Arriving today from the irrestistible reaches of eBay’s antiquarian section is a humble little volume one of Mrs Jameson’s Memoir’s of the Early Italian Painters. I can’t blame the printer, but the later bookbinder definitely had problems with the concept of the apostrophe, much like today’s greengrocers.
Written inside in beautifully clear copperplate is:
Louisa Clarke,
the gift of her Aunt,
December 1851
I wonder who she was…
Mrs Jameson is one of my eBay favourites – she’s nearly always very cheap, which suggests she sold an awful lot of books.
She had a full if not always easy life – surely calling out for a modern biography, but I didn’t think there is one.
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