Sam Bailey
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18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Sam Bailey
@18thcenturysam.bsky.social
810 followers 160 following 71 posts
PhD in 18thc British erotica / Antiquarian bookseller at https://keelrowbooks.com // she/they
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18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I think one of my all time favourite books that I've described: a nineteenth-century 'metaphysical story' about a man who can travel to planets inhabited by characters from novels. This copy is from an occultist library in Edinburgh, and we've only found two institutional copies worldwide...
Marbled paper wraps titled 'Ariel ... Or ... the Author's World' 'by Mary Platt Parmele' Title page reads: 'Ariel; or the author's world. A metaphysical story. By Mary Platt Parmele.' Text from the aforementioned novel.
December 17, 2025 at 11:39 AM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Surely one of the great ODNB epithets?
'Wilson, Edward [called Beau Wilson] (d. 1694), murder victim and subject of alleged sexual scandal'
October 13, 2025 at 8:56 AM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
On my desk today: victorian Frankenstein x Dickens x Zola fan fiction; and a sammelband of pamphlets about ghosts, adult circumcision, and slavery.
September 27, 2025 at 4:47 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Today's task: a love poem in cipher at the back of an otherwise quotidian local woman's memorandum book.
Manuscript love poem of the 18thc, in partial code.
September 19, 2025 at 12:44 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I'm really delighted to say that following submission of my thesis in December, I'll be starting as a full-time cataloguer and bookseller at the Keel Row Bookshop, supported by a traineeship from the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. Expect to see many more books here!
Shop front of Keel Row Books. A painted green shop front with yellow lettering, two windows full of books, in a 1930s building.
September 15, 2025 at 7:37 AM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I have rarely seen a work of art that speaks to me so specifically.
Pointillist illustration of a boy scout climbing a bookcase with caption 'for two years I worked for the archbishop collating and updating his archive of pornography and railway memorabilia'
July 18, 2025 at 3:49 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Today I am a bibliographer of erotica, reading a letter between two other bibliographers of erotica, which was mounted into a a bibliographer of erotica's copy of the Erotika Biblion.
Photo of a letter mounted into a bibliography.
June 23, 2025 at 7:43 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
My ambition for a bookshop is to have a floor dedicated to 'specialist publications' that consists of scarce but unsaleable books.
Photo of a book entitled 'Museum Quality Fish Taxidermy'
June 15, 2025 at 11:54 AM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I don't think I've ever encountered a bibliography that announces so clearly up front that it is going to be wrong.
Quotation reads 'Paul Englisch in several handsome volumes published in Germany during the late 1920's, has done as much as can honestly be done in the way of a large-scale survey of erotic literature, without falling into the ignorant and pretentious smattering that is the hallmark of what passes nowadays for literary scholarship, and perhaps always did. This sort of superficiality has also its counter-vice, actually identical but passing itself off instead as erudition: an excessive and finicking concern with unimportant details of literary form or detail, to the exclusion of the real matter and meaning; with the piddling minuatiae of line-endings, watermarks, and title-page variants, and altogether with a sort of biblio-coprolitic residue not worth considering at all - the sort of drivel endlessly and solemnly macerated in learned articles and Ph.D. dissertations submitted to, and accepted by, faculties of Literature and Arts, with apparatus criticus, notes, variants, stemma, and thematic index invariably as enormously large as the subject-matter is microscopically small.'
April 22, 2025 at 11:37 AM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Proud that my local is the sort of pub where patrons quote modernist epics in toilet graffiti
Caution sign overwritten with 'Brag sweet tenor bull'
April 18, 2025 at 8:39 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I've been working on 18thc puzzle-pictures recently. This 1786 ad in the Rambler shows the only way that I want to list books for sale.
A double-page printed sheet of 18 books, represented by rebuses. British Museum 1868,0808.5589.
January 28, 2025 at 1:37 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I am #BSECS2025 bound today. I'll be talking in the last session on Friday about queer bibliography and images of boys in the margins of printed books.
Slide with 'Boys in Print' in the centre, on images of woodblocks depicting various boys.
January 7, 2025 at 12:53 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Reposting the cfp for the 3rd Annual Queer Bibliography Conference, to be held at Newcastle University, and online 11-13 June 2025.

