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Message in a bottle.

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Dear Mr. Editor, sir:

Your look-out man has been having a hard time since last a message reached you: bad local weather and much ado in the literary backwoods. I have been busy with the end-labours on a couple of books (why does this take longer when done by computer than by compositors with hot-metal type?); the concluding work on an exhibition prepared for the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh; and some assistance given to a friend in the publication of a bibliography. That last may not sound a very burdensome task, but it has prompted ruminations that may be apposite here.

The bibliography in question is a near-enough complete checklist of all the children's books published by the company founded by William Darton the First, which ran from 1787 to 1846 in Gracechurch Street, London, and all those published by his son, William Darton the Second, whose parallel company ran from 1804 to about 1875 just up the road on Holborn Hill. These Dartons were the direct ancestors of F. J. Harvey Darton, who wrote Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, and of Lawrence Darton, the author of this checklist, on which he began work over fifty years ago. The volume, which is to be published by the British Library, runs to about eight hundred pages, in which are given detailed descriptions of some 1,072 children's books that emerged from Gracechurch Street and 1,624 from Holborn Hill--along with all traceable later printings carrying the firms' imprints.

Now I can see, Mr. Editor, that few of your readers will have much interest in these eight hundred pages, unless they be dealers, or collectors, or young lady graduates engaged in the fashionable pursuit of Women Writers of Children's Books. (While they're about it, they might like to take a look at Mary Elizabeth Leathley, nee Dudley, who turned in over seventy books for William II behind the rubric "By the author of 'Chickseed...

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