Bradford on 10 Jun 2005  •  Link

"I had a great mind to have bought the King's works, as they are new printed in folio, and present it to my Lord; but I think it will be best to save the money.”

But they could always be pressed into use as a mounting block when taking horse, or to prop up a corner of a canopied bed when one of the legs breaks. Don’t the contents sound like a sure cure for insomnia?

dirk on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

The King's Works

"Basilika : the works of King Charles the martyr : with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt His said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament."

London : Printed by James Flescher for R. Royston, 1662.

The "Eikon Basilike" - as it was also known - is a work attributed to Charles I (1648?).

A second edition of "The Works of King Charles the Martyr..." was published in 1687 in a folio of 720 pages.

I haven't been able to find the text on the internet - maybe it was a boring book anyway :-)

Robert Gertz on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

"...but I think it will be best to save the money." Herein are we seeing the beginning of a slip in Sandwich's standing in Sam's eyes?

Cumgranissalis on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

Paying off Debts , I wonder what remains of his contents of his hanging Sock. There must have been many questions that tweaked Sam's mind.

The Workes of King Charles the Martyr
“…. It is now generally acknowledged that the work was written by John Gauden, who after the Restoration became one …”
a discussion frim Monarsh U. Aus.
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhi…
if ye have the funds one can find a copy.

Stolzi on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

The Eikon Basilike is available on line. The portion I read was very moving:

Though they think my Kingdomes on earth too little to entertaine at once both them and me, yet let the capacious Kingdome of thy infinite mercy at last receive both me and my enemies.

When being reconciled to thee in the bloud of the same Redeemer, we shall live farre above these ambitious desires, which beget such mortall enmities.

When their hands shall be heaviest, and cruellest upon me, O let me fall into the armes of thy tender and eternall mercies.

language hat on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

"and do not intend to buy any more of any kind a good while"

Heh. How many times have I made similar resolutions...

The Eikon Basilike is here:
http://justus.anglican.org/resour…

Pauline on 11 Jun 2005  •  Link

"and do not intend to buy any more of any kind a good while"

I made this vow just yesterday. And have stuck by it ever since.

Australian Susan on 12 Jun 2005  •  Link

Book buying
I read today's entry when having spent the day at our local Church garage sale (a mere 10 books bought) and Brisbane's twice yearly charity BookFest held in the State Convention Centre offering 1 million books. Oh dear, oh dear. Bought far far too many; *but* did get a first edition hardback of 'Forever Amber' (discussed at length in theses pages last year) for only $1AU (that's 80 American cents or 40 British pence.). Not bad.

Ruben on 12 Jun 2005  •  Link

It is no coincidence we met in this virtual space.
Books as Pepys and we knew are going the way of the Dodo.
Public Libraries are turning to the digital world and in a short time all the book shelfs will become obsolate.
Libraries will have their books posted in the Net or similar and students will seat somewhere else, and have an experience completely different from that of a hundred previous generations.
No, I am not happy with this. But it is a fact of life.

Robert Gertz on 12 Jun 2005  •  Link

Ruben, I'm not quite ready to say the paper book is doomed. Paper documentation was not eliminated by the advent of electronic data storage, despite the prophets of a totally digital future and I think the book will survive, though I agree that libraries will increasingly turn to the Net. Is it such a terrible thing? A monk of the twelve century finding himself in Sam's day would probably mourn his lost art of copying manuscripts and despise that filthy Gutenberg and his press churning out cheap Bibles and nonsensical pamphlets and books from every partially-literate fellow with a big ego but the digital book does open a lot of opportunities as Phil's blog here demonstrates.

Certainly nothing matches the joy of exploring a printed book new to oneself, good or great if possible, but even if not so fine a work, to sit in a comfortable chair, feeling the pages, discovering the author and her or his world at leisure. And there's no greater tragedy than the loss of any book and its world. I think of the novel "Shadow of the Wind" with the entrancing description of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where all works, great and not-so-great, that the dedicated booksellers of Barcelona find abandoned and forgotten are taken for safekeeping and like you I fear that day may come for all printed work. But the reality is most of us don't get the chance or time to explore the great libraries and bookstores on foot. The Web has offered some chance for that kind of exploration. True, most of us with access to digital sources still don't employ them to find the classics, etc...But my monk above would have been right to point out that the printing press led to a surfeit of junk on the world's shelves as well as great lit.

