I acquired a book this past week, which contains two musical scores and two songs. #GeorgeWalker (1772-1847) established his publishing house in 1790 and was considered ‘a publisher of music at half price’, which meant that he marked his musical publications at double the normal price and then pretended to sell at a 50% mark down. Walker was best known as a publisher of sheet music . The music ranged from Handel songs, popular ballads, Scottish songs, to country dances for pianoforte. He also authored a number of books which he self-published.

The book I purchased contains the full #Messiah score arranged for voices and pianoforte, the oratorio #Joshua in full score, and two songs ‘Lord, remember David’ and ‘Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre’ as separate publications.

Most of Walker’s music was printed on a blue tinged paper, which was then in great use. The only piece done in this colour paper in this book is Lord, remember David the rest are done on cream colour paper.

There are also a number of watermarks on the the sheets. The Joshua marks are a date 1805 and a pair of cursive intertwined letters.

The Messiah score is somewhat more difficult to date. I, luckily, have two loose leaves (from a previous purchase) in my collection of pages 5-8. These are dated 1807, but my latest purchase bears only a R and an G on opposite pages. Likely referring to King George so I will date the full score earlier. Possibly going back to 1795 but more likely sitting right around 1800.

So, two complete full scores from a man not known for publishing large scale works. In my research, so far, I have not found any other large works produced by this publisher- only smaller individual works/songs.