The Postmaster of Ipswich : William Stevenson Fitch ; Antiquary and Thief

The Book Collector, London, first edition, 1997. Cloth, 8vo,. 177 pp. From the blurb: "Among nineteenth century rogue antiquaries, William Stevenson Fitch (1792-1859) casts a long shadow...Fitch was .. a persistent and unrepentant thief of broadsides and manuscripts, who betrayed scholarly access and personal trust, enriching both his own shelves and those of other collectors at the expense of unwary custodians. Although suspected even in his own time by a few shrewd observers the extent of Fitch's depredations has never before been appreciated. Drawing on a wide-range of archival sources, The Postmaster of Ipswich leads us from Ham House and Helmingham Hall, the country seats of the Tollemache family, to the Corporation chest of Ipswich itself - all of them home to unique literary and historical materials. Into Fitch's net came the manuscripts of John Bale's morality play Kynge Johan and George Peele's poetical Anglorum Feriae; books printed by Caxton and Wynkyn de Wörde; the hoard of sixteenth-century broadsides now known as the Britwell and Huth ballads; and hundreds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century letters and state documents abstracted from the Duke of Lauderdale's Ham House papers." Contents: Introduction; I Ham House and Helmingham Hall: The Tollemache Legacy; II Scottish Letters and English Books; III Useless Lumber, Curious Papers, Black-Letter Ballads; IV The Pursuit of the Postmastership; V The Ipswich Muniments and Bale's Kynge Johan; VI Discoveries and Traffics; VII Recognition. Appendix I: The 1824 Sale of Lauderdale Papers; Appendix II: Fitch's Spoils at Auction, 1855-73.Indexed. Near Fine in Near Fine dustwrapper.