I can generally put my hands on things if I need them. I’m also a bit anxious about old things and much inclined to wrap them in acid free tissue and keep them forever, to the detriment of the tidiness of the house. But I think this is the first time something has turned up that we didn’t even know we had.
Look what we just found in a shed.
Luckily it’s a nice dry shed and they were well wrapped up so the moth hadn’t got into them.
It’s a uniform edition of Shakespeare bound in marbled calf with marbled end papers and it’s got PICTURES.
The big surprise was the date.
So 215 years old! And – AND – I know where they came from.
“H Godwin, Bookseller, No. 19 Milsom Street, Bath” in that copy while others are at No. 24.
So I Googled him and found this:
It is estimated that by the turn of the nineteenth century there were at least ten circulating libraries in Bath. The most exclusive one was undoubtedly Marshall’s at 23, Milsom Street, which opened in 1787. Originally it was jointly owned by Samuel Jackson Pratt and James Marshall, but by 1793 Marshall was the sole proprietor. The list of his subscribers read like a Who’s Who:
two princes (the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Prince of Orange), five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, fourteen countesses, many other nobles and forty-three knights. Professional customers were three admirals, four generals and many service officers down to twenty-six majors and seventy-one captains, and also ecclesiastics: one archbishop, six bishops and 114 clerics.
Phyllis May Hembry, The English spa, 1560-1815: a social history (1990, p. 150)
Marshall’s library flourished between 1793 and 1799 but the rise in the price of books -up to 100%- was a serious threat to the business in general. Marshall increased his rates by 25% but ultimately even that didn’t save him from being declared bankrupt in 1800 as the number of subscribers declined. His son joined him that year and together they managed to revive the library, stocking up to 25,000 books, until it was bought by Henry Godwin in 1808.
{From the Painted Signs and Mosaics Blog which is well worth an explore.}
Google Earth informs me that 19, Milsom Street is still there:
Now housing the local branch of Austin Reed. I don’t suppose the upper stories have changed substantially since Jane Austen’s day.
I’m scared to look in the rest of the shed.
Elin Gregory 
That is so totally cool!!
You found that in your shed?!? All I find are antique mouse nests and ‘project’ lawnmower bits in my shed. Clearly, you are the lucky one. Are you going to build a special Shakespeare shrine to keep them in your house?
What a great find! 😀
I recently got a copy of The Thin Man out of the library. It was clearly pretty old and battered, had come up from the stacks, and return dates stamped inside going back to the 1950s. So I did some googling and figured out it was a first edition, second printing, actually American, not a British printing – so how it ended up in the library system of a city in England, who can say!
Good condition copies were worth hundreds of pounds on eBay etc. Though this being a library book it was well worn! Anyway, it was great fun reading such a classic book in a first edition copy that someone had once read as “the new book from Dashiell Hammett”
I volunteer to come and clean out said shed! It’s like the batch of footie programmes my hubby gave his nephew. In it I discovered – just at the point it was too late to get them back – two autographs. Booby Charlton and Alf Ramsay.