James Harriman-Smith

Category: Archive

  • Another Finding in the Folger

    As I said in last week’s post, there is a lot of stuff in the Folger Library that I could talk about. I spent my week looking at as much as I could, in the hope of one day returning to work in more detail around a specific project. For the post, I thought I’d…

  • Findings in the Folger

    I have spent from 8:45am to 5pm of every day this week sitting in the same chair in Folger Shakespeare Library’s main reading room, which, with its wood panelling, green carpet and nice solid tables and chairs, takes me back to my Cambridge days (and working habits). Here’s a picture of the place: There are…

  • On the Legality of my Thesis

    My thesis has five pictures in it. They have caused me quite a lot of problems, enough to merit this post, which will – I hope – veer between entertaining lament and useful advice about copyright and doctoral research in the age of the institutional digital repository. My thesis has five pictures in it. They…

  • Some more about Saint Omer

    In late November 2014, a First Folio was discovered in the Bibliothèque d’Agglomeration Saint-Omer. I realise I’m a bit late to the party with a blog post on this extremely rare qnd exciting event, but, still,I hope what I have to say here about another of Saint-Omer’s Shakespearean connections remains of interest.

  • Curating Letourneur

    This is a bibliographical post. In the following table, I’m going to list the rough contents of all twenty volumes of Pierre Letourneur’s translation of Shakespeare into French. I am also going to provide a link to the digital copy of each volume on Google Books. To find out why I think this is important,…

  • Missed Chances

    Again, I’m going to start this blog-post with an apology. My latest lack of publications is the result of devoting all my spare time and energy to the writing of a great many applications for post-doctoral positions. Those same applications have, however, inspired this little text, so it’s not all bad news. I want to…

  • Promptbooks and Publication

    As is no doubt evident from my last few posts, I’ve been looking into Francis Gentleman and his work on John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare quite a lot. I’m now writing my ideas up, and – as ever in this process – there’s quite a lot that won’t fit into my chapter. This includes…

  • Francis Gentleman & Bell’s Shakespeare: A Short Bibliography

    This is a new kind of post. I wrote to the mailing list C18-L a few weeks back asking for details of books and articles about the Irish actor, orator, teacher, and critic Francis Gentleman (1728-1784) and his work as the editor of John Bell’s 1774 edition of Shakespeare. I got a few, very useful…

  • Adventures in the BNF

    I spend a lot of time in libraries, but have – shockingly – never really written about them on this blog. This post will change that, as I’ve spent the last week familiarising myself with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (or, as everyone calls it, the BNF, pronounced ‘bay-enn-eff’), and have all sorts of things…

  • Reprinting lost books…

    NOTE: This a reposting of something I wrote a while back, but as the website it is hosted on will soon be closing, I wished (aptly enough) to preserve it here. I’m afraid that the pictures will only last until the host website goes down, since I haven’t been able to extract them easily. Of…