Rare Books 2: April Fool's Day

Two rare books for April Fool’s Day. An edition of the Reverend Thomas Creech’s (1659-1706) translation of Lucretius that together with Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer were the three most read classical renderings throughout the 18^th century (Glasgow, 1749). Notes: The book in hand, as the phrase goes, is a cataloguing minefield. Lacking a title page, one is left completely reliant on the bookseller’s sale tab, pasted helpfully in the top left-hand corner of the inside cover, itself detached from its job. But is the tab true? “By Creech” is scratched crudely in ink, just by way of backup, with the book being renumbered in different Whitefriars, i.e. Carmelite, libraries on its journey through life. One relates to Lucretius (pictured) trying to turn his back on the whole mess, but, like Lucretius, one has to face up to the facts as given. You see, a cataloguer cannot describe a work with anything other than entire certainty. It is not permissible to say it is the 1749 version outright, the date on the tab, or even that it is De Rerum Natura, without evidence inside and outside the text. Covering notes are created to explain for the user keen on Creech just which Creech to expect. One thing is certain, it is the same edition as all the others going way back, containing extensive verse recommendations from contemporaries like Nahum Tate, Thomas Otway, Edmund Waller and the increasingly high profile Aphra Behn, herself. Time to google ‘W. Tho. Wilkinson TCD, 1910’, the name signed in different places throughout this copy of Lucretius, but no leads, in fact too many Thomas Wilkinsons that could not alas be our Thomas Wilkinson. Another nightmare is this battered copy of a set of comic stories by the Irish novelist Gerald Griffin (1803-1840) under the title ‘The Christian Physiologist and Other Tales’ (Dublin, circa 1892). Notes: Confusingly, the cover calls the book ‘The Five Senses’, a perplexity resolved outside the text by obscure sources corroborating that the two titles are interchangeable. Cataloguers are required to give priority description to the title page, if it exists, so ‘The Five Senses’ co-title goes in an added entry, with plenty of explanation in the notes field.  Griffin would have had fun at the expense of a Carmelite cataloguer of the 21^st century who cannot locate firm information about this impression using all the mighty powers of his online inheritance. Reprints of the James Duffy version start at least in 1857. The only certainty is that the book must have been published in or before 1892, which we know from the St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic School Port Melbourne prize plate pasted inside the cover, awarded Christmas 1892 to Miss E. Barlow for “Excellence in rapid progress”.