Tracking the Kilmarnock Burns: Allan Young's Census and the Hunt for 'Lost' Copies

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Article

Abstract

Presents an overview of the aims and process of Allan Young's project to create a census of all surviving copies of Robert Burns's first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock: John Wilson, 1786), usually called "the Kilmarnock edition;" outlines the way in which earlier and current records describe copies through ownership marks, binding, size, and (in)completeness, to create a profile or DNA for each copy, often allowing its history to be traced in surprising detail; and illustrates the census method with short studies of three copies, the A.C. Lamb-Harry Widener copy, now at Harvard; the Dowager Countess of Glencairn-Gilbert Burns--H. Bradley Martin copy, so far untraced since it was last at auction in 1990; and the badly-damaged Edward Whigham copy, recorded in 1896, and again 1910, and then lost again for a hundred years, till it was identified as a recent acquisition at Princeton. The article concludes with an appeal for information about copies in libraries or private ownership of which the census compilers might be unaware.

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