Posies and Pirates by
Alan Borer
The
book was in a pile of scruffy-looking donations to the library. Typical book stock at the end of their
usefulness, made all the more sad because of the looming de-emphasis on the
printed word. But there were a couple of
older items, and I took a closer look. A
math book from the 1890s; a battered McGuffey’s Third Reader (an old edition
but the date was unreadable), and the front cover of a book, the rest of which
was at the bottom of the pile. A scan of
the title page is below.
Now
denominated OCLC# 191310421 in Worldcat, the central computer database of the
world’s book titles, The Bouquet by
“A Lady” was a “gift book” of the early Victorian era. Gift books were books sold for use as
gifts. Often richly decorated with steel
engravings and florid prose and verse, they were sources of sentimental
reflection for the person to whom they were gifted. “…most such books made a general appeal to
those who wished to bestow an “elegant” offering indicative of “refined”
sentiment.” [The Cambridge History
of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Volume
XVI. Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part
I., XX. Magazines, Annuals, and Gift-books, 1783–1850, p. 21]
Who “A Lady”
was is unclear. The printer was Benjamin
B. Mussey, but the verso shows the name of Oliver L. Perkins, the one who
“Entered According to an Act of Congress,” and thus secured copyright. Perkins was a Boston bookseller, and one of
the first book merchants to use the term “antiquarian” to describe his stock of
merchandise. Details of Perkins’s life
are sketchy. He was born in Maine in
1808, when Maine was yet a province of Massachusetts. In the 1850 Census he was listed as a “bookseller”
with a wife and four children, plus two live-in servants, both women and one
born in Ireland.
Other books produced by Oliver
Perkins can be tracked via bibliographies on or off line. He brought out an edition of the 1678 classic
The History of the Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin. This
classic book of piracy on the high seas is old enough to have no copyright
restrictions on reprints. English
editions are still readily available, and despite the temptation to refer to
them as “pirated editions,” they are all perfectly legal.
Another book, The Pearl Box was published by Oliver Perkins about 1851. Written (compiled?) by “A Pastor,” it claimed
to offer one hundred poems suitable for young people. I have not examined a copy, but from the
subject headings, “Love – Juvenile Fiction,” and “Nature – Juvenile Fiction,”
we can gat and idea of the contents. Sentiment, Gothic, and romantic
Thus, the primly Victorian feminine gift
book, The Bouquet, keeps company with
the bloody, violent, masculine, Buccaneers. Oliver Perkins, like bookmen before and
since, appears to have added to his bookstore by reprinting books that had
little or no copyright restrictions. Did
Perkins make much money reprinting books?
Did he intentionally print gender-based potboilers? That is up to a more skilled bibliographer
than I. But as a literary rag-picker, it
was a satisfying look at an old book.
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