortcomings" (150)

despite Dibdin's believe the Wanley must have edited Bagford's proposal for a history of printing, surviving evidence shows that "Bagford was very much in control of the composition and development of this descriptive advertisement for and sample of the history of printing" (161)

Gatch identifies mss of "Proposal"

"Despite all this evidence, it is difficult for a modern scholar to believe that Bagford could ever have produced a satisfactory history of the very difficult subject of the technology and bibliography of printing. Yet it is necessary to respect the opinion of contemporaries of the magnitude of Hearne, Sloane, and Wanley that the collection was an important one and that Bagford himself, despite his manifest limitations, was an impressive and learned figure." (161)

seems strange today to have title-pages as primary source for Bagford's research; but "it should be recalled that B's title-page collection contained some 3,600 items printed in English alone. Of these some 800 items -- 544 of them printed before 1701 -- are not recorded in the short-title catalogues" (164)

autograph memorandum from Bagford on history of printed editions of Chaucer's works; helped stimulate Urry's edition of 1721

On Antiquaries

• Antiquaries, book collectors, and the circles of learning, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (1996)
• Antiquaries : the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century Britain, by Rosemary Sweet (2004)
• Making history : antiquaries in Britain, 1707-2007 (2007)
• The trophies of time: English antiquarians of the seventeenth century, Graham Parry (2007)
• Antiquaries & archaists : the past in the past, the past in the present, edited by Megan Aldrich and Robert J. Wallis (2009)
• The Antiquary: John Aubrey's historical scholarship (2016)
• Papers of British antiquaries and historians

on British historiography of the tiem:

• Noelle Gallagher, Historical literatures: writing about the past in England, 1660-1740
• The Social circulation of the past: English historical culture, 1500-1730, by D. R. Woolf (2003)
• D. R. Woolf, Reading history in early modern England (2000)
• The historical imagination in early modern Britain: history, rhetoric, and fiction, 1500-1800, ed. Donald Kelley, David Harris Sacks (1997)

Copyright and histories of printing

see Johns 1998 chapter 5; points out that there was a need to tell the history of printing because of its relationship to powers of Stationers' Company and copyright law; was printing always common, or was it owned by the King? brought to England by Caxton independently, or as part of crown-funded expedition to steal it from Continental printers? competing stories of the history of printing as a technology would be used to adjudicate who had the right to print, who had the right to copy

Bagford's proposal is mentioned briefly in Johns but not examined in full

Other histories of printing at the time

<< also look at Royal Society, Cl.P. 17/45, Proof sheet from an Arabic book on the art of printing amongst the Turks: https://collections.royalsociety.org/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=Browse2.tcl&dsqItem=Cl.P/17/45&dsqKey=RefNo

https://collections.royalsociety.org/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=Browse2.tcl&dsqItem=Cl.P/17/45&dsqKey=RefNo

Richard Smyth, "Of the first Invention of the Art of Printing", BL Ms. Sloane 772

Christopher Bateman, printer

Seems to have a close relationship with Bateman; see Gatch 1985

In Dictionary of Printers and Printing, Bateman says he has suffered much from people taking leaves out of the books in his shop: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3O8DAAAAQAAJ&lpg=PA596&ots=5vf9-ycHqt&dq=christopher%20bateman%20bookseller&pg=PA596#v=onepage&q&f=false

Adriaan Beverland, pornographer

Adrian Beverland seems to have feuded with Bagford, as well as Michael Bull and the publisher Pierce Tempest, who produced Cryes of the City of London; see bio here, and "Discovery of Three Imposters": http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=73751

Mentioned in the Biographical History of England (1775): https://archive.org/stream/biographicalhist04gran/#page/96/mode/2up/search/hadrian

Feminization of collecting

Bagford's Essay on the invention of printing was satirized by King as "An Essay on the Invention of Samplers; communicated by Mrs. Judith Bagford: with an Account of her Collections of the Same." Oddly, if you search ECCO for "Bagford," this comes up, but as a page or leaf tacked to the end of Mary Chudleigh's "Ladies defence," a feminist poem! Why? Would have to consult the original at the BL. Prob just microfilm fluke.

Johns 1998 cites this -- see 352n78

Tracking fragments: possible case studies

Fragment 177 in Fragmenta manuscripta at University of Missouri comes from Pepys 2030, which also has note at beginning from Bagford about the book; this same ms also has initials cut out and sewn back in: http://vm133.lib.berkeley.edu:8080/xtf22/search?rmode=digscript;smode=basic;text=bagford;docsPerPage=1;fullview=yes;startDoc=178

manuscripts

Lambeth Palace LIbrary MS 1742, misc. papers, includes Bagford's Proposals for printing an historical account of typography: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/1154b8d4-7183-42e7-bbb0-1d0ceea7e04c

Cambridge UL, Dd X 56-57, MS History of Typography and account of first English impressions of the Bible: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/N13645175

Bodleian, MS Rawl D 375, papers relating to the history of printing: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/N13967649