LIBRARY NOTES
James Raven
Letters to the Library
Friday, December 30, 1994
Dear Mr. Piel:
It was a great delight to return to the Library before Christmas. My last visit, ten years ago, introduced me to the marvelous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction of the Hammond Circulating Library.
I have been travelling outside of my Cambridge teaching term to collect materials for a study of the ways in which books came to the American Colonies. Surprisingly, this has been little studied, and the surviving archives of major eighteenth-century libraries are revealing remarkable details about shipments and business transactions.
The Library's own records are very valuable here, and I am now busy comparing these with others of the eighteenth century. A new History of the Book in America is to be published in three volumes by Oxford University Press in a few years time, and the Library will certainly feature in it.
One conclusion I can reveal is how polite and patient the early committee members were in their dealings with London booksellers when compared with the more aggressive behavior of some of the other Library Societies (who also placed smaller orders)!
Yours sincerely,
James Raven, Fellow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
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