This Week's Acquisitions

(I could have sworn that I was trying to get rid of books.  This doesn't seem to be happening.) 

• [Margaret Fison], Giuseppe, the Italian Boy (Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1847).  Reprint of the previous year's London edition.  A relatively popular little anti-Catholic novel.  Margaret Fison's best-known publication, however, is not a novel or religious tract, but this.  (eBay)
• Christopher Nicholson, The Elephant Keeper (Harper, 2010).  In eighteenth-century England, a man winds up with the unlikely job of elephant caretaker.  (Lift Bridge)
• David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, 2010).  Young man from the Netherlands journeys to Japan in the nineteenth century.  (BOMC)
• C. F. Smarius, Points of Controversy, a Series of Lectures (Thomas McCurtain, 1867).  A Jesuit's contribution to Protestant-Catholic debates.  Father Cornelius Smarius (1823-70) was a leading nineteenth-century missionary.  (eBay)
• Mark Doyle, Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics, and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (Manchester, 2010).  Historical study of sectarian violence.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (Columbia, 2001). Fiction's audiences and attitudes to fiction.  (eBay)
• Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, eds., Amy Levy: Critical Essays (Ohio, 2010).  New studies of the Anglo-Jewish novelist's fiction, poetry, and prose.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)