Australian Susan on 13 Jun 2005  •  Link

The Charity BookFest I referred to above is a hugely successful event - thousands and thousands attend, picking over the books, chatting to each other as old favourites are unearthed or that missing book from a series pounced upon. Middleaged men buy old copies of mechanics text books, children scoop up armfuls of reading matter which they can *keep* (always a problem with a library book), people thoroughly infected with bibliophilia squeak with excitement: "Look! Hardback '50s Graham Greene! Only a dollar!" Yes, the digital age is upon us for evermore, but books are and will be loved and cherished and desired for many centuries, I am sure. And the networked world allows me to use a metabookstore search facility (such as abebooks.com)to track down those elusive out of print volumes. I think Sam would have loved the BookFest - not only for the bargains and our Sam likes a bargain, but all those pretty young female students buying books, maybe needing a helping hand to move a heavy atlas? And so on.

Jenny Doughty on 13 Jun 2005  •  Link

I don't know about anybody else, but I hate reading anything very extended on the computer screen, let alone a whole book, so at least in my household the paper book isn't dead yet.

Ruben on 13 Jun 2005  •  Link

Thank you all for your points of view. I agree with all of them. I also love my books and will never part with my grandfathers library or the one book I had from a friend 50 years ago and still I open from decade to decade. But times are changing. Like a storm in the horizon, the air is still but you can smell the rain and the birds fly in a special way and you know things will change.
This storm will be historic. Books will be kept in a shelf and like a seed in the desert may be it will be read again only after a hundred years span or never...
I do not know how to send a link to an excellent New York Times note to you so I will send it complete for you to read.
May 14, 2005
College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
HOUSTON, May 13 - Students attending the University of Texas at Austin will find something missing from the undergraduate library this fall.
Books.
By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library's 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.
"In this information-seeking America, I can't think of anyone who would elect to build a books-only library," said Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin.
Their new version is to include "software suites" - modules with computers where students can work collaboratively at all hours - an expanded center for writing instruction, and a center for computer training, technical assistance and repair.
Such digital learning laboratories, staffed with Internet-expert librarians, teachers and technicians, have been advancing on traditional college libraries since appearing at the University of Southern California in 1994. As more texts become accessible online, libraries have been moving lesser-used materials to storage. But experts said it was symbolic for a top educational institution like Texas to empty a library of books.
The trend is being driven, academicians and librarians say, by the dwindling need for undergraduate libraries, many of which were built when leading research libraries were reserved for graduate students and faculty. But those distinctions have largely crumbled, with research libraries throwing open their stacks, leaving undergraduate libraries as increasingly puny adjuncts with duplicate collections and shelves of light reading.
Mr. Heath said removal of the books had raised some eyebrows among the faculty and anxiety among the library staff. But he said the concerns were needless. "Books are the fundamental icon of intellectual efforts," he said, "the scholarly communication of our time."
So, Mr. Heath said, speaking of the library, "if you move it, there's a pang, a sense of loss." He added that the books were merely being moved within the university's library system, one of the nation's largest, home to some 8 million volumes and growing by 100,000 a year. Basic reference books like dictionaries and encyclopedias will remain.
The move, Mr. Heath said, would free about 6,000 square feet in the four-story Flawn Academic Center, which opened in 1963.
Students at Texas, interviewed as they studied or lounged at the library tables, said that they would welcome extra computer space and that they got most of their books anyway at the far larger Perry-Casta?eda Library. But some said they liked the popular selection at the undergraduate library and feared the loss of a familiar and congenial space.
“Well, this is a library - it’s supposed to have books in it,” said Jessica Zaharias, a senior in business management. “You can’t really replace books. There’s plenty of libraries where they have study rooms. This is a nice place for students to come to. It’s central in campus.”
Library staff members said they were taken by surprise when told last month of the conversion, which is how the news first emerged. At a retreat just weeks earlier they had brainstormed about ways to improve service and save money. They said they had been promised reassignment after the conversion and feared speaking out publicly at the risk of jeopardizing their jobs.
Many specialists said Texas was going along with an accelerating trend.
“The library is not so much a space where books are held as where ideas are shared,” said Geneva Henry, executive director of the digital library initiative at Rice University in Houston, where anyone can access and augment course materials in a program called Connexions. “It’s having a conversation rather than homing in on the book.”
“We’re teaching students how to do research,” Ms. Henry said. “Their first reaction is to Google. But they need to validate their information and dig deeper.”
Carole Wedge, president of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott, an architecture firm in Boston that has redesigned dozens of college libraries for the computer age, said most were built “as boxes to house print collections.” The challenge, Ms. Wedge said, is to adapt them to what she called “the Barnes & Noble culture, making reading and learning a blurred experience.”
Rarely do today’s students hunt for a book in the stacks, she said. Now they go online and may end up with a book, but also a DVD or other medium. But, she said, “it’s unlikely there will be libraries without books for a long time.”
Significantly, librarians are big supporters of the trend.
“There’s a real transition going on,” said Sarah Thomas, past president of the Association of Research Libraries and the librarian at the Cornell University Library in Ithaca, N.Y. “This is not to say you don’t have paper or books. Of course, they’re sacred. But more and more we’re delivering material to the user as opposed to the user coming into the library to get it.”
Southern California, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of its electronic center, called Gateway, last October, keeps about 80,000 books at Gateway, although millions more are available at the university’s 15 other libraries, said Lynn O’Leary-Archer, director of the university libraries.
Similar digital library centers have been built at Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Georgia, the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan. The University of Houston, which is doubling its library space, specializes in the publishing of scholarly material online.
“This is a new generation, born with a chip,” said Frances Maloy, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and leader of access services at Emory. “A student sends an e-mail at 2 a.m. and wonders by 8 a.m. why the professor hasn’t responded.”
Ms. Maloy praised the initiative at the University of Texas as signifying “that a great university with a fabulous library collection recognizes it’s in the digital age.”
Nathan Levy contributed reporting from Austin, Tex., for this article

