Cotton | Title 2 | Index of names in the book
Cotton
The History and Antiquities of the Church and Parish of St. Laurence, Thanet, in the County of Kent. With Special Articles upon Local Subjects by other Contributors. Illustrated with Maps, & pedigrees, Lithographs & Zincographs from Photographs specially taken for the work. 1895 By Charles Cotton.
Publishers note.
Some apology is due to the readers of this volume for the delay in its issue; but I must plead in extenuation, that when we took the work in hand we had no idea of the difficulties we would encounter, fitting a quart into a pint pot as we have.
Apologies are also due for the very small size of some of the print in this edition, I am afraid some of you will have to use a magnifying glass to read it. I was faced with two possible options, one this and the other 3 A4 volumes bringing the cost to a prohibitive £30.
An original copy of this book will set you back over £200 and for those of you to whom money is no object, but would rather have much larger print I am happy to help you get hold of a copy.
Any errors in the index are ours, so please let me know if you find any and I will correct subsequent printings.
It is now 70 years since Charles Cotton died and this means that his work is no longer in copyright, so now it is quite legal for me to reprint it. This is rather a silly situation, as if I were able to have tracked down the ancestor of Cotton that actually ownd the copyright, they would probably have been only to pleased to allow me to reprint it and make it available to local people again. The main problem here is they probably don't even know that up until now they had held the copyright, this makes it very difficult for me to do reprints of many of Ramsgate's more recent books.
I believe Cotton himself had problems with copyright, if you look at the map on page 5 you will see that cotton has used a map of Thanet that predates 1820 and has drawn on the railways and boundaries as they were in 1895.
So I suspect that Cotton would have been sympathetic to my reprint regardless, I certainly feel that as he put so much work into this volume it should be more widely available.
The original edition was limited to 250 copies, probably due to financial constraints rather than the author's choice.
This is one of the most important and accurate Ramsgate history books, it is very much centred around the parish church and the people buried there.
Cover photo David Richards.
The picture on the back drawn by Emma Harrison in 1869, is of Holy Trinity Chapel St Lawrence that was demolished in 1892, courtesy of Alan Hardcastle.
Michael Child 15th November mmviii.
