Culpeper's British Herbal and Family Physician

I've in my collection this herbal, but it doesn't have a publishing date. It is quite old, hardbound and has watercolour plates therein. It was printed in London by Milner & Co. Ltd, Paternoster Row. Underneath this information is another publishing stamp of W. Foulsham & Co. 4 Pilgrim St. London. I should like very much to find the date of this book. Is there someone who can help me with this? Thank you. Danny Kendrick, Gun Barrel City, Texas

I can't help you with your herbal, but I'm hoping you'll tell us how your town got its name.

I googled Culpeper's Herbal. This is the link to the wiki page :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Culpeper

It give you the original publication date of 1653, but I don't know how you find the date for a specific book.

The town is long and narrow like a gun barrel.

You might try contacting a librarian to see if they can dig up when the firms in question were actively publishing, thus narrowing the date range (perhaps by searching in old London business directories). Who knows, maybe one of the publishers will still be in business or was absorbed by another publisher. Then you would have someone to contact directly who might have the answer in their records. You might also see if you can find a bookbinder willing to give you a date range based on the technique used in the book.

I don't know if this would be at all helpful, but the first publishing company was mentioned on a list on this site:

http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/sitesearch.html

And if you do a search on Milner you can see examples of books that may have been published by them.

Well what do you know, it looks like W. Foulsham & Co. are still in business:

http://www.foulsham.com/page100.htm

Try contacting them: they might still have records of their older publishing efforts. Good luck, and please let us know if you find anything out.

I am unable to check this, but I believe that this is likely to be an edition from the nineteenth century. Several presses published this book at that time. William Milner became a printer in 1836. When he died he left his business to his stepsons, who continued to trade as Milner and Sowerby until 1883 when they incorporated as Milner & Company before liquidating in 1910. I guess that Foulsham acquired the stock at liquidation.

I have a copy of this book published by Milner and dated 1949. Would like to sell if anyone interested.

I cannot see anyone asking to buy and this is not a sales forum.