[PW] Ralph Henry Bassett "The Mechanised Historian" (1950)

[Dennis Lien]

At 06:40 PM 7/15/2008, you wrote:
>I am looking for bibliographical details for the following item.    I 
>would be grateful if any replies were sent directly to 
>SSircar1 at yahoo.com.au Thank you.    In _Who Was Who_, vol 6   the entry 
>under Ralph (Periera [sic]) Henry BASSETT (M: 1896 Feb 16 - 1962 Jul 18) 
>  lists the work, not in Copac or LofCongress,   "The Mechanised 
>Historian" (1950). Â  Bassett does include "archaeology"in his list of 
>interests & pastimes. Â  Sanjay Sircar


Negative evidence:  the only mention of the title in the TIMES OF LONDON 
ARCHIVE is
in Bassett's obituary there in 20 July 1962 issue, page 17, where it is spelled
"Mechanized" rather than "Mechanised" but otherwise gives no details other than
the 1950 date.  (Presumably WHO WAS WHO took their information from that obit.)

The 1948-1951 cumulation of ENGLISH CATALOGUE OF BOOKS lists neither the author
nor the title.  My guess if it's not a complete hoax would be that he may have
published a journal article of this name which got mistakenly cited as a book,
but I've not been able to find a journal article either,
per search in print indexes:

C.R.I.S. : the combined retrospective index set to journals in history, 
1838-1974
(and) the British Library Association's SUBJECT INDEX TO PERIODICALS (vols. for
1950 and 1951; there are no author or title indexes so finding anything 
requires
one to outguess the subject heading assigner -- I scanned entries under words
starting with Bassett, Historians, History, Mechanical... , Ceylon, Research,
and Calculating Machines (their then-preferred term for Computers) with no 
luck;

nor online indexes:
PERIODICALS INDEX ONLINE (formerly PERIODICALS CONTENT INDEX);
JSTOR; or a cited reference search in WEB OF SCIENCE.

Given his career in what was then Ceylon, I also checked the online catalog of
the national library of Sri Lanka for books by him.

http://www.natlib.lk/

Besides the expected
ROMANTIC CEYLON, it lists a couple of government reports he authored, and one
2002 title subject headinged as "Folklore" :
Pembara Lanka : ithihasaya janapravada ha visthara --
but this turns up to just be a translation of ROMANTIC CEYLON again.

I'm out of ideas.

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu