Talk:Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets

English Edition - Is this a complete version of the work?

I have found three versions of this work online, all of which appear to have problems. However, it is not easy to discern what the 'original' should have looked like, in part because there are no page numbers in the work. The quality of the scans is generally low.

British Library - scan is by Google of the BL copy (library stamps visible). The front of the book is missing (scan starts at the table of contents page) although there is an image of the front cover elsewhere on their website. The rear of the book is present (inc. back cover). There are 192 page scans, with lots of blanks, consistent with both the 'botany' and 'alphabets' sections being printed on the recto only. The catalogue entry for the book states it is '4th thousand, 1872')

Google Books - scan is by Google of Bodleian Library copy (library stamps visible). This appears to be of the same edition as the BL (4th thousand) and has 202 page scans. However, there are some duplicates, which, when removed, leaves 200. Some of the pages in the 'Alphabets' section are skewed, resulting in the last line of text being missing (c.f. the BL edition).

Internet Archive - is a version of the Google Books' scan but it is seriously 'downgraded', with quite a few of the illustrations missing.

I haven't been able to find a proper bibliographic description of the work; the sources I can access don't even give a page count, and there are no signatures in the work.

Consequently, from the available scans, I have created a version based on the British Library one but with the missing 'front matter' imported from the Google Books version. Chrisguise (talk) 09:59, 5 May 2023 (UTC)