Opie, Peter

“Small Buff [and Blue] Books.” Manuscript journal, commonplace and scrap-book. [Alton, Hampshire], ca. 1947 – 1951. 3 vols. (8 ½ x 5 3/8 in.; 215 x 136 mm), approximately 110 pages written (mostly in the first vol), newspaper clippings tipped- and laid in. Buff (2 vols) or blue cloth; some spotting on covers. — Autograph lecture notes on nursery rhymes, (10 ¼ x 8 in.; 260 x 204 mm), 19 pages. Plus 17 other autograph manuscript lectures (and one typescript), ca. 200 pages, probably given at Oxford in the early 1950s — Autograph manuscript draft of The Collection of Folklore in England, ca. 50 pages. — E. G. Withycombe, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945. 8vo. Publisher’s blue cloth, printed dust jacked; jacket spotted. Signed “Iona and Peter Opie 28. 1. 46” on flyleaf, their stamp on verso, notes and postcards (some by Withycombe) laid in and stapled to front flyleaf.

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A splendid record of the scholarly study of nursery rhymes by their greatest exponent of the 20th Century.