About the Collection

About the Bibliography

This site has been created to make the bibliographic entries of David Magee’s Victoria R.I. bibliography accessible online. These entries detail a collection of over 3,500 Victorian-era publications, manuscripts, letters, and ephemera purchased in its entirety by Brigham Young University in 1969 and currently housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at BYU.

Until now these entries have been available only in print form (three volumes, published 1969-70 by Antiquarian Books), printed by Grabhorn-Hoyem Press in an edition of only 625 copies. Only about two-thirds of the entries made it into print, leaving several hundred of Magee’s annotated bibliographic descriptions awaiting a publication that never came to be. Magee had intended to issue another three volumes of the Victoria R.I. catalogue but was unable to do so before his death, from cancer, in 1977.

This new digital edition includes all of Magee’s valuable, copy specific descriptions, notes, and comments from both the published and the unpublished entries. The information provided for each entry includes title, author, place and year of publication, physical description, and details about association copies, former owners, and marginalia. It also itemizes the fine points of unique or obscure editions and impressions. The specifics for manuscripts, letters, and ephemera are especially enriched by Magee’s conversational and informative annotations.

This site will include digital images of both the original printed entries and the typewritten and handwritten cards. Thus researchers can scrutinize the original images alongside the database transcripts.

The database may be searched by any of the following elements: title, author, year of publication, place of publication, material type, genre, Magee number, and call number. It may also be searched by keyword for any element in the entire entry. Magee’s descriptions did not include publishers, so this information has been added to the entries and is visible from the results page. Other information which has been added to Magee’s entries is object dimensions and pagination as well as genre and material type.

This digital edition of the Victoria R.I. bibliography was initiated in 2013 and completed in 2015.

Maggie Kopp
Curator of European Books
maggie_kopp@byu.edu

Valerie M. Buck
Rare Literature Cataloger
valerie_buck@byu.edu