"There's nothing quite so lovely as a brightly burning book." The Badger
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Lord Gardenstone: This wreck was easy in a stupid age.
Lord Gardenstone (1721-1793) was a distinguished judge, bon vivant and a wonderful eccentric noted for his fondness for pigs: he was ‘distinguished for his conviviality, at a period when, especially in Scotland, it must be admitted that real proficiency was requisite to procure fame in that qualification’ (Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, 1835).
He also found time to be an occasional writer, and his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1792) is a charming selection of some of his pensées and poems, which unsurprisingly includes a rollicking ode ‘On Hard Drinking.' The same collection also includes the following poem 'On the Loss of Ancient Literature':
Hi Matt, do you know much about the burning of Voltaire Philosophical Letters in France in the 1730s? Did the French has an official officer in charge of book burning?
I am a bookseller with Hordern House Rare Books in Sydney, Australia, where I first became interested in the culture of book burning while researching a catalogue of utopias and imaginary voyages. My first book, Burning Books, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008.
Together with Mark Tewfik, I am currently working on a picture book investigating the graffiti written on bombs during the Second World War.
1 comment:
Hi Matt, do you know much about the burning of Voltaire Philosophical Letters in France in the 1730s? Did the French has an official officer in charge of book burning?
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