Pimp My Uppity Colonials

It's been a long time since "Pimp My Dante" and I feel the need for some more biblioporn and am lured by the sirens' call to fondle some leather.

This time it's the loving rebinding in period clothing of some tattered and disbound documents pertinent to my friends in the Colonies which I hope they might find diverting.

 Yes, it's all very brown.

I do love a bargain and the interweb is the perfect place to trawl the back rooms and musty corners of the world's bookshops, ready to pounce on any unwary prey that takes my fancy. Disbound or with their covers hanging off and spines broken they can be obtained for astonishingly few groats, and even if you don't re-skin them they make wonderful reading.
In particular I am obsessed (yes, I confess to obsession … sorry, Mum) with collecting old news as it happened and original documents and letters from revolutions and revolts, being pretty revolting myself.

The rather alarming duct tape binding above contains the first appearance in a printed book - as opposed to manuscript or pamphlet - of the American Declaration of Independence (amongst the Parliamentary State Papers for 1776, bound in with the hugely entertaining and divers debates and correspondence leading up to said Declaration and its wake of amusing spuffle, blather and faff from the outraged English Tories).

If, like me, you find duct tape an inappropriate cladding for the most sacred of uppity Colonial documents, read on.

 Here lay the tattered remains of many debates, rants, arguments and handbag fights in both the English Parliament and the Philadelphia Congress.

It is distressing to see such distressed damsels déshabillé and so I sought the aid of Bald Bernard from the Basement in hope of restoring their dignity.

 And now here they sit betwixt first editions of Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Mishima and McCarthy and some beautiful Rivière Brothers bindings that - after some haggling regarding beards and gourds - some fool let me buy for £3.55 a volume, at least a hundred times less than their current value.
Like I say: I do love a bargain.

Anyhoo … Back to Bald Bernard from the Basement …

While I was working in London I used Shepherds' for my bookbinding needs. Not because they were only a few yards from my office on Rochester Row but because they are the current equivalent of Bayntun and Rivière; the best of the best of the best … Sir!

And down in their basement toiled bald Bernard, master of calf and hand-stitching, and his wife Sarah, queen of fine leather mosaic work.

When I returned to Norwich, Bernard and Sarah decided it was time to start their own bindery and by serendipitous chance, concluded that the best place for a bindery would be the UNESCO City of Literature … er … Norwich; home to more fine writers than you can shake a stick at (should you choose to do so).

 And so …

Our damsels are no longer déshabillé but clad in new mottled calf that I am instructed to fondle as often as possible, the natural oils from skin being the the perfect food and preservative for new, deliciously soft calf-bound books. As these are books that I will read and re-read and enjoy for as long as I live, fondling them is not going to be too Herculean a labour.

 For the endpapers we spent some time with marvellous rolls of hand-marbled paper, choosing a style and colour consistent with the 1770s. Bernard is as fussy about period veracity as I am.

 The hand-stitching matches the endpapers and Bernard worked really hard adjusting the raised bands on the spines to align across all the volumes.

 Here, starting in the last column is the first printed and published version of that most sacred of Colonial scriptures, clad no longer in duct tape but in a more fitting and dignified wrapper.

 And here is one of my very favourite documents. In essence it is a bonkers, Trump-style splenetic rant refuting in eye-popping apoplexy the document bound with it (see below).

The British Library's English Short Title Catalogue (they keep tabs on printed material from the 1470s up to 1800) lists three of these still in existence and I am rather chuffed that mine is the copy from the "New Exchange Coffee House Subscription Library" (copperplated over several pages to discourage pilfering).

The New Exchange (now the beautiful and dignified Old Exchange) was the stock exchange of its time, nestled between Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, whose coffee houses were the debating chambers for politicians, scientists and the more enlightened of Enlightenment society.

The New Exchange Coffee House was the grandest and would have seen Edmund Burke and John Dodsley, Charles James Fox and William Pitt (both versions) and on occasion Benjamin Franklin reading, debating and getting caffeinated to the gills.

Riff-raff like stockbrokers were not allowed in and had their own coffee house down the street.

Here's the document from July, 1775 (bound at the back of the above volume) that kicked off the petulant, foot-stamping temper tantrum, which, by the way, makes for hilarious and really quite shocking reading, though you'll have to take my word for that unless you manage to track down one of the other two remaining copies.
James Ranty MacPherson takes particular umbrage at the concept of no taxation without representation, citing that women and (let us say 'persons of colour') together with the poor have no vote and therefore no representation and yet are taxed by the divine right of the monarch. He then goes a leetle bit apeshit and his views are unfortunately those of the Tories (most of whom "owned" millions of square miles of Colonial soil by dint of having simply given it to themselves) and not those of reason. Regrettably his views are also those of today's "one percent" and those of the GOP. What the hell happened to the enlightened views of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams et al? Whither America in the 21st. Century?
…
At the lower left of the above photo, however, Bostonians may find some amusement.
The blustering, indignant and quite frankly chortlesome abuse MacPherson rains on Boston and its inhabitants in his main text would be unpublishable today. It is beyond Trump for sheer ignorant insanity. Pop round for a cuppa and I'll let you read it.

Good old Johnny Hancock really did know how to raise the hackles of the English Tories.
You can gauge the tone of the major part of the book by the paragraph at the top right.
The certain "Illustrious Band" referred to being the Whigs, whose arguments recorded in the Parliamentary Papers were rational, reasonable, occasionally hilariously sarcastic and personal. The Whigs of course sided wholly with the Americans and their perfectly reasonable grievances but unfortunately, as today, the Tories won the vote by lying, cheating (using rotten boroughs and bribery) and bullying and of course calamity ensued.

Here beginneth Colonial Independence.