My ten-volume set is currently in New York being scanned. I'll keep you posted. No Andy Carnegie bindings on mine, I assure you! In fact, the old leather bindings are almost totally separated from the spines. In the first volume was a hand-written letter from Child that reads (to the best of a concerted effort to make out all of the elegantly scrawled words):

F. J. Child
Oct. 5, 1893

The Riverside Press

I send, according to instructions from Messrs Houghton, Mifflin -?-
copy for part 9 of English & Scottish Ballads (Nos 200-276).
I have no transcript of this and could not
replace it, & will therefore beg that it may
be kept safe.

Faithfully,

F. J. Child


We now keep this gem in our personal strong box. I had overlooked it for years, since the condition of the bindings of this ten volume set was such that I preferred to use the five volumes of the Folklore Press edition (bound in three). I once took a couple of the worst of the ten volumes to a bindery to ask how much it would cost to repair them. They suggested simply giving up on the old bindings as trying to salvage them would be quite expensive. "So," I asked, how much to simply rebind them?" "$100 per volume." That was their less-expensive suggestion! And that's why all ten volumes have been living for many years in a box on a top shelf in our library/guest room. Yikes!

Sandy (wondering what Carnegie would have done)