Somewhere out there, lost lambs are baa-ing to return to the fold, and a group of scholarly Bo Peeps is ready to shepherd them home.
The little lambs in question are hundreds of books formerly owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight, whose estates at Godmersham and Chawton once housed libraries fine enough to satisfy even the exacting tastes of a Mr. Darcy.
In the two centuries since a catalog of the Godmersham library identified some 1,250 books, the Knight family fortunes have declined, and many volumes have scattered to the wind. (The remaining volumes belong to Chawton House Library, the library for the study of early English writing by women that is now housed in the Knights’ restored Chawton House.)
Earlier this month, three Austen scholars – Janine Barchas, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Deborah Barnum, a board member of the North American Friends of Chawton House Library who blogs at Jane Austen in Vermont; and Peter Sabor, a professor of eighteenth-century studies at McGill University in Canada – announced the formation of a group whimsically entitled the Godmersham Lost Sheep Society, or GLOSS. (Barnum in fact began posting about the group months ago.)
GLOSS’ goal is to track down the scattered Knight family volumes, whose inner covers bear one of the three bookplates of Montagu George Knight, a grandson of Edward Knight. (See the three bookplate designs here.) Locating the lost volumes will help to reconstruct the literary context that influenced Jane Austen, since she visited Edward’s family and had access to both his libraries.
Last February, while inspecting the Austen collection of a Texas Janeite, Barchas stumbled across an incredible find: Chawton’s copies of all six Austen novels, in the 1833 Bentley edition that brought Austen back into print for the first time after her death. The owner of the volumes, Sandra Clark, donated the books to Chawton House Library, and clearly GLOSS hopes other collectors who happen across one of Montagu George Knight’s bookplates will do the same: As regular blog readers will recall, cash-strapped Chawton is in no position to buy anything right now.
Failing that level of generosity, however, GLOSS is willing to settle for digital images of the books’ bindings, title pages and Knight bookplate. Anything to rescue those poor little lambs who have lost their way – baa, baa, baa.
2 comments
Jan 22 2018 07:30PM by Deb Barnum
Thanks Deborah for posting this! I am just seeing it - only 3 months later - Appreciate very much you giving it some air-time!
Jan 22 2018 07:46PM by Deborah Yaffe
My pleasure -- I wish you all much luck on your mission!
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