language hat on 13 Jun 2005  •  Link

Probably not a good idea to post long articles with no immediate connection with the diary...

Australian Susan on 14 Jun 2005  •  Link

Libraries and Sam
Sam loved books. If he hadn't cherished the idea of the written or printed word, his diary would not have survived. We also have the "time capsule" of his personal library given to his old college which, in its wisdom, kept the collection and intact and did not allow it to be borrowed.
One of the professional qualifications I have is in librarianship: I retrained later in life when the profession was on the cusp of going digital: librarians make jokes about "the b word" and they spend more and more of their time staring at a computer screen. Students have changed - they expect everything to be there in the ether. The type of research where you get a list of references, find the journals and p/c bits of the relevant articles seems gone. Sam would have recognised that world (except the electronic copying). It is is similar to, say, the revolution in transport made by the car.
For a take on all this by librarians, try http://www.librarian-image.net/

Tom Burns on 14 Jun 2005  •  Link

The King's Works

"Basilika : the works of King Charles the martyr : with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt His said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament."

Oh, brother ! What is it about ruler-types that causes them to think that their every thought must be recorded for prosterity?

Perhaps Sam considered possession of a copy obligatory for advancement, like Chairman Mao’s little red book in the 20th century.

This is the same kind of logic that caused Richard Nixon to make those tapes that everyone found so amusing…

JonTom Kittredge on 15 Jun 2005  •  Link

The King's Works
To be fair, this compilation of Charles I's works was made after his execution, so it was not published to serve his vanity. It did, though, serve those who wanted to justify the old regime and condemn the rebellion and Commonwealth. The title "King Charles the Martyr" states the agenda pretty clearly.

Michael Robinson on 14 May 2008  •  Link

"I had a great mind to have bought the King’s works, as they are new printed in folio, and present it to my Lord; but I think it will be best to save the money."

[Basilika. Greek] The workes of King Charles the martyr: with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt 101, n. 3) reads ” … It was a second hand copy, and haHis said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament.
London : printed by James Flesher for R. Royston, book-seller to His most sacred Majesty, MDCLXII. [1662]
[16], 120, [2], 458, [12], 733, [7] p.,
[3] folded leaves of plates : ill., coat of arms, port. ;
2⁰. (folio) Pepys Library 2577

Compiled by William Fulman, (1632–1688), surviving Mss. notes at Corpus Oxford; preliminary “life of Charles I,” signed Richard Perrinchiefe, compiled from Fulman’s notes and some materials of Silas Titus. The substantial bulk of the text by far is the ‘… collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers … ‘

The text of the ‘Eikon comprises only p. 1-198 of the second section. According to Falconer Madden ‘New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike’ this is the 65th. edition of that portion of the text. The authorship of the Eikon was originally attributed to Charles I, but generally accepted by the Restoration to have been written by John Gauden, (Bishop of Exeter 1660, translated Worcester 1662 http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo… ) who probably included some authentic writings of the king. His brother was the the Navy victualer Sir Dennis Gauden http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo… who figures in the Diary

Spoiler

SP later 'bespoke' a second hand copy, for 50 shillings.
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Michael Robinson on 14 May 2008  •  Link

[corrected post]
“I had a great mind to have bought the King’s works, as they are new printed in folio, and present it to my Lord; but I think it will be best to save the money.”

