Dating Books

I've had a number of 19th century to turn of the century books recently that were undated - does anyone have particularly good methods or sources for dating books?

One book has a tremendous cover with beautiful floral painted boards, and a penned inscription that looks like it was done with sepia ink and a fountain or quill pen. It's a copy of the Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb, published by Lupton - my suspicion is that it was specially bound at dates from somewhere around the turn of the century to the twenties, as I've seen similar bindings on books from those periods, but I'm wondering if it could be earlier.

Any way to upload a photo here?

But I'm also curious generally, as I have this problem a fair bit. Any good detective stories anyone wants to tell.

Sometimes WorldCat is useful, if you have author/title/publisher a search in there will often pull up the right date (or the best guess anybody's come up with). If there were many editions of the work, you may need to check out the various records to confirm (via page counts, etc.) which your book is. It all depends on the book, of course - some are easy, and others notsomuch.

Funny you should mention Charles Lamb - I`ve just finished reading English Humour by J B Priestley, a book in which Lamb is praised highly.

Dating books is always a challenge.

Sometimes it is worth trying to find out when the publisher in question was in business - that at least gives you an idea.

We were once able to date an undated book surprisingly accurately, just because the publisher`s name had changed slightly a number of times over a period of years, as various partners came and went. Fortunately, the form used in the book we had was only used for a very short period.

Another thought would be - a lot of books of that era contain lists of other books from the same publisher at the back - sometimes it`s possible to arrive at a date by reference to these.

Pictorial covers of the type you describe were popular in the 1890s, especially in the field of Christian religious fiction, but it is not usually safe to date by that alone - I`ve known of titles where the publisher just carried on using the same cover design for successive editions from the 1890s - the 1920s.

Collectors are often only too happy to share their knowledge. Recently, a collector of books published by an Edinburgh company, Gall and Inglis, was able to enlighten my wife and I (we`re booksellers) that two books we had in stock by the Victorian religious writer `F W I` were probably written by a member of the Inglis family who owned the company, as family members often wrote titles, but regarding themselves as publishers, not professional writers, took little interest in being credited as writer. An unusual situation I would imagine.

Without knowing more about your purchases, that`s all I can think of offhand - hope it helps though.

This helps a lot. Using the information above, I found my way to Worldcat.org, which unfortunately didn't help me this time, and to the Lucille Project at http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/lupton/Lupton.htm by searching on the publisher -- this got my date to sometime from 1892 to 1902, and it looks like the Lucille Project has info on the dates of operation and book cover styles of a lot of publishers, so that can help me in the future. They had a number of covers similar to mine, but none exactly there (mine is gold gilt titles with three colors and a floral design that I'm going to guess is a beaux arts rendition of a narcissus). The person I'd bought from dates around 1896, so it sounds like that could be the case.

On Charles Lamb, if you have to start somewhere, Dissertation on Roast Pig is among my all-time favorites, but almost any volume of the Essays of Elia is likely to have some good stuff. Lots of precious little nuggets.

Thanks! If anyone has more ideas, always helpful!

often the nice ABE site has decent info if you look up your book. That floral cover from Lupton I think was in a series ; there are several listed, but the sellers seem to have the same question about dating that book (ie. circa 1900.) Sellers are often a great source of info - and generally very happy to help

The standard reference for this sort of search, that I haven't seen mentioned, is the 754 volume National Union Catalog, pre-1956 imprints (1500-1955). A quick glance of the many pages for Last Essays of Elia turned up two editions by Lupton, listed as 185- and 188-. Not kidding; they may not have been dated... Any sufficiently huge research library will have these; best to check for yourself.

You might also look in university library catalogs for bibliographies of Charles Lamb. A cursory search of ABE and Worldcat comes up with several.

Dating books? I don't recommend it. They're lousy kissers, and they never call back.

But they're often better than expected under the covers.

Top that? I don't think so!