Tuesday 10 June 1662

Annotations

• N Bradford on Fri 10 Jun 2005, 11:07pm

  “I had a great mind to have bought the King

• N dirk on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 02:15am

  The King’s Works

  “Basilika : the works of King Charles the martyr : with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt His said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament.”

  London : Printed by James Flescher for R. Royston, 1662.

  The “Eikon Basilike” - as it was also known - is a work attributed to Charles I (1648?).

  A second edition of “The Works of King Charles the Martyr…” was published in 1687 in a folio of 720 pages.

  I haven’t been able to find the text on the internet - maybe it was a boring book anyway :-)
  

• N Robert Gertz on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 03:21am

  “…but I think it will be best to save the money.” Herein are we seeing the beginning of a slip in Sandwich’s standing in Sam’s eyes?

• N Cumgranissalis on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 04:07am

  Paying off Debts , I wonder what remains of his contents of his hanging Sock. There must have been many questions that tweaked Sam’s mind.

• N Stolzi on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 02:27pm

  The Eikon Basilike is available on line. The portion I read was very moving:

  Though they think my Kingdomes on earth too little to entertaine at once both them and me, yet let the capacious Kingdome of thy infinite mercy at last receive both me and my enemies.

  When being reconciled to thee in the bloud of the same Redeemer, we shall live farre above these ambitious desires, which beget such mortall enmities.

  When their hands shall be heaviest, and cruellest upon me, O let me fall into the armes of thy tender and eternall mercies.

• N language hat on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 05:48pm

  “and do not intend to buy any more of any kind a good while”

  Heh. How many times have I made similar resolutions…

  The Eikon Basilike is here:
  http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/charles/eikon/
  

• N Pauline on Sat 11 Jun 2005, 06:32pm

• N Australian Susan on Sun 12 Jun 2005, 03:08am

  Book buying
  I read today’s entry when having spent the day at our local Church garage sale (a mere 10 books bought) and Brisbane’s twice yearly charity BookFest held in the State Convention Centre offering 1 million books. Oh dear, oh dear. Bought far far too many; *but* did get a first edition hardback of ‘Forever Amber’ (discussed at length in theses pages last year) for only $1AU (that’s 80 American cents or 40 British pence.). Not bad.

• N Ruben on Sun 12 Jun 2005, 02:10pm

  It is no coincidence we met in this virtual space.
  Books as Pepys and we knew are going the way of the Dodo.
  Public Libraries are turning to the digital world and in a short time all the book shelfs will become obsolate.
  Libraries will have their books posted in the Net or similar and students will seat somewhere else, and have an experience completely different from that of a hundred previous generations.
  No, I am not happy with this. But it is a fact of life.
  

• N Robert Gertz on Sun 12 Jun 2005, 06:36pm

  Ruben, I’m not quite ready to say the paper book is doomed. Paper documentation was not eliminated by the advent of electronic data storage, despite the prophets of a totally digital future and I think the book will survive, though I agree that libraries will increasingly turn to the Net. Is it such a terrible thing? A monk of the twelve century finding himself in Sam’s day would probably mourn his lost art of copying manuscripts and despise that filthy Gutenberg and his press churning out cheap Bibles and nonsensical pamphlets and books from every partially-literate fellow with a big ego but the digital book does open a lot of opportunities as Phil’s blog here demonstrates.

  Certainly nothing matches the joy of exploring a printed book new to oneself, good or great if possible, but even if not so fine a work, to sit in a comfortable chair, feeling the pages, discovering the author and her or his world at leisure. And there’s no greater tragedy than the loss of any book and its world. I think of the novel “Shadow of the Wind” with the entrancing description of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where all works, great and not-so-great, that the dedicated booksellers of Barcelona find abandoned and forgotten are taken for safekeeping and like you I fear that day may come for all printed work. But the reality is most of us don’t get the chance or time to explore the great libraries and bookstores on foot. The Web has offered some chance for that kind of exploration. True, most of us with access to digital sources still don’t employ them to find the classics, etc…But my monk above would have been right to point out that the printing press led to a surfeit of junk on the world’s shelves as well as great lit.
  

