The Oxfordshire Contest, 1753

Here's an interesting book to share with you. This is The Oxfordshire Contest: or the whole controversy between The Old and New Interest, printed for W. Owen. (London, near Temple Bar, 1753) Looks like the publisher, William Owen was put on a trial for publishing this and other "libel" books that were considered "against the government", for which he was acquitted. This book is a collection of tracts and pamphlets, and corresponding letters exchanged between the oppositions, the Tories and the Whigs prior to the infamous Oxfordshire general election of 1754. I was flipping through this book, and found their humorous, rather "polite" insults against each other amusing. (Equivalent of those nasty "attack commercials" of politicians today? People used to be more creative ..) Social issues and the stand of women in the 1700's shown in this book are very interesting as well. The whole book is digitally available online, so I linked it above. (Click on the title above.) Anyway, the client of this book asked for a brand new facsimile half binding with hand marbled paper. This book was rebound previously, so I don't know how the real original spine looked like, so I just recreated the spine as it was. The original sewing wasn't done perfectly, resulting in the cords being askance. Therefore I created a set of false-raised cords instead of using the actual sewing cords for the raised bands. As for the marble paper, I chose a nonpareil just like the original, but one with a bit of an arc and in more neutral color coordination. I was just gonna sew simple conservation headbands, but decided to do a set of French double with a blue/turquoise and a hint of copper threads. I thought that they'd look nice with the marble. The original book didn't have marble paper endsheets, so I used paper that I'd antiqued, so that the brand new paper doesn't ruin the feel of the 260-year old book.