I'm hoping some preservationist or library scientist will tell me what this nutty annotation -- found lodged in a rear molar of Google Books' insatiable maw -- means:
I am hoping "HD" means "hard disk", but am very afraid it stands for something like "hollow depository" or "hold-for-discard".
Now, I found this curious annotation in a "book" as Google understands that term. It wasn't a book, except in the sense of being bound in half-leather and boards. It was a set of pamphlets, on a topic -- Modern Spiritualism.... fancy that -- of interest to the original owner of the pamphlets, who invested in having them bound uniform with his or her other books (I suspect). One of the pamphlets (damn Google Books to hell) was Capron and Barron's Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits (1848, 1850), which I paid quite a lot of money to obtain in order to digitize it. That pamphlet was the meat of the "book"; the two slices of bread were far more fascinating.
They were:
- "Doctor Diotrephes'""The Knockings" Exposed, Comprising a Spiritual Examination of Modern Pneumatology and Thaumaturgic Manifestations. Together with a Spiritual Critique on the Claims of Psychological-Mesmerism and Clairvoyance (New York: 1850)
- an anonymous pamphlet (attributed to George H. Derby, but probably by Austin Flint), entitled Rochester Knockings! Discovery and Explanation of the Source of the Phenomena Generally Known as the Rochester Knockings (Buffalo and New York: 1851).
The first of the two pamphlets is available from reprint houses (if you know you're looking for it) but the second appears to have been lost to researchers after Sidgwick in 1887, and I can find no mention of either of them in modern scholarship on Spiritualism.
Have I completed the analytical recon, do you think?
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