• N Australian Susan on Mon 13 Jun 2005, 01:39am

  The Charity BookFest I referred to above is a hugely successful event - thousands and thousands attend, picking over the books, chatting to each other as old favourites are unearthed or that missing book from a series pounced upon. Middleaged men buy old copies of mechanics text books, children scoop up armfuls of reading matter which they can *keep* (always a problem with a library book), people thoroughly infected with bibliophilia squeak with excitement: “Look! Hardback ’50s Graham Greene! Only a dollar!” Yes, the digital age is upon us for evermore, but books are and will be loved and cherished and desired for many centuries, I am sure. And the networked world allows me to use a metabookstore search facility (such as abebooks.com)to track down those elusive out of print volumes. I think Sam would have loved the BookFest - not only for the bargains and our Sam likes a bargain, but all those pretty young female students buying books, maybe needing a helping hand to move a heavy atlas? And so on.

• N Jenny Doughty on Mon 13 Jun 2005, 02:20am

  I don’t know about anybody else, but I hate reading anything very extended on the computer screen, let alone a whole book, so at least in my household the paper book isn’t dead yet.

• N Ruben on Mon 13 Jun 2005, 06:16am

  Thank you all for your points of view. I agree with all of them. I also love my books and will never part with my grandfathers library or the one book I had from a friend 50 years ago and still I open from decade to decade. But times are changing. Like a storm in the horizon, the air is still but you can smell the rain and the birds fly in a special way and you know things will change.
  This storm will be historic. Books will be kept in a shelf and like a seed in the desert may be it will be read again only after a hundred years span or never…
  I do not know how to send a link to an excellent New York Times note to you so I will send it complete for you to read.
  May 14, 2005
  College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age
  By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
  HOUSTON, May 13 - Students attending the University of Texas at Austin will find something missing from the undergraduate library this fall.
  Books.
  By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library’s 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.
  “In this information-seeking America, I can’t think of anyone who would elect to build a books-only library,” said Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin.
  Their new version is to include “software suites” - modules with computers where students can work collaboratively at all hours - an expanded center for writing instruction, and a center for computer training, technical assistance and repair.
  Such digital learning laboratories, staffed with Internet-expert librarians, teachers and technicians, have been advancing on traditional college libraries since appearing at the University of Southern California in 1994. As more texts become accessible online, libraries have been moving lesser-used materials to storage. But experts said it was symbolic for a top educational institution like Texas to empty a library of books.
  The trend is being driven, academicians and librarians say, by the dwindling need for undergraduate libraries, many of which were built when leading research libraries were reserved for graduate students and faculty. But those distinctions have largely crumbled, with research libraries throwing open their stacks, leaving undergraduate libraries as increasingly puny adjuncts with duplicate collections and shelves of light reading.
  Mr. Heath said removal of the books had raised some eyebrows among the faculty and anxiety among the library staff. But he said the concerns were needless. “Books are the fundamental icon of intellectual efforts,” he said, “the scholarly communication of our time.”
  So, Mr. Heath said, speaking of the library, “if you move it, there’s a pang, a sense of loss.” He added that the books were merely being moved within the university’s library system, one of the nation’s largest, home to some 8 million volumes and growing by 100,000 a year. Basic reference books like dictionaries and encyclopedias will remain.
  The move, Mr. Heath said, would free about 6,000 square feet in the four-story Flawn Academic Center, which opened in 1963.
  Students at Texas, interviewed as they studied or lounged at the library tables, said that they would welcome extra computer space and that they got most of their books anyway at the far larger Perry-Casta

• N language hat on Mon 13 Jun 2005, 05:21pm

  Probably not a good idea to post long articles with no immediate connection with the diary…

