Thanks to a generous fellowship award from the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I'm headed to Bermuda tomorrow for a couple weeks of reseach in the archives there as part of my Bermuda Project (that is, a study of the history of books in Bermuda from settlement through 1800). I'll be staying at Greenbank (pictured at left), just across the harbor from Hamilton, where the archives are located. Not only is it a great place to stay, but it also provides me at least a good excuse to be outside some of the time, since it means a ferry ride across the harbor to get back and forth from the archives each day (nothing like going to a nice warm place in the winter but spending most of the time in a climate-controlled basement archive, right?).
This trip I'll be focused again on the early Bermuda probate records, but I hope to make enough progress with those that I can move on to other archival collections as well; there are some tantalizing letterbooks and other materials there to be examined. Time permitting I'll chime in here with interesting finds.
I'm incredibly grateful to the BSA and ASECS for their support of the project, and I look forward to sharing more with you all over the course of the next couple weeks.
Books coming with me for the trip: Naomi Novik's Black Power War, Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English (in flipback format, for the plane rides), Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World, Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, Richard Conniff's The Species Seekers, Ned Landsman's From Colonials to Provincials, E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, and Elizabeth Little's Trip of the Tongue. Probably far too many, but better too many than too few, right?
