A Classic Sporting Book (With Recipes)
Pike!
Henry William Herbert (1807-1858) was a British expatriate in Canada and the United States, exiled by his family after a youthful scandal. He tried to make a living as a novelist, but his historical fiction made little impression on readers or critics. As Frank Forester, however, he was an originator of the genre of sporting literature in North America, and the book at hand is one of the most notable products of the fictitious Mr. Forester.
Details of our copy can be found here. It is bound in a very appropriate style, with gilt ornaments of fishing paraphernalia on the spine.
“Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing” is not a comprehensive work, but it succeeds very well in conveying the author’s enthusiasm for what is best in North American angling: salmon, brook trout, pike and a few other fishes are discussed at length, and illustrated very vividly (most of the illustrations are by the author). Together with Herbert’s works on hunting and horsemanship, these fishing tales established sporting books as a viable and respected branch of American writing.
Here is the recipe for salmon à la Forester:
MY OWN RECEIPT FOR BOILING SALMON
If you are ever so lucky as to catch a Salmon, where incontinently you can proceed to cook him, that is to say, in the wilderness, within ten yards of the door of your shantee, with the fire burning and the pot boiling — good!
Stun him at once by a heavy blow on the head; crimp him by a succession of cuts on each side, through the muscle, quite down to the back-bone, with a very sharp knife, in slashes parallel to the gill-cover. Then place him for ten minutes in a cold spring, or under the jet of a water-fall. In the meantime, keep your pot boiling, nay, but screeching with intense heat, filled with brine strong enough to bear an egg. Therein immerse him, having cut out the gills, opened the belly, and washed the inside, and boil him at the rate of seven minutes and a half to the pound; dish him, and, serving him with no sauce save a tureenful of the water in which he has been boiled, proceed to eat him, with no other condiment than a little salt and the slightest squeeze of a lemon.
Front cover
Out with the New and in with the Old: The 1722 Bede
1722 Bede
The 1722 Cambridge edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is credited to John Smith, a priest attached to Durham Cathedral, but it would not have come to press if not for the work of Smith’s son, George, who completed the work after his father’s death in 1715. However the work was shared, the two produced a much better text than had previously been available in print.
More details about our copy here.
Title page
Whereas earlier editions and translations of Bede were based on one family of manuscripts (the C texts, as grouped by Colgrave and Mynors), Smith’s edition represented a much fuller sampling of manuscripts. These included the particularly important Moore MS., one of the earliest extant versions of the text, donated by George I to the library of Cambridge in 1715.
Earlier editions of the Ecclesiastical History had accumulated many errors, omissions and spurious additions. In the Preface to the Cambridge edition, George Smith describes his father’s frustration at this state of affairs, which he hoped to correct by consulting as many manuscripts as possible. However, he soon found that the manuscripts themselves varied widely, so that he was in danger of producing an unmanageable multitude of variants in the text. He solved this problem by a rigorous test of priority, trimming away much of the material from later copies to arrive at a usable critical text. The passage on methodology ends with a nice maxim for the editor of medieval manuscripts, which might have been coined by either Smith, or both: Remove readings found only in later manuscripts, restore the readings from the oldest .
Moore MS., 128 verso
While the Smiths had access to a number of early copies of Bede, the Moore manuscript is the star of this show, and George Smith transcribes the passage from the Moore MS. which demonstrates its age (no later than 737). More information about the text generally and the Smith edition in particular can be found in the Colgrave and Mynors edition published by Oxford in 1969: S41537
Fans of the Venerable Bede in search of an immersive experience should take note of Bede’s World, a museum at the site of the former monastery of Jarrow, which includes an Anglo-Saxon demonstration farm and the ongoing excavation of various medieval buildings.
1722 Bede: Engraved half-title page
Arthur Dale Trendall and South Italian Vase painting
- Medeia and child, by the Ixion painter (Louvre)
Two landmark works by the art historian A.D. Trendall:
The Red-Figured Vases of Lucania, Campania and Sicily (2 volumes, with 3 supplements). $1,525.00 Details
and
The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia (3 volumes, with a supplement). $1,525.00 Details
A multi-volume catalogue of ancient art is usually the work of a community of scholars, often distributed across a number of institutions, nations and continents. The Corpus Vasorum and Corpus Signorum series are such works: monumental achievements, but clearly resting on the shoulders of many.
The red-figured vase painting of South Italy, on the other hand, was collected, organised and published chiefly by A.D. Trendall (d. 1995). The two works listed above comprise the largest part of this life’s work, although they are supplemented by a number of shorter volumes. The systematic description of these paintings created a coherent field of study, clearly identifying many artists and local styles and greatly easing scholars’ access to a wealth of information about art and daily life in the greater Greek world.
A. D. Trendall was a native of New Zealand and was educated there and at Cambridge. He spent his academic career in Australia, at the University of Sydney, the Australian National University and La Trobe University. His long and highly productive years of scholarship were interrupted only by his wartime service, when he served in a code-breaking unit attached to the Australian Navy. One can imagine that the mind that brought order to the thousands of vases and fragments in his field was a welcome addition to a team of cryptographers and signals analysts.
More information can be found at the website of the A.D. Trendall Research Centre, La Trobe University, where Trendall’s personal library is housed, together with his vast photographic record of Greek vases. In addition to the two major works noted above, Powell’s frequently handles other works by Trendall, such as:
The Red-Figured Vases of Paestum
Red figure vases of South Italy and Sicily: A handbook
Apulian Red-Figured Vase-Paintings of the Plain Style
South Italian Vase Painting
