This is a scan of a postcard sent to me in 1994; it was done as part of the campaign to have a plaque for Anthony Trollope in Westminster Abbey
Dear friends and readers,
Now for something a little different. Just, or focusing on, photos. Over on the Trollope Society face-book page, someone suggested people send in photos of their Trollope books. So I took four photos of what I have that is real, physical books, folders, papers, and share them here.
First, there’s my main bookcase, which stands to the left of my desk: half books by Trollope (some several editions), the other half the first part of an alphabet of critical, biographical and other non-fiction books on Trollope or an area of concern to him. I didn’t get the very top, which is another row of books.
Second, behind me as I face my PC (some of it visible in videos), my folders of essays, all sorts of primary stuff xeroxed, hard-to-get texts by Trollope, especially lots on illustrations and handbooks:
Third, the books and folders that didn’t fit and are in the closet to the right of the shelves of folders:
And fourth, lastly, 
a row and a half of notebooks on (some screenplays I copied out) and DVDS of Trollope movies. It’s the second shelf starting one third the way through and the third. All in my enclosed porch where I keep all my DVDs and notebooks in two similar bookcases.
And of course separately, the short stack of what I’m reading now: two copies of Orley Farm, one with original illustrations. On a table in my workroom. After I finished my Joanna Trollope blog I put back her books. These or she sit/s in another room next to novels and travel books of Fanny Trollope (some of these in xeroxes in folders) and Thomas Trollope’s What I Believe.
I necessarily omit all that I now have as digital books and files in my computer. Around 2004 I stopped xeroxing things, stopped printing out except when I needed a final paper to take with me to a conference to read aloud (or now on zoom). I now have a couple of books by Anthony Trollope as digital files (How the Mastiffs Went to Iceland is one of them), a few more secondary books and all the essays and articles gathered from online databases since.
Anthony Trollope by Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print, 1864
I believe I could do the something similar (write a similar photo blog) of my Jane Austen library: it would take two photos, one full bookcase of books by and on Austen (same size bookcase so 7 rows of books); and a second of three rows of shelves in my enclosed porch, not just notebooks and DVDs of Austen movies, but one of the shelves has sequels (many unread) and translations of Austen’s novels into French and Italian (some read).
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Thanks for sharing, Ellen. Those are a lot of Trollope books. I actually have very few – most of the Barchester and Palliser novels and a few others – about enough to fill one shelf of a bookshelf – but I have almost all the others as ebooks. There just isn’t room in my house for many more books, though I do buy physical ones when the ebooks are not available or actually cost more than the paper ones.
Tyler
There is a sort of psychological origin to my whole library – beyond the practical that I inherited my father’s books, and we had two serious readers in our house, and in different disciplines, both of us valuing books and art. Sometime after I arrived in Virginia from NYC, with no car, and discovered local libraries in Alexandria City, were for me a laugh — I was used to NYC borough libraries, and British libraries — and found myself feeling utterly cut off from everything I valued. We rented a condo apartment just off a highway; no sidewalks in west Alexandria. To find daycare I could afford for Laura seemed necessary since apparently no women stayed home with their children where I was. Not that I found many playgrounds.
The worst was to be without books. Of course we had some but not enough to live through and with, and I vowed to myself that I would overcome this with a Scarlett O’Hara like vow: I’ll never be w/o books again. I began to go regularly to the Library of Congress and Folger Shakespeare Library. When I went back to work, another motive was to get a library card and have access to interlibrary loan.
And then in 1995 a world-wide world of books became available and I could find precisely the book I wanted. I loved wandering through used bookstores but they were most of the time not taking me precisely I wanted to go in my reading and writing journeys. And we were in a house that had wide walls on two sides of each room and two halls! Useless closets — hard to describe but they started about a foot above the floor so I ripped two of them out and had walk in vestibules.
And I love literal well made books — I don’t own a kindle and when I’ve tried ilbraries when traveling inevitably the wifi doesn’t work and I can’t figure out how to do this or that and the text doesn’t seem to me as really there as a real physical book
Ellen
Wow! What is most impressive is that you remember so many details and share them with us! Dick and Brenda Cheadle dbcheadle@verizon.net
Of course I remember them. They are my life.
Wonderful. Thank you so much!!
I’ll try to put my photos on the AT fb page.
I can relate, Ellen. We have a good public library here but it did not always have the books I wanted to read. The university library does but is not easily accessible if you are not associated with the university. Bookstores were wonderful but only stocked the most popular classics. Sometimes they would order books for me – I had to order my first Fanny Burney’s through B. Dalton, but other times they could not get a book or said they could only order it if they placed an order for 10 copies and they knew they’d never sell 10 copies of the obscure classic I wanted.
