A series of pocket-sized books called Cassell's National Library was published from 1886 in Britain. The series were exported and widely read by Japanese students and teachers at the end of the Meiji Era and the beginning of the Taisho. Soseki Natsume, one of the great writers in the Meiji Era, had sixteen books of Cassell's National Library which are now in the Soseki Library at Tohoku University Library. According to the bibliography, one of the sixteen is not dated. Cassell's National Library was published four times (1886-1890, 1891?-1894?, 1901?-1903?, 1904-1913?) and the size, the design of the cover and the phrase printed at the bottom of the last page of each series are different. With the help of these differences, I have managed to identify the book as belonging to the first series.
Among the sixteen books is
Poems : 1700-1714 by Alexander Pope. It has the most numerous margin notes made by Soseki. However, the number of the notes is different between the old edition (1967) and the new one (1997). The former has twelve notes but the latter only six. This difference is due to each publisher's editorial principle. One of the editorial policies of the new edition is that fragmental notes like signs and references to other passages and other books should be omitted.
I think that the margin notes referring to other passages and other books give us important clues as to how Soseki read books and made the best use of them in his own works. Therefore, the omission of some of the notes is a very serious mistake, and I intend to show how seriously mistaken the omission is in the following paper “Soseki and Cassell's National Library (2)”. In this paper, I have focused on the notes the two editions have in common and have tried to ascertain why Soseki made such margin notes and what the notes mean, comparing these with his margin notes on other books and the phrases and passages of his works.
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