{"id":8,"date":"2005-06-02T18:45:08","date_gmt":"2005-06-02T22:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblogbeta\/2005\/06\/02\/a-minor-mystery-solved\/"},"modified":"2006-05-25T11:31:39","modified_gmt":"2006-05-25T15:31:39","slug":"a-minor-mystery-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2005\/06\/02\/a-minor-mystery-solved\/","title":{"rendered":"A minor mystery solved"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"a9\"><\/a>Depending on the mood you&#8217;re in that day, cataloging a pamphlet with no author, no publisher, no place of publication, and no date, is either an exciting challenge or a real pain in the neck. Fortunately for me, almost everything that was published in 18th century Great Britain has a record in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rlg.org\/en\/page.php?Page_ID=179\">English Short Title Catalogue<\/a>, or ESTC. Looking up my title, <a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=007043167\"><em>Tears of Scotland<\/em><\/a>, I was able to find out that it was written by Tobias Smollett, and probably published in Edinburgh in the late 1740s. That would make a respectable enough record right there, but my copy happens to have a little something extra that allowed me to make the record more complete.<\/p>\n<p>Bibliographers use the term <a href=\"http:\/\/palimpsest.stanford.edu\/don\/dt\/dt2359.html\">offsetting<\/a> to describe what happens when a freshly printed sheet with still-wet ink comes into contact with another sheet, leaving a ghost impression of its text in mirror image. In a happy accident, a wet copy of the title page of a work called <em>A letter to the Reverend Mr. G. Logan<\/em> offset onto the Hyde copy of <em>Tears of Scotland<\/em>, which strongly suggests that they were printed at about the same time. Since the <em>Letter<\/em> does have an imprint, we can now be fairly certain that <em>Tears<\/em> was printed in Edinburgh in 1747. Thus does the store of world knowledge become exactly one fact bigger. I&#8217;m exhausted!<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"254\" height=\"446\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/media-cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/hydeblog\/Ghostimage.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Depending on the mood you&#8217;re in that day, cataloging a pamphlet with no author, no publisher, no place of publication, and no date, is either an exciting challenge or a real pain in the neck. Fortunately for me, almost everything that was published in 18th century Great Britain has a record in the English Short [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-overholt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}