the book collector
House put it. The image was first published in some (but not all) of Forster’s Observations made during a Voyage round the World... (1778), a book that came out in Berlin in 1783 and in Vienna in 1787. Say Hordern House ‘but to date no Russian edition has been noted, though there was a Russian edition of the o Y cial account of the second voyage (six volumes, St Petersburg, 1796–1800.)’ It’s the context of the ongoing Russian obsession with access to the oceans that makes this item tingle. because of the editor’s poor attitude to filing, the piece written to pu V Grantham’s Gravity Fields science festival (26 to 30 September) never made it into our last issue. We bend our heads. It was a crying shame for the festival, which was inspired by Grantham’s most famous son, Sir Isaac Newton (as in the Isaac Newton Shopping Centre), will not be held again until 2020. Barring Acts of God, by the time you read this, lectures will have been given on quantum theory, black holes, William Stukeley, anti-gravity, Joseph Banks and, from Anke Timmermann, who’ll be writing on the subject in our next issue, al- chemical recipes and remedies. Furthermore, it is expected that over 70,000 people will have visited the festival, a number that surely renders questionable the oft-repeated statement that interest in the sciences is in rapid decline. Entrance to most of the lectures was £ 3 or £ 4. In the same neck of the woods as Grantham is the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. Founded in 1710 by a local lawyer, Maurice Johnson, who wished to replicate in Lincolnshire his co V ee-house conversation in London with the likes of Pope, Addison and Steele, it’s the oldest provincial learned society in Britain and its collection is the second oldest after the Ashmolean. Its library is of key significance for the study of the Enlightenment. The residue of Johnson’s books came up at Sotheby’s in 1970. He is said at one time to have owned sixteen Caxtons. Our man in the rooms had this to say: ‘He had a messy habit of writing his name in a large pre- tentious hand on title-pages that deserved better treatment, although his vast bookplate (by Vertue) is an ornament to most of the books he stuck it in.’ A long note about the Society may be found in the book collector for Summer 2012. eric white’s Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible has been awarded the 2018 DeLong Book History Prize of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).
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