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Early 19th century xylotheks
Xylotheks, or xylotheques, are book-like herbariums, made of wood and filled with wood specimens, including dried leaves, flowers, seeds and bark. They appeared towards the end of the 17th century […]
William Beckford’s travels in Italy (1834)
William Beckford (1760-1844) was an English novelist and travel writer, best known for his Gothic novel, Vathek (1786), and for building the magnificent (but structurally unsound) Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. […]
William Hogarth’s complete works (ca. 1861)
William Hogarth (1697-1764) was a prolific painter, printmaker and social critic, best known for his often bawdy and satirical comic-strip series of pictures of life in 18th century England. His […]
Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822)
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817) was a Swiss traveller and geographer from Lausanne who later moved to England and found employment with the African Association. His mission from its President, Sir […]
Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Six months in the West Indies (1826)
Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798-1843) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon. He was both nephew and later son-in-law of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and edited his poetry. In […]
David Gregory’s first complete edition of Euclid (1703)
David Gregory (1659-1708) was a Scottish mathematician, best known for his Astronomiae Physicae et Geometricae Elementa (1702) – the first published work to apply the language of Newtonian gravitation to […]
Thomas Young’s course of lectures on everything (1807)
Thomas Young (1773-1829) was born in Milverton, Somerset, in 1773, the eldest of ten children in a Quaker family. Soon after his birth, he was brought up by his mother’s […]
Philip Henry Gosse’s Aquarium (1854)
In May 1852, the marine biologist and naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), made his first serious attempt to create a marine aquarium. He put three pints of sea water into […]
Caroline Halsted’s Travels in the boudoir (1837)
In Travels in the boudoir (1837), Caroline Halsted (1803/4 – 1848) takes the young female reader on a world-wide Grand Tour via the everyday objects in her private sitting-room. At […]
Anne Pratt’s Poisonous, noxious and suspected plants (1857)
Anne Pratt (1806-1893), a ‘grocer’s daughter of Strood’, developed an interest and talent for botanical art from an early age. She was self-educated; collecting and drawing flowers was an accepted […]