The Tinker Library. A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Books and Manuscripts Collected by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

Maurizio Martino, Storrs-Mansfield, [1995] reprint of the 1959 first edition. Reprint limited to 150 copies. Cloth, 8vo,. xxvi, 530 pp, ills. 2,368 entries. This is a bibliographical catalogue of a splendid collection assembled by Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who for over 40 years was Professor of English at Yale and acted also as Keeper of Rare Books at Yale Library.He specialized in 18th and 19th century English Literature, with emphasis on such figures as Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Anthony Trollope and their associates, although the 2,368 items described here extend generally over the field to give a representative selection of good English literature of the period.. The catalogue entries include collations and descriptions of each book and manuscript. A detailed author/title index is provided. From a review of the first edition: "There is a fine Goldsmith collection, including the first English, Dublin, and American editions of The Vicar of Wakefield; there is plenty of Richardson, but little of Fielding and nothing of Gibbon or Lyttelton. Tinker, as is well known, went on from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and beyond. One of his most notable collections was that of Matthew Arnold, which contains his commonplace books, his pocket diaries, a few manuscripts, and a considerable number of letters as well as first editions of the printed books and other Arnoldiana. Prominent in this last category is the copy of Gianvili's Vanity of Dogmatizing (the book which inspired The Scholar Gypsy) given by Arnold to Robert Browning. George Eliot was another favourite and there are about 130 letters from, or to, or relating to her. Tinker was also caught up in the wave of Trollope enthusiasm of thirty years ago. He has the manuscripts of three novels and first editions of The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys. It is also pleasant to note that in his novel-reading he had a regard for Anthony Hope (though he failed, as most collectors fail, to secure a first issue of The Prisoner of Zenda); for Rider Haggard; for Max Beerbohm (he has a delectable copy of Zuleika Dobson with an inscription and a drawing by Max); and for Sherlock Holmes, of whose first adventure he has an author's presentation copy.... Mr. Metzdorf modestly describes his work as something between a check-list and a bibliography, and hopes that 'certain portions of the book will prove useful to librarians and to bookdealers . . . and to collectors'. The careful, though not overloaded, descriptions of each item and, in particular, the references to the standard bibliographies of the individual author will ensure that his hope is amply fulfilled. As new.