Wish list
Adam Roberts has suggested that I vary my acquisitions lists with a wish list. Like all bibliophiles, academics, and academic bibliophiles, I yearn to own any number of things. I'll confine myself here to books that I would buy if I didn't actually need to eat.
- Thomas Laqueur's Religion and Respectability (1977). Before Laqueur started writing about sex and gender, he wrote about...Sunday schools. I've been looking for a copy of this book since 1993 (and see that Amazon actually has a couple of relatively affordable copies available--both of which will no doubt vanish now that I've called attention to them).
- Pickering & Chatto produces these lovely sets, all of them at prices so astronomical that I can't even justify ordering them for the campus library. For example, English Catholicism 1680-1830, or Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction, or...
- The early modern/nineteenth c. volumes of the Cambridge History of Christianity would be awfully nice.
- I also have unfulfilled dreams of stumbling over an affordable copy of Josef Altholz's Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over "Essays and Reviews" 1860-1864 (1994).
- For some reason, I have yet to find volume one of the ongoing edition of Disraeli's letters.
There are a number of very obscure Victorian novels/nonfiction works/periodicals I wish I could afford, let alone own:
- Saddoc and Miriam (1832)
- Mrs. Robertson's Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829) (I'm trekking to the Harry Ransom Center this summer to read it)
- Emma Leslie's The Hermit of Livry (as opposed to the novel of the same name by M. R. Housekeeper)
- A rare Religious Tract Society journal called The True Catholic
- A complete set of Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England
- Ditto, Mary-Anne Everett Green's Lives of the Princesses of England
- The Cattley-Townsend edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments (it's a lousy edition, as Thomas Freeman et al. have been pointing out for some time now, but it's nevertheless the one that nineteenth-century novelists usually cite)
- Not Victorian: Thomas Leland's Gothic-cum-historical novel, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762) (it's supposedly being reprinted, but has been announced as "forthcoming" for quite some time)