Cox's Fragmenta II

By Simon Murphy

Subjects: Museums, British museum, Catalogs, Scrapbooks, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES, British Museum, Periodicals, Journalism

Description: A presumptuous bear who surprised a group of ladies in a coach, an accident involving an actor pretending to be an orang-utan and an aristocrat mistakenly pronounced dead in a newspaper are just some of the masterpieces of understated journalism collected by Francis Cox and contained in his Fragmenta. At ninety-seven volumes, Cox's scrapbook has to be one of the largest collections of journalistic ephemera ever. For sixty years during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries he accumulated articles on everything from duels to playhouses, and foreign travel to warfare. Following on fr.