The key is another obituary from 1889, this one from The Archer’s Register:

Google will quickly tell you a lot about a Zouch Troughton. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, Nina Sforza (1841), acted by Helena Faucit (!), well regarded in print and on stage, and staged in 1893 by Buffalo Bill (!) as a vehicle for his girlfriend (It bombed that time).

Thirty years and many house moves on, you find it again and start to wonder - who are these people who have been on the front endpapers all this time?

I bought this book about 1992, probably from the 50p box of some charity bookshop. It was long before you could read anything you wanted on a phone, and I was trying to build up a library of Renaissance texts, one spectacularly dog-eared book at a time. It was very Jude the Obscure. (1/11)

Which looks a bit like the picture - you hold the narrow top in your hand, and then there’s an expanding cone of wool below it
- Our artist has drawn one, but it has looked really confusing and they’ve tried to turn it into a pillar

Had a lot of fun talking to Cassidy Cash www.cassidycash.com mainly about Mrs Shakspaire, with an excursion to a desert island at the end. Apologies in advance to the seagulls.

A long shot, but can anyone make anything out in this bit of binding waste found in a book printed in England in 1608? I can’t even tell what language it’s in.

Lots of Shakespeare merchandise around, but nice to see some William Henry Ireland merch for a change.

Guess the seminar from the whiteboard challenge.

Pressed send on a book draft.

Without downloading any new pics, what’s your energy going into 2025?

And it turns out these things have colour-coded hatching, so here are the owner’s arms in colour for the first time in, I’d think, quite a long time.

The small bookplate in the front looks like the “Chippendale armorial” style which, per the Bookplate Society guide, flourished from 1740 to 1770. So it’s from early in the book’s life, likely the first owner. (bookplatesociety.org)

Hello new friends! Can I share a book with you? This is a (battered) Volume I of Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets (1779). I’d like, purely out of nosiness, to know who the original owner was.

I have an article out! In unexpected company! I have loved Housman for thirty years and never intended to write on him, but there you go.

Had an email from a nice lady offering to help me detect spammy writing. See if you can spot the tiny clue which suggests that the email might be a bit spammy itself.

Enjoyed Martha Moulsworth’s Memorandum again this week. It teaches so well - that bit where she says, “you know, we really ought to have a university for women” - stops the class in their tracks every time!