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So, at the recent TEI Conference in Vienna, Elisa and I were indulging in a little mutual admiration on our knowledge of an obscure work entitled Thalaba the Destroyer by the early English Romantic Poet called Robert Southey (rhymes, as any fule kno, with "mouthy"). So when I got back home, I went to look for the volume containing said work which I dimly remembered having on my shelves, in the decrepit-but-too-nice-to-throw-away-section. And sure enough, there it was. The front board has come loose, but the first three openings  look like this:Having scanned those first few pages, I naturally asked Mr Google what he knew about the matter. And was thus able rapidly to confirm : My copy of Thalaba is the cheap reprint (two volumes in one) publishedby Vizetelly and Beeton in 1853. There is a Google-scanned version of the same edition, available from the Internet Archive. They have included with it a couple of pages of  advertisements for other works published by Clarke Beeton (p 7 and 8) which are missing in mine however. What seems like another copy of the same edition is currently on sale at Abe Books for the startling sum of $199.76. Mine is in poor condition,  which is why it only cost me half a crown back in 1967, when I used to frequent Oxford's second hand bookshops (there aren't any to frequent these days).As you may have noticed above, my copy also contains several signs of its previous owners. As well as the book plate, and the inscription above, there's a nice message from Aunty Sarah, the donor,  opposite the preface:and there's also an intriguing note from "JB" dated some twenty years later, opposite the start of the poem proper.So... what have we learned? Rosamund was given this book by her aunt, Sarah Brent, in 1860. And in 1882, her husband felt compelled to record his own experience of the Eastern exotic in the same book "We met at Persepolis an Arab maiden of most lovely form and features -- she was a dream of beauty never to be forgotten". What she made of it, one can only conjecture.But why I love the Internet, is that (pondering these matters after breakfast this morning), it has helped me place these people a little more precisely in time and place. A search for "Rosamund Borrowman" told me that  the 1861 Census shows a person of that name, born 1825 in Kent, married to John Borrowman, born 1830 in Midlothian, residing in Middlesex in 1861. The ancestry.co.uk site where I found this record is pay-walled so no further details available, but that seems reasonably plausible.And searching for "Rosamund Borrowman John" I was able to find a record of her death. Some industrious volunteers have been surveying the gravestones of a place called Hambledon in Surrey, and there she is:   "Rosamund Vertue the beloved wife of John Borrowman. She died 25th August 1895. Also the above named John Borrowman son of Robert Borrowman born in Edinburgh 3rd April 1830 died at Hambledon 4th July 1906. Also Elizabeth daughter of the above died 22nd October 1932 aged 72 years" It's all in the spreadsheet.My next step, obviously, will be to find out where Hambledon is, and whether you can get there by train. Maybe.