Thank God for Amazon and the ebook. I understand your aversion to the ebook but there are some books I just can’t get any other way, and some, like George WM Reynolds, in print, are in such tiny print it is difficult to read so I’ll opt for the ebook. Still, we live in the best age for people who love to read, however you choose to read. I hate to think what will become of my library when I am gone. No one will want my collection of modern Arthurian fiction or Oz novels or Gothic literature and keep it all together.
Tyler
When I found myself (as it were) in an apartment (renting a condo from someone) off a highway in Virginia, and with only the books Jim and I had gathered by that time (1980), I felt naked and alone. It’s this lack of any context that mattered that stunned me. You needed a car to buy a milk. No people about during the day — for Laura empty playgrounds. An early conversation with a next-door neighbor shocked me: it seems her (Black) handyman didn’t need to come to garden for her as much as he because his social security had kicked in. She was all resentment. Recently I joined in on a neighborhood zoom, supposedly a community group interested in local issues: profoundly unfriendly; apologizing to anyone who felt a need to stay; all but 6 in black boxes (it was some cheap form of zoom where only 6 cameras could be on); the conversation (such as it was) euphemisms about whatever were the supposed issues (the local elementary is closed and a new one is being built; a site of ferocious arguing now and again lest it become a multi-purpose site as the land is pretty big and could take 3 buildings). A neighborhood cop reporting on crime: one example was a mentally disturbed person whose relatives had called a cop in; he referred to the person as “the bad agent” whom they “restrained.” It was an extreme version of what’s wrong across the US.
For me it was the lack of any living community in a daily walking way and library with good books. When I finally started to teach again, a central motive was a library card. I even told one of the interviewers that a couple of years later when I was having trouble taking books out of the AU library because before the Internet, the practice was to throw all adjuncts off whatever each time the term ended, and I had tried to take out books in the summer. The woman behind the desk enjoyed my humiliation, having to give up culled books. The AU composition head (at the time) wrote out a letter for me and also called her and gave her a hard time. I value my position at OLLI at Mason because of my access to their database and faculty library privileges. I can take out books for as long as a faculty member. I do have access to interlibrary loan.
When Amazon and bookfinder and other such sites appeared in 1994/5, that is when our library really grew a lot.
I do feel bad about what is to happen to my library after I die. But one must remember Mr Casaubon and how he wanted to extend his life or experience or identity somehow beyond his life. Our children will not have our personalities or values necessarily– or often don’t. Maybe I yet will do something over Jim’s math and science books. Some of them are in Russian, Hungarian and other languages and are priceless. They need to go into some library. One problem is I have to go through my 11,000 picking them out. Maybe when I finally stop teaching.
Ellen
Serendipitously today — referring to Tyler and my conversation about libraries, — I read a very interesting review-article in the LRB by Adam Smyth on David Pearson’s Book Ownership in Stuart England. Yes people did own libraries and while the literacy rate for women was low in the UK until the mid-18th century, and money for books among many people scarce, yet one can find
persistent book-lovers and trace their libraries. Of course Pearson’s book is more about the wealthy and the institutions at the time.
A related subject is who got into print widely but that is another tale.
I doubt this is one of those not behind a paywall so if anyone wants a copy I’d have to copy and paste. It’s called “The ‘r’ word” because among some the habit of reading or the idea of a reader is apparently an avoided idea especially when it comes to libraries. Smyth says an important fundamental assumption one should have in approaching a library is there are many other things one wants a book for than reading it cover-to-cover.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/adam-smyth/the-r-word
It’s in the November 4th, 2022 issue
Ellen
Interesting piece, Ellen. I find the writing of names in books especially interesting. When I was a kid, I wrote my name in every book.
Today I usually only write my name in books I know I will keep or feel some connection to. For example, in books about the Pilgrims, I will sign my name and write “Descendant of Edward Doty” after it to clarify why the book is important to me.
Living here in Marquette, where my family has been since 1849, I’ve had the opportunity to buy many used books that have had the names in them of people I once knew or people who were well known in the community when they lived. The house of the town founder, Amos Harlow, stayed in the family until about a decade ago and then there was an estate sale. I went hoping to find a book with his name written in it. That happened with the second book I picked up, but the first book I picked up said “Omelia Bishop, her book” – Omelia was my great-great-great-great aunt, and her father worked with Amos Harlow in his forge so I was thrilled. Below that was written, “Omelia, this is not your book” by someone else. The book was an old hymnal and while the Harlows were Presbyterians and the Bishops Methodists, I can see such books probably got passed around in Marquette’s early years when there would have likely been very few books. I also have my great-great-grandfather’s Bible and a Sunday School book he was given by his teacher. To me, when people write names in books they take on a special personality and become so much more than just the book itself.
