08/21/2026
So I found an interesting set of books this week! Let me introduce you to the works of Alexander Pope, complete in nine volumes and printed in London, in 1760 (MDCCLX)! These are in remarkable condition, bound in leather, with hand-marbled endpapers, sturdy and sound, shocking really, considering they pre-date America's founding by almost 20 years! There is a publisher/bookseller plate loose in each volume that is really fun, with a vague address ( Crofs Keys, opposite Dunstan's Church!) Alexander Pope was a poet and essayist, and these volumes contain a collection of poems, essays, letters and related writings. His most famous poem might be The R**e of the Lock, a mock-epic poem about a dispute that occurs when a young man cuts a lock of a woman's hair. He also wrote rhyming translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. When I sat down to read a passage I immediately noticed a problem. The books are written with "the long s", a convention common to books written before 1800. In practical terms, the letter "s" appears very much like the letter "f" (with a slightly shorter cross-bar) and without practice it very hard to read the cadence of poem when you are try to decipher the words. For example: in the last photo, the sentence "The wife man's paffion" is actually "the wise man's passion" so you really have to watch the length of that cross-bar of the letter to determine if is is the letter s/f!