• N Australian Susan on Tue 14 Jun 2005, 12:22am

  Libraries and Sam
  Sam loved books. If he hadn’t cherished the idea of the written or printed word, his diary would not have survived. We also have the “time capsule” of his personal library given to his old college which, in its wisdom, kept the collection and intact and did not allow it to be borrowed.
  One of the professional qualifications I have is in librarianship: I retrained later in life when the profession was on the cusp of going digital: librarians make jokes about “the b word” and they spend more and more of their time staring at a computer screen. Students have changed - they expect everything to be there in the ether. The type of research where you get a list of references, find the journals and p/c bits of the relevant articles seems gone. Sam would have recognised that world (except the electronic copying). It is is similar to, say, the revolution in transport made by the car.
  For a take on all this by librarians, try http://www.librarian-image.net/

• N Tom Burns on Tue 14 Jun 2005, 01:30pm

  The King

• N JonTom Kittredge on Wed 15 Jun 2005, 03:04pm

  The King’s Works
  To be fair, this compilation of Charles I’s works was made after his execution, so it was not published to serve his vanity. It did, though, serve those who wanted to justify the old regime and condemn the rebellion and Commonwealth. The title “King Charles the Martyr” states the agenda pretty clearly.
  

• N Michael Robinson on Wed 14 May 2008, 09:26pm

  “I had a great mind to have bought the King’s works, as they are new printed in folio, and present it to my Lord; but I think it will be best to save the money.”

  [Basilika. Greek] The workes of King Charles the martyr: with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt 101, n. 3) reads ” … It was a second hand copy, and haHis said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament.
  London : printed by James Flesher for R. Royston, book-seller to His most sacred Majesty, MDCLXII. [1662]
  [16], 120, [2], 458, [12], 733, [7] p.,
  [3] folded leaves of plates : ill., coat of arms, port. ;
  2⁰. (folio) Pepys Library 2577

  Compiled by William Fulman, (1632–1688), surviving Mss. notes at Corpus Oxford; preliminary “life of Charles I,” signed Richard Perrinchiefe, compiled from Fulman’s notes and some materials of Silas Titus. The substantial bulk of the text by far is the ‘… collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers … ‘

  The text of the ‘Eikon comprises only p. 1-198 of the second section. According to Falconer Madden ‘New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike’ this is the 65th. edition of that portion of the text. The authorship of the Eikon was originally attributed to Charles I, but generally accepted by the Restoration to have been written by John Gauden, (Bishop of Exeter 1660, translated Worcester 1662 http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/993.php ) who probably included some authentic writings of the king. His brother was the the Navy victualer Sir Dennis Gauden http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/994.php who figures in the Diary

  Spoiler

  SP later ‘bespoke’ a second hand copy, for 50 shillings.
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/13/

• N Michael Robinson on Wed 14 May 2008, 09:32pm

  [corrected post]
  “I had a great mind to have bought the King’s works, as they are new printed in folio, and present it to my Lord; but I think it will be best to save the money.”

  [Basilika. Greek] The workes of King Charles the martyr: with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt His said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament.
  London : printed by James Flesher for R. Royston, book-seller to His most sacred Majesty, MDCLXII. [1662]
  [16], 120, [2], 458, [12], 733, [7] p.,
  [3] folded leaves of plates : ill., coat of arms, port. ;
  2⁰. (folio) Pepys Library 2577

  Compiled by William Fulman, (1632–1688), surviving Mss. notes at Corpus Oxford; preliminary “life of Charles I,” signed Richard Perrinchiefe, compiled from Fulman’s notes and some materials of Silas Titus. The substantial bulk of the text by far is the ‘… collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers … ‘

  The text of the ‘Eikon comprises only p. 1-198 of the second section. According to Falconer Madden ‘New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike’ this is the 65th. edition of that portion of the text. The authorship of the Eikon was originally attributed to Charles I, but generally accepted by the Restoration to have been written by John Gauden, (Bishop of Exeter 1660, translated Worcester 1662 http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/993.php ) who probably included some authentic writings of the king. His brother was the the Navy victualer Sir Dennis Gauden http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/994.php who figures in the Diary

  Spoiler

  SP later ‘bespoke’ a second hand copy, for 50 shillings.
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/13/