Suffering from plauge...

Really, I think I might have plague (he says, with a smile). Fluids and cataloging will be the course of the day. Which brings me to the minor mystery I am trying to track down today. Not many know that Noah Webster, in addition to a fondness of words, was a lay epidemiologist. I am currently trying to track down one of his lesser known works, "A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases..." It was published in this country in 1799 but I am actually looking for the much less common London edition. He had all but given up on the US publisher and had sent the manuscript over to London to be printed. Shortly before it was published in the UK, the US printer finally printed it...this, however, annoyed the London publisher a great deal as they were under the impression that it was an unpublished volume and, in the end, never paid Webster for the book.

It is amazing, in our age of instant communication, how much could happen in the couple of months it could take to get trans-Atlantic communications (there and back again) and what the meant for how one conducted one's business. I think I will go check reference volumes at the Bodleian...because I can. Actually, for anyone who does not know it, there is an amazing collection of illuminated manuscripts, from the collections of the various Oxford Colleges available (N.B. most images are *large* and high quaility...a high speed connection is recommended).