Owners and Collectors of the Printed Books of the Early Modern Lord Mayors’ Shows

Abstract

The annual London Lord Mayor’s Show, which saw its heyday in the early modern period, exists in printed form from 1585. These books stand as permanent witnesses to an ephemeral event. Until quite recently they have not been subject to any thoroughgoing bibliographical study, however. This article explores the evidence that remains of readers’ ownership of and interactions with these works from the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Copies of these works were owned by collectors including Humphrey Dyson, Robert Burton, Anthony Wood, and John Philip Kemble. Through an exploration of handlists and annotations, one can discover how these books were collected and categorized. Such an analysis reveals not just the original cultural meaning of these works but also the ways in which owners and collectors identified them in generic terms, thus suggesting their changing value to readers.