THERE IS NO greater pleasure in book collecting than to discover un-expectedly a book one really wants, at a price one can afford.

The pleasure is heightened when one did not previously know that the book even existed. Shortly before Christmas, I received a catalogue from the eminent London booksellers, Bernard Quaritch. The item that caught my eye would have attracted anybody interested in the French Revolution or in the history of The Times:

“Trial of Marie Antoinette, late queen of France before the Revolutionary Tribunal, at Paris; compiled from a manuscript sent from Paris, and from the Journals of the Moniteur. The whole carefully revised and corrected by The Conductor of The Times. London; printed and sold at the Logographic Press, Printing House Square, Black Friars; also sold by J Owen, 168 Piccadilly, T. Longman, Paternoster Row.”

The pamphlet is undated, but must have been published in 1793 or early 1794. The Logographic Press is itself an interesting subject. It was based on a patented system of typesetting. All common words were set as such, leaving rarer words to be set in individual letters, thus, in theory, greatly speeding up the setting of type. The rights to this process had been acquired by John Walter, who had been a coal merchant and a Lloyd’s underwriter before becoming a printer.

Like many other Lloyd’s names, he had been bankrupted by the losses of English shipping in the early 1780s, the last years of the American War of Independence.

In May 1784, Walter announced the establishment of the Logographic Press at Printing House Square, and in January 1785, he launched the Daily Universal Register, which was retitled as The Times in 1788.

The Logographic Press does not seem to have been particularly successful, nor was the Daily Universal Register. Walter himself had to run the business for a year from Newgate prison, after being convicted for a criminal libel against the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. The libels had been inserted in the paper on behalf of the Treasury, in support of the administration of Pitt the Younger, in Pitt’s battle with the Prince of Wales.

The Times as a newspaper was made by its coverage of the French Revolution. From the period of the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, when Walter must still have been in prison, the French story ran until the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Walter himself handed over the business to his sons, particularly to John Walter II, at some period in the later 1790s.

However, there is no doubt that “the Conductor of The Times” in 1793 would still have been the original John Walter himself. Both he, and John Walter II, seem to have combined the roles of proprietor, general manager and Editor. The first separate Editor of The Times to be appointed seems to have been (Sir) John Stoddart, some time after 1810. He quarrelled with his proprietor and started a rival news- paper, The New Times, which was a failure.

The Trial of Marie Antoinette may have been, as Quaritch thought, the last book ever published by the Logographic Press. It is certainly a rare pamphlet. The copy I bought has been disbound from one of those collected volumes of pamphlets one finds in good libraries of the period.

The pamphlet is based on contemporary accounts that had already been published in The Times. The Queen was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution at about 1pm on October 16, 1793. It is certainly an excellent piece of journalism. It includes the preface, written by the conductor of The Times, the pre-trial interrogation of Marie Antoinette by the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Act of Accusation, the Order of Arrest and the examination of witnesses, the verdict and final account of the imprisonment and execution of the Queen. In all the text come to about 20,000 words.

Reading it, one is struck, as were contemporary observers, by the calm and dignified manner in which Marie Antoinette defended herself at her trial, knowing her situation to be hopeless. Her husband, Louis XVI, had already been executed after a similar trial. As John Walter writes in his preface: “She astonished those who assumed to themselves the office of Judges by her presence of mind; she exposed the contradictions of the evidence and the artful interrogations of her prosecutors with great ingenuity and clearness; she replied with firmness and dignity, and heard her sentence without emotion.”

Even today, the pamphlet provides an excellent account of an important and tragic event in French history. Some details stick in one’s mind. The Queen was pressed on the extravagant cost of building the Petit Trianon. She replied: “There was a fund destined to that purpose . . . it is possible that the Petit Trianon may have cost enormous sums, perhaps more than I wished. This expense was incurred by inches.”

She sounds as calm as a permanent secretary in front of the Public Accounts Committee. Or again, the description of the special smock in which she was dressed for the guillotine, “of white with a white waistcoat with sleeves, but leaving her neck and shoulders bare, was put upon her; her hands were tied behind with cords and she was conveyed to the Tombril that waited for her. This vehicle is a kind of dungcart, used as an aggravation of punishment, to convey to the scaffold, the worst and vilest criminals.”

As I read the pamphlet, with its professional use of documents, sources, eyewitnesses and editorial comment, I thought how little had changed in the principles of good journalism, which The Times did so much to establish.

John Walter’s account of Marie Antoinette’s trial is not all that unlike a modern-day account of a major historic event. It gives the detail. It quotes the documents, and it still rings true. This pamphlet does credit to Marie Antoinette, to John Walter and to The Times.

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