Thomas Reid Collection Prize winner, Derek F Stewart talks about his printed word collection.
"The collection of material I have gathered relating to popular nineteenth-century British novelists may have been born out of the practical reason of aiding my doctoral research, but it has been through obtaining these books that I have gained an insight into the true significance of book collecting. As a literary scholar, I am, naturally perhaps, a bibliophile, and cannot go inside a second-hand book shop without taking at least a couple of volumes home. But since beginning my collection of nineteenth-century texts, I have learnt that any given book is more than a story.
My collection is a tangible link to nineteenth-century culture and its readerships – a period which witnessed a burst of mass-literacy and unprecedented circulation of the printed word. Each volume contains traces of the past: while on some we can see and feel the ragged edges where pages have been, presumably with much anticipation, frantically opened, the gatherings of others have been opened more neatly. Similarly, many of the books have the names of their original owners written in floral handwriting inside, as well as a host of other annotations.
What a marvel it is to see the books themselves as physical objects. The copious engravings that accompany each novel reward a viewing in their original context as opposed to looking at them through a glaring electronic screen, while the array of sizes, colours and different bindings of these books breaks the monotony of the black-spined modern editions that monopolise my bookcase. In addition to giving us a feel for history, then, these books are also works of art; they exist as physical sites where the efforts of artist and artisan are held in a kind of embrace. The term ‘collector’ places undue focus on ownership, but I believe that, as individuals in possession of such collections, we are custodians for subsequent generations of readers.
Themed around my chosen research topic about the theatricalisation of London in the mid-nineteenth-century novel, my collection offers a unique assemblage of urban texts by lesser-known Victorian popular writers. Books by the likes of Shirley Brooks, Augustus Mayhew and Charles Reade are often difficult to source. Despite its impressive collection of nineteenth-century popular fiction, including all the first editions of works by Charles Dickens, the University of Aberdeen’s collections only have a handful of texts by these particular authors. I am also interested, however, in the dramatic sensibilities of these novelists and, given that many textual examples of nineteenth-century drama have been lost, I endeavour to expand my collection with examples of acting editions of plays, such as those published by T.H. Lacy. Furthermore, transatlantic editions of works by these writers often differentiated in form and content from the original British versions, and I plan to purchase other volumes of works by popular mid-nineteenth-century British authors printed for New York-based publisher Harper and Brothers. For me, the most invigorating aspect of book collecting is that it is a constant source of inspiration pertaining to new directions for scholarly research."
