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Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net
Many thanks to Patrick Scott and Allan Young
for sharing with us the results of their search of the original work of
Robert Burns entitled POEMS Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Due to a
slight physical set back, I have been unable to do much work on Robert
Burns Lives! recently but hope to resume my work on the column in the
near future, As usual, Patrick Scott stepped in to assist and the
article below is the interesting account of the book he and Allan Young
have put together. These two gentlemen have blessed the Burns community
with a volume worth more than its weight in gold. My deepest thanks to
both, and I say “thank you” on behalf of all of us who will buy and
treasure the book for many years to come. (FRS: 11.1.17)
The Kilmarnock Census: A Personal
Perspective
By Allan Young
Patrick Scott writes: I first met Allan
Young soon after he started on this project, when he came up to South
Carolina to talk about it with Ross Roy. As I learned when sorting old
files after Ross’s death in 2013, Ross himself had tried at least twice,
in the early 1960s and again in the early 1990s, to pin down the number
of copies of the Kilmarnock that had survived, but he had never been
able to get definite information for more than forty or so copies in
libraries, so he had had to settle for a very provisional estimate to
allow for copies in private hands. Allan Young, a Scot now retired and
living in Florida, had spent his career in the construction industry (he
was a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors), and
by the time he visited us he had already made an effective and systematic
start on the project, putting the search on a much firmer basis. He and
Ross got along well, and Ross was able to put him in contact with
several other friends who owned Kilmarnock editions [including Susan
and Frank Shaw]. Allan’s reports on what he had found in 2009 and in
the Burns Chronicle made it clear that his research was breaking new
ground. In the following years, several people had asked me whether
Allan planned to do more with it. My original idea two years ago when he
agreed that I could help him get the census published was that we would
just format his previous findings as a small pamphlet. As we began that
process, we realized that there was additional background information to
be gathered, both from older printed sources and from newly-available
on-line resources. I wrote a short article about this stage of the
research for Robert Burns Lives! no. 230, which put us in contact with
further owners. Allan has been wonderful to work with, as we compiled
and edited and proofread this additional research, through email and
long telephone calls. The result is a book of 234 pages, just a few
short of the Kilmarnock edition itself (and after allowing for inflation
the price is also almost exactly the same as the original subscribers
paid for the Kilmarnock). I am very proud to be credited as a coauthor,
but I still think of the book as “Allan Young’s census.” The essay that
follows gives his personal account of how he got interested in the
census project, together with some of the interesting findings in the
book. (PS: 11.1.17)
Allan Young presenting a copy of the new
book to Robert Betteridge, Curator, Rare Books, at the National Library
of Scotland, October 24, 2017.
The Kilmarnock Census: A Personal
Perspective
by
Allan Young
We have just completed and published the
first-ever attempt to record all the surviving copies of Robert Burns’s
first book, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), usually known
as the Kilmarnock Burns or the Kilmarnock Edition. For me, it has been a
fifteen-year project, and now the book is out the best way to introduce
it may be to write a little about how I became interested. More formal
details about the research are given in my introduction to the book
itself.
Though I now live in Florida, I was born in Scotland, and lived there
before my career took us to the States in 1979. When I went to school in
Glasgow in the 1940s and 1950s, we learned about Robert Burns before we
learned about William Shakespeare. My grandfather was a Burns enthusiast
and could sing all the verses of James Thomson’s song “The Star o’
Rabbie Burns,” once a standard at Burns suppers:
Though he was but a ploughman
lad
And wore the hodden grey,
Auld Scotia's sweetest bard was bred
Aneath a roof o' strae.
Unfortunately, my grandfather’s singing and
memory genes did not come down to me, but his interest in Burns did.
Later, when my two sons went to school in Alloway and Ayr in the 1970s,
they too learned about Burns. I remember my younger son, aged about
seven, coming home from Alloway Primary School to tell us about his
Burns experience that day. Part of the discussion in class had been
about Burns suppers, and my son asked us what “champit titties” were. My
wife took on the task of explaining that champit tatties were mashed
potatoes. Fortunately, their discussion did not extend to the definition
of his phrase.
What got me started hunting down copies of the Kilmarnock edition was
the vagueness of the available information. I first saw a Kilmarnock in
wrappers at Burns Cottage when I was a boy. Of course back then I didn't
know the significance of that particular copy, but many years later I
examined it there, before it went to the Birthplace Museum. In 1996, the
bicentenary year of Burns’s death, the Burns scholar Ross Roy had
estimated that “fewer than 70 copies are known to exist.” It was reading
about this estimate, in 2002, that led me to undertake this census, and
I began checking catalogues and writing to libraries. As opportunity
allowed, I also visited libraries that owned copies, both in Scotland
and the United States. The first Kilmarnock that I got to handle for
myself was in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. It brought a tear to my
eye, but I made sure it didn't fall on the book.
By 2009, when I first reported on this research for a conference at the
University of South Carolina, I had located 71 copies with confirmed
locations, and I had credible reports on three others. I also had a fair
bit of evidence about copies that seemed to have vanished. As I wrote
soon afterwards in the Burns Chronicle (Summer 2011), the question
remained “Where are they now?” One such copy was in Sir Walter Scott’s
library at Abbotsford in the 1830s; even though it contained one of
Burns’s handwritten excise reports, and some poems printed in
newspapers, it was reported missing in 1889, and is still unlocated.
