the book collector
as yet another piece of Bay Psalm Book misinformation a closer inspection of the known facts suggests two possible scenarios for the claim. The attribution of existing ‘Old South Church’ copies to specific Prince catalogue entries is not straightforward. Of the five copies noted in the 1846 Prince catalogue two (the Shurtle V and one of the Boston Library copies) have Prince New England Library bookplates c. 1758. The Crowninshield copy has since been washed and rebound and the second Boston Library copy and Livermore copy do not have Prince numbers which were recorded in 1846. It is also unclear whether other copies of the Bay Psalm Book were at one time held separately by the Church and their attribution to Prince without clear evidence has confused the issue. To complicate things further another Prince copy disappeared some time after 1830. Benjamin Weisner in his History of the Old South Church in Boston (Boston, 1830) wrote concerning Prince’s improved edition of the Bay Psalm Book (published in 1758) that ‘I have found in the Old South library, and there now lies before me, the very copy of the New England version which he [i.e. Prince] made use of in his preparing his Improvement, with the various changes he made written with a pen’. This is the last time this copy was recorded, and no subsequent description of any of the eleven existing copies includes these identifying annotations. The James Lennox copy of the Bay Psalm Book has the least con- vincing provenance of all the surviving copies. It first appeared in the auction of William Pickering’s stock at Sotheby & Wilkinson’s in 1855 and the only person to identify it was American book-dealer Henry Stevens, who had seen the Bodleian copy. He purchased it at a bargain price and added twelve leaves from the Livermore copy before selling it on to James Lennox. It has been suggested that the Stevens/Lennox copy originated in the Old South Church Library but this has been dismissed by some on the grounds that the sale was kept secret. But if it was in Armstrong’s possession might his wife have sold it on between his death in 1850 and it appearing at Sotheby’s in 1855? Bartlett’s second letter replaced the ‘Mrs. Armstrong’ copy from the first letter with the copy in the ‘Lennox Library’ – might this actually imply that the Armstrong copy was in fact the Lennox copy at the time of writing the second letter?
756
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter