Background:
Francis Grose 1731 – 1791 was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer.
Grose had early on shown a keen interest in drawing, having attempted sketches of medieval buildings as far back as 1749, and having taken formal instruction at a drawing school in the mid-1750s. He was not a particularly gifted draughtsman but he mixed in the London artistic milieu and began to exhibit, first at the Society of Artists in 1767–8 and then at the Royal Academy. His interest was in the field of medieval remains, which were beginning to exercise an increasing grip on the public imagination. In 1772, he published the first part of The Antiquities of England and Wales, a work which he unashamedly aimed at the popular market. Essentially, it targeted those who wanted to know about antiquities but had neither time nor means to visit them in person, and contained small panoramas of medieval ruins, together with an informative text on a separate page. