Brief Recap
In the last blog, we brief discussed how I found the book “Voyages Around the World” and how this book appeals to me. In this entry, I am going to talk about the bibliographical information about this book so we can understand this book’s history even deeper.
This is the year of 1784, 8 years from the end of Captain Cook’s voyage, the book “Voyages Around the World” written by George William Anderson was published by Alexander Hogg.
Publisher
Alex was a publisher who intended to make book more affordable to people:
- Most of the other books about Cook’s journey costed an average of 20 guineas-equivalent to 3250 USD today (relative to the increase in price of the other commodities) while for this particular book that we are talking about, it costed around 76 pence-equivalent to 49 USD today (using the same method used above), which is only 1.5 percent of the market price at that time!
By searching on ESTC, there were a total of 4 editions of this book:
About 4 editions were made and were all published in London and printed by the same people.
Since my book was published in 1784, it’s very likely that it might be the 1st edition. As I suppose for this particular book that is cheaper than the others in the market, they might need to make more editions and sell more in order to make more moneys.
Author
For Anderson, he was believed to be pseudonym of the publisher-Alex. Hogg, and “Voyage Around the World” is very likely to be the first book he got published. The two other books written by him and were published are “Seaforth songs: ballads and sketches, with several illustrations” (1890) and “Lighting Pamphlets” (1800).
By looking through the title pages of these two books, they are not very relevant to “Voyages Around the World”; this means he wasn’t an author who only writes certain type of literatures.
Printer
Different from the author and publisher, I didn’t really find the name of the printer for this book, but I did see the print shop’s address on ESTC multiple times.
After I put in this address to the google map, this is the place I found:
Even though this place is no longer a printing shop or any building related to literature, it’s not hard to imagine how popular this place was 250 years ago when all the book trades and printings were going on.
Binder
In order to bind the printed pages together, we need a binder to do this. However, there doesn’t seem to be any information about binder that I found since I didn’t even find the printer’s name. However, I suppose that the printer isn’t the same as the publisher & author since on the last page of the text, there’s a page stating the procedure for binding the book:
Reader
The target audience of this book is very wide.
As described on the first page, this book is available for people who want to know more about Captain Cook’s voyage and the discoveries he made during this voyage. There’s no explicit limit on the type of people eligible for reading this book.
Previous owner of the book
After talking about the origin of this book close to its birth time, it’s also interesting to understand how this book came to Colby.
Though I didn’t find the exact person who took this book oversea, I successfully found the owner of this book before the book came to Colby.
According to a tag on the first page of this book, this book was given by Miss Dorothy Dennett after James Vaughan Dennett in February 1965 died in 1965.
This is Mr. James Vaughan Dennett, who used to be one of the illustrative presidents of the Saco Museum.
Saco Museums
Along with this book, Miss Dennett also donated a lot of other books, and due to her generosity, we are able to have some of these books in special collection to study about.
Hyperlinks
Info about publisher and author
Info about currency conversion
The other book the author wrote #1
The other book the author wrote #2