[Basilika. Greek] The workes of King Charles the martyr: with a collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers concerning the differences betwixt His said Majesty and his two houses of Parliament.
London : printed by James Flesher for R. Royston, book-seller to His most sacred Majesty, MDCLXII. [1662]
[16], 120, [2], 458, [12], 733, [7] p.,
[3] folded leaves of plates : ill., coat of arms, port. ;
2⁰. (folio) Pepys Library 2577

Compiled by William Fulman, (1632–1688), surviving Mss. notes at Corpus Oxford; preliminary “life of Charles I,” signed Richard Perrinchiefe, compiled from Fulman’s notes and some materials of Silas Titus. The substantial bulk of the text by far is the ‘… collection of declarations, treaties, and other papers … ‘

The text of the ‘Eikon comprises only p. 1-198 of the second section. According to Falconer Madden ‘New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike’ this is the 65th. edition of that portion of the text. The authorship of the Eikon was originally attributed to Charles I, but generally accepted by the Restoration to have been written by John Gauden, (Bishop of Exeter 1660, translated Worcester 1662 http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo… ) who probably included some authentic writings of the king. His brother was the the Navy victualer Sir Dennis Gauden http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo… who figures in the Diary

Spoiler

SP later ‘bespoke’ a second hand copy, for 50 shillings.
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Douglas Quick on 19 Aug 2009  •  Link

Re the "King's works" I own a copy and a lovely (and heavy - roughly 15 pounds) thing it is.

It was the first folio edition of the Eikon - albeit as part of the King's Works(Madan 65). There was an earlier editon of the Works (Madan 64) published in 1658 in octavo. The earlier editions of the Eikon (of which I also own several)were typically small octavos on poor paper.

This edition also included the first edition of the life of Charles I by Dr. R. Perinchief.

This is a high quality "coffee table" edition of the Eikon and related works and publications (the King's letters, speeches, etc as well as a transcript of his trial) virtually all of which had been previously published. It has a full page Royal Arms by Hollar, and engraved titlepage with an oval portrait of Charles I and two folding plates. The paper is high quality and there is red ruling on several pages and red type (both expensive as it required double printing in various locations) - including the names of the signatories to his death warrant!

For a booklover like Pepys it would have had great appeal but one can also see why it would be such an appropriate gift for his patron Sandwich.

I note that Royston also stated that many copies were lost in the Great Fire in 1666. Its high price probably meant slow sales so that copies were still at the publisher's four years later. It is interesting to note that Pepys got a second hand copy when new copies were still available and still paid 50 shillings (2 and a half pounds)- a considerable sum at the time.

arby on 9 Jun 2015  •  Link

I'm certain I would never have read the Diary in book form, and probably wouldn't have read a digital version either, although I have a free one on a tablet. It's only this site and the knowledgeable readers that drew me in.

The Lily on 11 Jun 2015  •  Link

10 years later, the paper-based book form is still a major force. Sure, ebooks have exploded in use, but so far paper is here to stay. Trends point to paperback books being threatened more than hardbacks. Seems people who want to read in hardback specifically want that exact format, whereas folks who don't care will go for ebooks when they're released versus paperback. I find it all fascinating! I love reading on my Kindle app while waiting for the car to be worked on, for instance, but when I'm at home it's paper-based all the way. But travel - oh travel! No more lugging 20 books in my suitcase, I have 300 on my *phone*! Bliss! (But once I'm in the hotel room or tent, I want paper-based again!)

Jmacg on 13 Jun 2015  •  Link

I am a professional traditional book publisher, but these days my personal reading is nearly all on a Kindle Paperwhite, whether I am traveling or in an armchair at home. But that's for books which are largely or entirely text. Books with lots of illustrations are another matter. They are still much better in traditional book format - and that is the sort of book I publish.

IMHO, nostalgic notions of the feel of the paper, the smell of the bookbinder's glue etc are mostly a nonsense when applied to a newly published book. They are greatly outbalanced by the convenience and greater readability of an ebook on a good digital ink platform such as my Paperwhite.

My old books, and my beautifully designed and illustrated modern books, are still very precious to me.