For the theme of Literature and Song we managed to find some very interesting and diverse items, including fragments of Medieval manuscripts, song sheets from the Gaelic Society Collection, an edition of Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus, the libretto of a Handel opera, Lotario, and books on birds and bees.
Thomas Salmon (c.1647-1706) was a clergyman who caused one of the greatest controversies of his day when he published his Essay to the advancement of musick in 1672, in which he advocated several innovations concerning musical notation. He wanted to demystify music and its “dark and tedious principles” and to make it quicker and easier to learn. He suggested a new clef system to achieve this.
His work provoked an enormous, passionate, and occasionally vicious response. Joseph Ritson (1752-1803) was an antiquary who collected popular poems and songs. He was an argumentative person and became embroiled in many literary controversies.
He was also involved in radical politics being a passionate supporter of the Jacobins in France. He published several anthologies of ballads, songs, poems and nursery rhymes. His Select collection of English songswith their original airs: and a historical essay on the origin and progress of national song was first published in 1783.
Singing birds have been highly esteemed and kept as pets for centuries. In the Ogden collection there are two works originally written in French by Hervieux de Chanteloup.
The first deals with canaries and nightingales and the second solely with canaries. They were the first full-length books written on canary birds, which have been kept in captivity since the early 1600s.
Canaries were much valued for their fine songs and were very expensive. The books have several fine plates.
It is a charming little book, giving details of the birds’ appearance and habits, instructions on how they can be caught, kept and bred in captivity, and describes their songs. Albin produced several other books on natural history, including A natural history of birds: illustrated with two hundred and five copper plates, curiously engraven from the life. And exactly colour’d by the Author ( London, 1738).
This was the first English book on birds with colour illustrations.
The plates are all hand coloured, by Albin and his daughter. Probably the most curious item, and the most popular on the night, is a book called The feminine monarchie: or, the historie of bees, printed in 1609.
The author is Charles Butler, a logician, grammarist, and bee-keeper.
It is the first full-length English language work on bee-keeping and was a valued and practical guide for nearly 300 years.