Tyler
How touching, Tyler, especially that exchange. In Smyth’s article he records that sort of thing in older books: again where the book’s raison d’etre is not limited to reading it. It has become a carrier of cultural history around it
I have nothing from grandparents or beyond: poor Jews or Jews who emigrated or fled (they traveled light), or were exterminated; or from my father’s Catholic Polish family, peasants who most of them could not read and owned at most a Bible. My paternal grandfather was a tailor in Poland but no books. Two books from Jim’s family: a 19th century home-made book of recipes and housekeeping from a woman servant in a house where there were more than a couple of servants. The other book from Jim’s family: a turn-of-the-century monumental handbook for how to play boys’ games. Very fat and detailed. Kind of funny. Jim joked it was like having explicit instructions for how to bounce a ball. Not that absurd because it was preserving all sorts of rules and games for posterity too. My sister-in-law gave them to me because she would have thrown them out as worthless.
My real treasures are the kind Smyth a bit deprecates: the older book treasured because it is older. I have an early 17th century copy of one volume of Shadwell’s play. Many of these older books are in sad shape — why I was able to buy them off shelves at the time.
Or a rare book, hard to get, small printing — Trollope’s How the Mastiffs Came to Iceland if you have it as a book would be this type. I now have a digital copy (from Rory) and the book in xeroxes I did long ago. Or because I simply love it and have cherished it and I write in these: Ellen Moody her book.
Last, books with inscriptions from students or the occasional friend. Sometimes at length: one such is in my Eva Figes’s The Seven Ages [of Women} from a young man aged about 20 who was in a class I taught in
the 18th century century (only one I ever did) at the Northern Regional Center of the University of Va. He was having a very hard time at that point in life and to come to my class for 3 hours was to discover a space and time where the values excruciating him had no place, were not at all operational. I remembered loving the book and wanted to use if this coming term but I grew impatient re-reading and changed it. I’ve been reading Eva Figes’s Child at War, a wonderful and deeply felt, funny and truthful memoir of WW2 as experienced by an evacuee German Jewish child in England and remembered in later age and then researched too (a la Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood). Sometimes an inscription can make one over-value a book — I’m not sure that was the case but too late to change back.
No one will ever care but me and if the boy now an older man remembers. That’s why I said we have to accept death when it comes to a private library.
E.M.
[…] I provided the four photos it takes to capture most of my books on and by Anthony Trollope, and explained why. I thought I’d match that blog with a photo of my collection of books by and on Jane Austen, […]
Trollopiana, No 121, Winter 2021/2 just placed in my library. After having made a fuss over the (usual) delay of my mail in getting the Trollopiana, I am glad to be able to report, it’s very good, lots of intriguing details. It seemed to me to be more “unified” in theme than sometimes: my feeling was one way of looking at the number is it is all about being literal, looking at Trollope from a very literal angle.
John Bowen’s article comes out differently in reading than listening: the initial presentation (let’s admit it) has real shock value, but once you get used to the POV, I hadn’t realized how much detail is brought to bear. Yes all these sexy puns people don’t mention very often. (Mark Turner wrote about these in his book on AT and the Magazines). But I like especially how Prof Bowen brought out the vulnerable, sensitive Trollope; the man alive to poverty and what brings stigma. You might say we are given evidence of the driving autobiographical painful and other non-conventional memories and experiences Trollope had which lie beyond his conventional thrust towards ambition and stories of shattered and successful careers.
I am seeing this in Orley Farm: not only feeling for all the characters subject to such bullies (especially the wives), but instances of _dirt_ I had not noticed before. Things just getting old and falling apart. Just one example: when Kenneby visits the Dockwraths and has to look upon what the years and cruelty and deprivation have done to (alas still) very dull Miriam (albeit in her behalf very loyal to Lady Mason — far too late for Miriam): she is the mother of “a long string of dirty children.” She has lost her beautiful mahogany furniture and all there is is this dreadful metal stuff no one can sit on. Wasn’t there a much bought nuga-something kind of furniture (bright plastic colors) in the 1960s? The money she brought to this ill-advised marriage which has been taken from her, and what she can offer her guest to sit upon: “an old well-worn horse-hair bottomed arm-chair.”
I also enjoyed Janis Zroback on hairdos in the 19th century and Trollope. A woman certainly did need a lady’s maid and many accessories. Modern hairdos can take huge amounts of efforts too. When women finally give it over, what a relief.
Will Stevens on the music we are imagine Mr Harding really played on that violoncello and which he arranged to have played in Barchester Cathedral. In the post-text to Trollope by Joanna Trollope, The Choir, the specifics of kinds of music, its cost (to have a choir, to keep up an organ) and popularity or “usefulness” are central to the book’s theme. So too in Barchester Towers. There Mr Slope was the philistine (to use a very old-fashioned slang term) who bad-mouthed the music and said no one wanted it any more.