Sunday, January 08, 2006
Picture This
A couple of curious older items turned up for auction this week, neither of which I've seen before. First, there's currently an auction for a 1790 "Hieroglyphick Bible":
Earlier this week there was also a first edition 1849 Mother Goose in Hieroglyphics. The latter went for a hundred bucks, and could very easily have gone for even more -- children's books, for obvious reasons, are much less likely to survive over the years than grownup ones:
As you'll have already guessed, what they were calling "hieroglyphics" is what we'd call a rebus. To my surprise, I found that the Mother Goose volume actually went through a good number of printings, including a 1960s revival capped off by a facsimile Dover edition in 1972. It's out of print now, but thanks to the Dover edition they're quite cheap used.
Earlier this week there was also a first edition 1849 Mother Goose in Hieroglyphics. The latter went for a hundred bucks, and could very easily have gone for even more -- children's books, for obvious reasons, are much less likely to survive over the years than grownup ones:
As you'll have already guessed, what they were calling "hieroglyphics" is what we'd call a rebus. To my surprise, I found that the Mother Goose volume actually went through a good number of printings, including a 1960s revival capped off by a facsimile Dover edition in 1972. It's out of print now, but thanks to the Dover edition they're quite cheap used.
