Review by Bruce Whiteman
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/bsc/article/view/26846/20952
Not surprisingly, there are great accumulations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English material at the heart of the Bibliotheca
Fictiva.
Ireland, Chatterton, and Macpherson are represented in depth, and
John Payne Collier takes up 243 entries. The small but
important collection of
Constantine Simonides material includes a
fifty-two-leaf manuscript and a presentation copy of the book that Simonides helped to compose about some papyri he sold to a Liverpool collector that, oddly, seem to be genuine, at least according to Freeman. Twentieth-century material is sparse, with the Hofmann, Prokosch, and Texas forgeries, all infamous among booksellers and collectors, barely registering. However, this is the catalogue of a personal collection, and it is clear that the Freemans were most interested in earlier material. Where that material is concerned, this book will be of great utility to scholars and librarians, and the collection itself, now in a university library, will surely be the
laboratory for many interesting discoveries yet to be made.
BRUCE WHITEMAN
Head Librarian Emeritus,
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA
