Saturday, September 05, 2020
An Under-Rated Research Resource
Christopher Stray, "Edward Adolf Sonnenschein and the Politics of Linguistic Authority in England 1880-1930," in Nicola McLelland and Andrew Linn, edd., Flores Grammaticae: Essays in Memory of Vivien Law (Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2004), pp. 211-219 (at 215, discussing John Nesfield):
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Nesfield's name is often to be glimpsed on the shelves of that under-rated research resource, the second-hand bookshop.Id. (at 216, n. 1, on Nesfield's pamphlet Remarks on the Final Report Issued in 1911 by the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology, which was bound into copies of Nesfield's textbooks):
The British Library was unable to locate a relevant copy; but luckily, what the library system could not find, the second-hand bookshops provided. (There is a serious methodological problem here. By 1900 the publishing of textbooks had become separated from general publishing to the extent that libraries treated them differently. They were often stored separately, at times not even catalogued, and little attention was paid to collecting different editions. The result is that in this field it is at times more difficult to locate relevant copies of 19th and early 20th century books than it is for much earlier periods.)
