It’s immediately clear, reading the books in this collection, why they remain objects of debate and fascination two centuries later. There was so much overlap between their public and private lives, so much posthumous wrangling over ownership of their personas, and so much passionate discourse over their scandals, relationships, and personal characters. Book Collector lets you catalog your books in a database automatically by just typing the book title or scanning the ISBN barcode to download all data from. It’s fascinating to read these texts in conversation with each other, and to read Byron and Shelley as prototypes for our modern conceptions of celebrity. Researching the Romantics, I found that so many of the primary sources on both poets referenced each other or were written in furious response to each other, from Harriet Beecher Stowe publishing her controversial Lady Byron Vindicated in response to a memoir published by Byron’s Italian mistress, to Shelley’s daughter-in-law compiling her authorized Shelley Memorials in response to unauthorized memoirs by Shelley’s best friends. This was mostly due to memoirs from surviving friends and family members, the 19th century equivalent of celebrity tell-alls. The controversies surrounding each of them in life only intensified in the wake of their deaths, only two years apart in 18, respectively. The collection I call “Dueling Public Narratives of Byron and Shelley” focuses on the lives and afterlives of the Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, who were of course friends and fellow exiles. It does not equal the 100,000 book and manuscript collection of 19th century obsessive Thomas Phillipps. In an interview with Fine Books & Collections, Ms Milam describes her collection: A Collector Left a 70,000 Book Collection with No Instructions on How to Proceed It is not the largest book collection ever amassed by a private owner. Be sure to visit the collection on display at the fair. The fifteen Caxtons attracted special attention, and were pursued with particular determination by the 2nd Earl Spencer, well known as the greatest British book collector of the age. An interesting exploration of poets who were the rock stars of their day. Whitney has collected memoirs by people who knew them in their lifetimes, and reactions to those memoirs by contemporaries. Whitney’s collection focuses on the public reception of these two Romantic poets, who were both immensely popular and died young.
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