There the project rested, though in 2012 an Edinburgh auction house
cited my research when cataloguing a copy coming up for sale (which I
later got to inspect with its new owners, the Royal Incorporation of
Architects in Scotland). Then, in 2015, Patrick Scott offered to help
prepare the research for publication, and as more material accumulated
we agreed he should join me on the title-page as second author. The
number of copies found has continued to grow, and the Census has now
identified and described 84 copies with confirmed locations. Each of the
copies is described, often in great detail, including any inscriptions
or annotations, and sometimes bits of Burns’s own manuscript. Most
copies are now in institutional libraries (Part A, 69 copies), with a
smaller number located in private ownership (Part B, 15 copies). 48
copies of the copies we found are in the United States, 25 copies are in
Scotland, 6 elsewhere in the U.K., three in Canada, and one each in
Switzerland and Australia. Only a few preserve the original binding that
I first saw at the Burns Cottage. Four copies are still in the original
wrappers as issued, one has the wrappers bound in, one has a single
wrapper bound in, and one seems to have the original wrappers surviving
under a later marbled paper cover. One copy preserves unbound, uncut,
folded sheets. A further twenty-five copies have contemporary or other
early bindings. The majority, of course, are in later fine bindings,
which would themselves be prized by collectors.
But as well as describing the surviving copies as they are now, we had
been collecting information from older sources, and with additional
research this section of the book now runs to over 80 pages. Several of
the stories in this section are about lucky Burnsians who made
unexpected discoveries. In 1857, a Scottish mathematician, Dr William
Burns, found a copy in wrappers “among a lot of odd volumes bought for a
trifle” or in “a parcel of old books in an auctioneer’s office,” a
perfect copy which passed from owner to owner till it reached the
Harvard library. In 1898, a copy fetched 70 pounds at Sotheby’s; the
previous owner was a slater from Laurencekirk who had bought it in a
batch of five books for which he had paid just two pence.
Sometimes also, you weep for what had happened to a book or what
happened after it was discovered. A barber’s shop in Shrewsbury had been
using a Kilmarnock as a razor strop, and by the time John Murison, a
commercial traveler for a seed company, rescued it, the first 48 pages
were lost and many others damaged. It has an ownership inscription from
1796, and it is preserved with the rest of Murison’s Burns collection in
Dunfermline. In 1850 or thereabouts, the Edinburgh bookseller James
Stillie purchased a copy in wrappers for one shilling, inscribed, and
with several poems in Burns’s hand. It was Gavin Hamilton’s copy, but
because the covers were “somewhat frayed,” he sent it to be rebound.
However, that copy, including the manuscript poems, was also preserved,
and its current ownership is known. Worst of all is the 1908 newspaper
story, just after one of the big auctions, where the reporter had
overheard a Stirling bookbinder discussing the rarity of the Kilmarnock,
and a local man said he had torn a copy apart leaf by leaf to make
tapers to light the gas.
At least one discoverer was too honest to
profit from what he found. In August 1926, a tenant farmer near Lamlash,
returning from sheep-shearing, went to put away his tools in a hole high
in the cottage wall, and discovered a copy of the Kilmarnock “covered
with dust and cobwebs.” It had the name of someone who’d lived in the
house in the 1870s, and he gave it back to the man’s daughter.
Other stories, like fishermen’s yarns, are about the
one that got away. On August 2, 1832, the Shakespearian John Payne Collier
recorded in his diary:
I was passing through
Turnstile into Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, and so to Somerset House, when I cast
my eyes upon some shelves with books, outside a shop.… I saw one book that I
much desired to purchase, viz., the Kilmarnock edition.… I put it back on
the shelf, making up my mind to purchase it on the way home: the price was
only 1s. 6d., but I knew it would not be dear at a guinea; and when I
returned by the same way, I did not for a moment forget my book—for I
already considered it mine. My mortification, therefore, was not a little
when, as I passed the place again, I found it gone—sold for 1s. 6d. To
somebody else.
In conclusion, it is worth emphasizing that
the Kilmarnock Burns really is a very rare book. Censuses like this have
only been published for a few very important works: the Gutenberg Bible,
Copernicus, the Shakespeare First Folio, Audubon’s Birds of America.
There are fewer documented surviving copies of the Kilmarnock edition
than of any of the other titles except the Gutenberg Bible, perhaps
because the others were all big imposing books that were collectible
from first publication. Even for the Gutenberg, the original print-run
was smaller, so the percentage of surviving copies is higher than for
the Kilmarnock. The most recent census of the Shakespeare First Folio
found 232 complete copies, with one more discovered since, so the
Kilmarnock Burns is still nearly three times rarer than Shakespeare.
Any census is a snapshot of what we know
now, and these statistics are likely to change if new information comes
to light and further copies are discovered. Based on the records of
copies sold at auction in the past we think there could be twenty or
more Kilmarnocks out there in private ownership that we haven’t yet
located (see the list on pages xvii-xviii of the introduction to the
book). Eighty years ago, in The Story of the Kilmarnock Burns (1933),
John D. Ross had made the same point, quoting from a letter written by
one W. E. Wilson forty years earlier still, in 1892:
Perhaps these facts may
stimulate someone with sufficient leisure to make a systematic search for
that little volume of ‘Poems
chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,’ which is of so much interest to the
bibliophile, and if the searcher’s patience be rewarded, surely like Snuffy
Davie <sic>, he will be thrice happy.
Snuffy Davy, in Scott’s The Antiquary, is
described as “the very prince of scouts for searching ... for rare
volumes.” Our hope is that this Census will stimulate another Snuffy
Davy to hunt down some of the copies that remain unlocated.
Details about the book:
Authors: Allan Young and Patrick Scott
Title: The Kilmarnock Burns: A Census
Series: South Carolina Scottish Literature Series, no. 3.
Publisher: Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2017.
Pp. xxxvi + 198. Paperback, $24; £18. ISBN 978-1976245107
The book is not available for purchase
directly from the library, only through Amazon, Amazon UK, CreateSpace,
and several other online vendors, with wide variation in pricing and
shipping charges. |
