Preserving the book

At the weekend I finally got around to ordering some acid-free packaging (corrugated cardboard boxes) in which to store my antiquarian book. I desperately hope that in the time I've been procrastinating on this task I haven't caused irremediable harm to my wonderful family prayer book, my most precious possession.

Printed in 1617, the various owners of this book, presumably all direct ancestors of mine, have written their signatures, poems and quotations and sometimes have simply doodled on its now decaying pages. The oldest "contribution" that I've found is the signature of one Gabrielmus Evans, dated 1686. Was he a choir boy? That's how I see many of them, especially Joseph Donnaldson who, in an undetermined century but I'd place my bets on the 18th, filled an entire empty page with ornately written ramblings beginning with "Heavens quickning grace exalts the zealous mind, And therefore be to pious ways inclined. Joseph Donnaldson aught (sic) this Book and god give him grace on it to Loook (sic) both to Lark and understand never ..." and it gradually becomes less legible. Some other anonymous wag wrote "A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds" over and over again. More recently, James Carson of Cheetham Hill, 1861, is someone of whom I feel I should know, yet I've no idea where he fits into my family tree.

I remember very clearly staying at my Granny's house. I must have been in my early teens, and I was lying in the big bed in the spare room when my Granny came in and took the prayer book out of a drawer. I'd never seen it before and she let me browse its contents until I fell asleep. Next day I assiduously transcribed all the entries of the book, like the librarian bibliophile I was destined to be. Before she died my Granny, who herself wrote an entry in the book on her wedding day in 1939, entrusted the book into my care, but I do wonder whether the book has deteriorated under my custodianship, as I feel sure that the handwriting was clearer when I was a teenage girl than it is now.

In any case, who am I going to hand it down to? I have no children and neither does my brother. I'm sort of hoping that the recipient isn't alive yet. My cousin Ann, who's as interested in our family history as I am, has just had her first baby, but he's a boy, and I feel that a girl might look after it better, even though my Granny is still the only woman to have signed the book in nearly 4 centuries. That's just put an idea in my head - I'm going to have a party in 2017 to celebrate 4 centuries of our prayer book, and I'm going to get all my relatives to sign it.

In the meantime, it has to be consigned to the acid-free cardboard box, if only to enable me to assuage my conscience for my less than dutiful care to date.

So farewell to Gabrielmus Evans, Joseph Donnaldson, James Carson, Edmund Williams (love your bird sketch), William Evans, George Jones, David Harry, Daniel Jones (1693), Edmond Wiliams, Thomas Jones, and of course Joyce Newall nee Vosper.

See you all in 2017.