hidden in plain view
exactly the same visual e V ect, at Mount Stewart care has been taken to select a variety of books that reflect the wider library and pro- mote a palpable message. The selection has been made to give the impression of erudition, worldly and local, and an awareness of, and interest, in contemporary publications. The contemporary nature of the false spines is perhaps best demonstrated in its selection of ‘polite’ literature. There are no fewer than 24 novels printed in the 1790s and 1800s amongst the spines produced c.1805–7, many of which are now all but un- known. Female novelists predominate, as do Minerva Press books. Amongst the better known of a crop of novels now all but unread, are Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), Helen Craik’s Stella of the North, or The Foundling of the Ship (1802) and Mary Meekes’s The Sicilian . Of more interest, however, are the rarities: Jane Harvey’s Warkfield Castle (1802), Adamina: A Novel by a Lady (1801) and Marian Moore’s Ariana and Maud , now unknown outside the Corvey Collection, but clearly circulating in Ireland on publication. Margaret Minifie’s The Count de Poland (1780) appears to be the only novel simultaneously published in a London and Dublin edition. Despite the suggestion of intent, it is possible to argue that the selection of the false books at Mount Stewart was wholly random, perhaps replicating the current content of the binder’s workshop. However, there are two specific sections of the shutters where it is apparent that the selection was purposeful and where we see the long tradition of the in-joke surface, albeit in a more subtle and refined way than at Killerton or Chatsworth. Fifteen volumes in the false library purport to be authored by Edmund Spenser, nine of which are prefixed on the spine labels as ‘Spenser’s Comedies’. Spenser’s contemporary printed output was used by the poet as a means of advertising his poetry, and he famously took ‘full advantage of the opportunities o V ered by print publication’ to promote his forthcoming work. 29 The Shepheardes Calender (1579), the Spenser-Harvey Letters (1580), and the preface 29 . J. L. Black and L. Celovsky, ‘’Lost Works’, Suppositious Pieces, and Continuations’, in R. A. McCabe, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 349.
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