What might we say about this month’s crocodile mystery?
October crocodile (click to enlarge)
As always, the mystery is not only what this thing actually is, but why it might be of interest. Leave your guesses in the comments below and come back next week for the reveal!
Update October 7, 2014: The reveal is now revealed in “When is an inscription not an inscription?“
Stay connected
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Comments
The inscription looks like mid 20th-century handwriting. Is it going too far to guess it the writer was a woman? It must refer to events of the 1600s-1700s? Is The Tempest involved somehow???
Sarah B. Hood — October 2, 2014
I don’t know the sex of the writer or date of the inscription in the middle of the page—but I would agree that the writing looks more modern than not. I don’t think The Tempest is involved!
Sarah Werner — October 2, 2014
Is it an annotation to the 1633 edition of Herbert’s “The Temple,” referring to the section “The Church Militant,” which is about “the progress of religion westward to America”?
Misha Teramura — October 2, 2014
Maybe also of interest here because of how the goatskin binding affected the paper on the outer edges?
Misha Teramura — October 2, 2014
“8652” in dark pencil at the top left looks like an accession number or a bookseller’s catalogue number.
The main inscription looks more 19th century to me.
“A176” at the bottom right is probably a shelfmark, perhaps in the library of the writer of the main inscription.
We now need to identify the work which refers to America on pages 184 and 190 .
David Shaw — October 2, 2014
Yes, to both Misha and David! It is indeed written on the flyleaf of Herbert’s The Temple and it does indeed refer to “The Church Militant.” (The catalog record gives the full information about the book and links to the digitization of it.) And to my eye, the various inscriptions look like how David describes them.
My post next week talk about why I find this leaf—and other ones like it—interesting and worth thinking about.
Sarah Werner — October 3, 2014
And another tiny piece of chronology:
the numbers at the top left and bottom right both overlap the turn-in of the binding , suggesting that the pastedown and binding belong to an earlier stage of the book’s ownership.
David Shaw — October 3, 2014
I’ve now looked at the digitisation.
The page reproduced is not a pastedown; it’s the first free endpaper.
The marks round the edges are staining from the turn-in of the binding (by Riviere and Sons). The binding therefore is late 19th or early 20th century and the inscriptions must be from the same period, perhaps by Harmsworth’s librarian, perhaps by an early Folger librarian?
David Shaw — October 3, 2014