The hunt reaches a check....
Further to this post, I put in remote orders for Society and the German book (because, if I'm going to the BL anyway, why not, there might be Some Clue in the actual physical object). You can only put in remote orders for the BL during normal opening hours, which causeth me to sneer in a superior fashion.
So I trotted along this evening after work and went into the Rare Books and Music Room, which is where one reads the smut collection these days apparently, and was told that the physical volumes of Society were unfit for production, and I would have to order the microfilm. Why, if the actual item is unproduceable for conservation reasons, they don't automatically produce the mfilm I have no idea. But I do have the mfilm on order, so will probably pop in on Thurs.
However, my German volume had been produced, and I had to find myself one of the special seats under the eye of the Librarian at the Music Desk, and look at it there (and never, no, not ever, leave it unattended). Where it turned out to be a) a reprint of a correspondence in a British periodical called Family Doctor about corsetting etc - which I think I recall reading about somewhere, and can probably check out in secondary sources b) not the edition of the book in question which included the salacious details about breast-rings (Bloch does cite the second edition, so clearly there was a later, expanded, version, but this is not in BL).
But this all tended to confirm my longstanding experience that undertaking research in the BL is, at least for me, an enterprise fraught with frustration and annoyance, actually from my first visit as an undergraduate where I failed to grasp the idiosyncrasies of French indexing and thus did not glean the information I was after (okay, possibly my own fault, or my tutor should have mentioned that they Do These Things Differently in France, but it set a pattern). There have been enough sagas relating to things like lack of itemisation of things like annual reports and obscure periodicals so that the only way to discover that that the particular volume I specifically want to look at is not there is to order it and turn up to find it a hole in the air... Of latter years, my experiences at The National Archives have been that, while it is an enormous drag to get there, once there it is a well-oiled machine that ticks over admirably. Whereas the BL, a short walk from my workplace, always seems to manage to thwart me somehow. Even if I am no longer obliged to try and manoeuvre a bulky volume and a lap-top in the cramped space of one of the work-surfaces of the overheated North Gallery (you do not hear people getting sentimental over the Old North Gallery, only the Round Room).
At least it has never unexpectedly closed down on me in the way that the Library of Congress did in November 1996, but that was hardly the LoC's own fault, most of Washington ground to a halt because of the crisis over the budget.
Anyway, the hunt is still afoot, just casting around for the scent.