18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I

[mildred_of_midgard]

the pyhsical diary isn't a book with blank pages into which he wrote, stuff like that wasn't made in the 30 Years War

When did they start making these, do you know? I was assuming when betaing one of Cahn's fics that such a thing would be expensive but available to a crown prince with sugar daddies in the 1730s, but maybe I was wrong!

Alas no, I have no idea. I'll have to check the preface to Lehndorff's first diary volume again so see whether Schmidt-Lötzen mentions what material Lehndorff uses, i.e. sheets or a book with blank pages.

Our fic decision is VINDICATED! \o/

According to a book I'm reading/dipping into (same series as the Cunegonde book), Joseph Ryder, prosperous English cloth-maker of the 18th century, started his diary in 1733, and he was able to buy his blank books at the local bookstore in Leeds.

We can start with the concrete: what did Ryder's diary look like? Its bound octavo volumes came in two sizes, six and a half by eight inches and seven and a half by nine and a half inches. Virtually the only blank pages, besides those in his final volume that his death left unfinished, resulted from two pages apparently having been stuck together. The numbers also suggest that he grew more affectionate for writing over time. In mostly consistently sized handwriting, his first twenty volumes, which contain 5,578 pages, cover nineteen and a half years, while the second twenty volumes, 6,777, cover fifteen years. The two and a half million words he wrote (after we throw in thirty-five hundred more for the forty-first volume that he he had just begun before he died) amount to twelve times the total words in Moby Dick, more than three times the number in the King James Bible, and just less than three times the word count of Shakespeare's complex works.

Also,

The book plate advertisements in two of his own volumes...reveal that he bought at least some of his blank books from Samuel Howgate, whose store lay in the commercial center of the city. The fact that the bookplate ad for Howgate's Kirkgate bookshop grew more elaborate between the two volumes in which it was affixed indicates some measure of the store's prosperity. But judging by the content of both plates, this already seems to have been a place with varied consumer possibilities, selling "books in all faculties and sciences," maps, prints, parchment, paper, and at least one doctor's "elixir."

I don't promise a write-up of the book, especially as I'm not sure I'm going to read it beginning to end, but I'll try to at least do a paragraph or two to indicate what the book is *about*.