Full cfp ➡️ bit.ly/QueerBiblio2...

Submission form ➡️ bit.ly/QB2025Propos...

Questions? ➡️ [email protected]

Call closes 31 January. Please share widely!
Graphic with text reads: June 11-13 2025 Queer Bibliography In the Making Newcastle, UK and cyberspace Contact: queerbibliography@gmail.com
January 6, 2025 at 12:15 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Starting off the new year right
Title card of Master and Commander reads 'April 1805, Napoleon is master of Europe, only the British fleet stands before him, oceans are now battlefields.'
January 1, 2025 at 9:57 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
The tree is up. Couldn't find a topper so made our own this year.
A fully decorated and lit Christmas tree
December 7, 2024 at 6:47 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Cataloguing the manuscript catalogue of a previously unknown 18thc book owner and I have arrived, following the single-sheet publications, at the 'Good Books'.

This man may be the only person who thinks Robert Dodsley is the greatest among poets.
Manuscript list of 'Good Books': A Defense of Christianity by Ed Lord Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield; Gibson's Pastoral Letters; Salvation Every Man's Great Concern; Jenkin; Stanhope upon the Epistle and Gospels; Dodsley's Poems 'the best Miscellany extant'
November 29, 2024 at 5:35 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I spent too long today chasing up a quotation that I thought was from an Angela Carter interview which was, in fact, from the frontmatter of this book.
Pictorial cover of 'Sauce' by Ronnie Barker. Burnt orange cover with an image of a nude woman riding a bottle of 'The Old Favourite Sauce', contrasted with Ronnie Barker's disembodied head.
November 25, 2024 at 2:10 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
am delighted to announce the cfp for Queer Bibliography: In the Making is now open. Please see the attached full cfp: bit.ly/QueerBib2025 and the submission form: bit.ly/QB2025Propos.... I look forward to seeing many of you next year!
Call for proposals image for Queer Bibliography reads: June 11-13 2025 // Queer Bibliography In the Making // Newcastle, UK and cyberspace // contact:queerbibliography@gmail.com
November 6, 2024 at 4:16 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
As a Christmas gift to myself, I couldn't resist picking this up from Keel Row for the annotations and quaint take on a Cambridge binding. First time I've seen 'not his book' on an endleaf and tracings of watermarks with added smoking pipes.
Title page of an eighteenth century book entitled 'The Complete Proceedings of Parliament [...] Against Henry Sachervell'. Inscription on an endnote that reads 'John Strickland but not his book' Drawing of a foolscap watermark smoking a pipe Brown leather Cambridge binding with tulip decorations in each corner
December 16, 2023 at 1:39 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
You wouldn't steal a car font reading "You wouldn't download the Elgin Marbles"
October 24, 2023 at 6:37 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I've started cataloguing a bequest of 'miscellaneous 18th-century ephemera'. This may be the first bequest we've received that came in a crocodile skin archive box.
The aforementioned crocodile skin archive box
October 24, 2023 at 12:14 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
Encountered a good boy in the library today
October 12, 2023 at 2:45 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
It's a modest contribution, but it feels good to have a print copy of my first publication. Producing descriptions for a collection of rare children's books was certainly out of my wheelhouse but was a lot of fun
Cover of a book entitled 'The Blavatnik Honresfield Library: saved for the nation'. God cover depicts a painting of Charlotte Bronte in an oval frame. Table of contents divided into sections entitled 'Saved for the nation', 'William Law The Collector and His Collection', 'The Manuscripts' and 'The Books' Article title that reads 'Mother Goose, Brothers Grimm and Other Children's Books: Newcastle University' it is attributed to Dr Melanie Wood and Sam Bailey
October 9, 2023 at 2:16 PM
18thcenturysam.bsky.social
I always find the density of false information on this one very pleasing
September 29, 2023 at 9:08 AM