Very Rare. OCLC records a single other example in the Osborn Collection at the Toronto Public Library.
A very striking and large broadside catalogue of children’s books, prints, maps and theatrical scenery offered for sale in London at the beginning of the 19th-century.
A remarkable survival: a highly detailed catalogue of hundred of books published by the “Juvenile Press” of Hodgson & Co, “submitted to the judgement of Parents, Guardian, and other Teachers” and deemed “worthy their particular notice and patronage”. The catalogue would warrant much further careful study as it offers an enormous array of books from alphabets and grammars to picture books, present books, hymn books and religious texts, and moral works “embellished with numerous engravings , either Coloured or Plain”. There also atlases and maps, children’s editions of classic texts such as The Vicar of Wakefield and Rasselas. Listed under Hodgson’s Juvenile Drama are play such as Don Juan, the Libertine, Robinson Crusoe: or the Bold Buccaneers, The Vampire or the Bride of the Isles and Blue Beard: or Female Curiosity. There are also separate sections for miniature book, songs books, pamphlets, portraits (of Byron, Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, General Washington and Queen Caroline).
Hodgson & Co. was established in about 1820 at 43 King Street, London, in association with printer and stationer Thomas Hodgson, who operated at 11 King Street in Cheapside between 1799 and 1830. Hodgson & Co. moved to 10 Newgate Street in 1822, and operated there until taken over by William Cole in 1825. Orlando Hodgson, likely a partner in Hodgson & Co., continued on his own, publishing juvenile drama sheets of “splendid exuberance” until the mid-1830s
