A new bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press

I thought readers here might be interested in the new bibliography of The Golden Cockerel Press that I have posted on my blog:

https://ubiquitousbooks.wordpress.com/bibliography-of-the-golden-cockerel-press/

It covers all of the 214 editions listed in the official bibliographies. I have begun the (long!) task of enriching the list with my own notes detailing features omitted from earlier lists, correcting mistakes or omissions in the original bibliographies, and adding new information such as details from the colophons of many of the editions. It's very much a work in progress that I hope might, in time, become a useful modern reference companion alongside Chanticleer, Pertelote, Cockalorum and Cock-a-Hoop (all of which remain essential, if only for Sandford's invaluable observations).

Contributions of corrections or missing information would be welcome, although I am trying, as much as possible, to stick to information that provides objective facts about the books (with more evaluative material reserved for reviews of each edition).

THIS IS SO WONDERFUL!!!

Would love to see this done for more presses.

A great service. THANK YOU!

Wow! Very cool and thank you!

Thank you very much! I will definitely acquire more GCP books in the future and the information you provided will be very helpful.

Exceptional work from our resident GCP specialist.

>1 ubiquitousuk:
Excellent!
A link to your site has been posted on the Fine Press Forum wiki page here.

>1 ubiquitousuk: Thank you for the work on that bibliography. The pictures are great. Must be a real labor of love!
Also, everything that >2 grifgon: said!

Thanks everyone.

It's a bit ironic that, as I have mentioned here a few times, I am only lukewarm about GCP and think their books are mostly overpriced. With the exception of a couple of quite superb examples in my collection, I wish I could get my money back and spend it on books from a press that's more consistently excellent. And yet I keep buying Golden Cockerels. What's the bibliophile equivalent of Stockholm syndrome?

>8 ubiquitousuk: Which are the couple of quite superb examples in your collection?

>1 ubiquitousuk: I note you converted inches to mm. Why not give both? It would have been easy to do at the time, now not so much. But as one of those "readers for whom metric has not taken root," those mm measurements mean diddly squat. So now if I really want to know the size, I get to pull up the handy Google converter and convert those measurements. Yay.

Other than that caveat, EXCELLENT WORK AND THANK YOU!!!!!

>10 ultrarightist: The two I particularly had in mind were (1) A Voyage Round the World With Captain James Cook, and (2) Glory of Life. Of the first, I enjoyed the large sheets of mould-made paper, elegant classical type design, modernist wood engravings, and also the fact that GCP had the inspiration to publish Sparrman's journal in the first place. Number 2 is really an all-round superb example of private press publishing in my opinion: nice paper, nice quarter-vellum binding, two-colour printing executed with skill, superb wood engravings. In truth, there are some other GCPs that I also like, but none that I would hold as excellent examples of private press publishing in quite the same way.

>11 Glacierman: I was proceeding under the principle that if I am making a new bibliography for the 21st century then it was time to adopt the modern international standard of measure—even as a Brit who still has a foot (and an inch) in the old world. I could still include both and I certainly didn't type up a whole bibliography because I am adverse to tedious labour. To me, the reason to have one standardised system was less about the tedium of the work and more about keeping the bibliography clean and free of anachronisms. We can see what others think. I am tempted to round-out some of spurious millimetre precision, which would mean going through and updating all of the measures anyway.

>1 ubiquitousuk:
Thank you very much for your work on it! Bravo!
This is a wonderful resource. Much appreciated!

>12 ubiquitousuk: I suggest this

I have a fair number of bibliographies and it appears that perhaps US bibliographers prefer imperial units and the rest of the world prefers metric units. Yet the 2014 Russel Maret bibliography uses millimetres and the 2017 Peter Koch bibliography uses sixteenths of an inch and these are both recent US-published bibliographies of US fine presses compiled by the same US bibliographer (Nina Schneider)! So why not compromise and give both? And show the imperial first as the original dimensions are all exact multiples of ¼″.

It can easily be done with a trivial program

tim@tim-macpro:~/ub-gcp $ cat gcp-mmtoinches.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

# Quick hack to convert metric dimensions in ubiquitousuk's GCP bibliography to both imperial and metric.
# All dimensions in original bibliographies are exact multiples of 1/4".
# Convert back to inches allowing 0.02" slop. (But there is a little slop in the slop.)
# Use proper HTML entities for fractions, inch symbol, multiplication symbol.
# 
# Tim Rylance 20may2022

sub mmtoinches {
 my ($mm) = _;
 my $inches = $mm / 25.4;
 my $quarters = int(($inches+0.02)/0.25);
 my $rounded = $quarters * 0.25;
 my $result = sprintf("%.2f", $rounded);
 if (abs($rounded-$inches) > 0.03) {
 # not a sufficiently exact multiple of 1/4" - probably something wrong here
 print STDERR "warning: $mm mm => $inches in\n";
 $result = sprintf("%.2f", $inches);
 } else {
 $result =~ s/\.00//;
 $result =~ s/\.25/¼/;
 $result =~ s/\.50/½/;
 $result =~ s/\.75/¾/;
 }
 return "$result″"
}

while () {
 # NB no space before first × below is deliberate
 s!\((\d+)mm *x *(\d+)mm\)!sprintf("%s× %s (%dmm × %dmm)",mmtoinches($1),mmtoinches($2),$1,$2)!ge;
 print;
}
tim@tim-macpro:~/ub-gcp $ perl gcp-mmtoinches.pl gcp.html >gcp2.html
warning: 245 mm => 9.64566929133858 in
warning: 101 mm => 3.97637795275591 in
warning: 320 mm => 12.5984251968504 in
tim@tim-macpro:~/ub-gcp $ open gcp2.html

Perl in the fine press forum, now I've seen everything.

>14 tim_rylance: Thanks, it's a good suggestion.

It's funny, Perl isn't my usual language of choice so I failed to notice that some angle brackets and @ symbols seem to have been removed from your code by the forum. I couldn't understand why my computer was sat in an infinite loop, or why, having fixed that, it was spitting out a bunch of 0 inches.

Anyway, I have learned something about Perl and think I have it working now. I'll look at it properly as a weekend project.

Many thanks.

>16 ubiquitousuk: Oops. It's probably the first Perl program longer than one line I've written in 20 years and when HTML-ising it for the forum I changed all the HTML entities from (eg) &frac14; to &amp;frac14; but forgot while(<>) and if ... > 0.03 and my ($mm) = _ - though perhaps the last should be my $mm = shift;

Sorry about that. The actual script is here.

Okay, with thanks to >14 tim_rylance: the dimensions are now quoted in imperial as well as metric units.