Received: One Large Box Containing ...

Greetings, Gate, from the fog enshrouded Peninusla where the Vout is, as ever, very O-roonie.

Good thing I went cycling yesterday afternoon, for unless this fog burns off I won't be cycling today. One benefit of cycling 'round my neighborhood is that it is largely car-free. While the neighborhood is getting decidedly built up, it doesn't seem to have the high volume of car traffic that one would associate with such a situation. What traffic there is falls into two peak times: early morning and late afternoon. On the weekends, no one seems to go anywhere. Thus leisurely cycling is still a do able thing.

Friday night I returned home to find a very large box awaiting me. Within the box were 20 individually wrapped editions of Thomas B. Mosher's The Bibelot. It was like Christmas, opening the package and then unwrapping each volume paging through it, then unwrapping the next volume and I had to resist the urge to peruse at length the volume in hand. For within each volume were a variety of literary wonders ~ Oscar Wilde! Fiona MacLeod! A.C. Swinburne! William Morris! J.A. Symonds! Robert Louis Stevenson! Arthur Symons! D.G. Rossetti! Austin Dobson! Sappho! Theocritus! Others! Poetry! Essays! Novellas!

As it turns out, this set of The Bibelot is the "testimonial edition" published in 1925 by William H. Wise & Co., limited to 4,500 editions of which this is number 3628. Within the Index there is a list of subscribers and I assume there are 4,500 names, as I am not inclined to count them all.

The Bibelot was begun in 1895 as a yearly anthology selected and published by Thomas B. Mosher. The final volume was issued 20 years later in 1915 and the series had attained the status of Literary Phenomenon. The purpose of The Bibelot was, in Mosher's own words,

"To bring together the posies of other men bound by a thread of one's own choosing is the simple plan of the editor of The Bibelot.
"In this way the exotics of Literature that might not immediately find a way towider reading, are here reprinted, and, so to speak, resown in fields their authors never knew."

Within each volume of The Bibelot, one could find lyrics by William Blake and Francois Villon, the Ancient poets Sappho and Theocritus, novellas by William Morris, essays by J.A. Symonds, James A. M. Whistler, Arthur Symons and Robert Louis Stevenson, contemporary poetry by Austin Dobson and Fiona MacLeod as well as scattered writings by John Ruskin, Marcus Aurelius and Dr. Thomas Campion ... among a vast array of other writers. When Mosher chose the works of a well known writer, he rarely chose the expected works, instead he published the lesser known but equally polished works. Through The Bibelot Mosher restored critical attenntion to Thomas Campion, Villon, Sappho and Theocritus, championed the contemporary poetry of A.C. Swinburne, and brought to the public's attention the poetry of Fiona MacLeod and Austin Dobson, among others.