About the project
The Harding Collection
Most of the miscellanies in the bibliography are contained within the Bodleian Library’s Harding collection, which houses the most significant but largely neglected group of miscellanies in the world.
The information from the Harding collection miscellanies will be combined with data from the copies of all the miscellanies in the bibliography in other libraries, such as the British Library, and Cambridge University Library. The contents of the database are based on a comprehensive bibliography of eighteenth-century poetic miscellanies compiled by Professor Michael F. Suarez SJ.
Walter Harding: the collector of collections
Walter Newton Henry Harding was born in south London in 1883. At the age of four, he and his immediate family emigrated to America, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. Their family home, a suburban timber-framed house in Chicago, was to become the library and repository of Harding’s remarkable collection of printed music, verse, and drama. At the time of his death, in December 1973, each room was lined with ordered and catalogued books, the basement effectively an underground stack.
Walter Harding was not an academic or book dealer. He worked as a ragtime pianist, making much of his living from performing at Masonic events. He seems to have become involved in collecting through his interest in the words to songs he knew or performed. Music led him to verse, then drama, to sheet valentines and on to opera. His success as a book collector was partly due to the unfashionability of the material he was collecting: ephemeral, popular publications with little commercial value in the mid twentieth century.
Harding decided to give his collection to the Bodleian two decades before he died. He had never been to the library, and had not returned to England since his early childhood. His gift seems to have been motivated in part by a sense of nostalgia for a past England, a world that he had known only through the books he had collected, and partly by a sense, post-war, of the destruction of European culture. The collection, one of the largest within the library, arrived in 1975, by air, weighing 22 tonnes.
A large proportion of the miscellanies contained within the Digital Miscellanies Index come from Harding’s collection of songbooks within the Bodleian. Harding had composed his own, handwritten record of their contents, a first line card-index occupying some 48,000 cards, on which he had recorded titles, first lines, and tunes of all the songs within his collection. He published an article on his collection, ‘British Song Books and Kindred Subjects,’ Book Collector 11 (Winter 1962), 448-59.
Bibliography
Anon, ‘Organist dies at 90 leaving Fortune in Rare Sheet Music’ New York Times, 14 December 1973, p.34
Geil, Jean, ‘American Sheet Music in the Walter N.H. Harding Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University’, Notes, 34.4 (1978), 805-14
Harding, Walter N.H., ‘British Song Books and Kindred Subjects,’ Book Collector 11 (1962), 448-59
Hyatt King, A, Some British Collectors of Music, c. 1600-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 82-83
Hunter, D, ‘The publication and dating of an early 18th century English songbook’, Bodleian Library Record, 11 (1984) 231-40.
Solheim, Helene Elizabeth, ‘Walter N.H. Harding and the Harding Drama Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, unpublished Phd diss, University of Washington, 1985.
Turner, Michael L., ‘Who Was Walter Harding? Some Preliminary Notes on his English Antecedents, Part One’, Bodleian Library Record, 15 (1996), 422-454.
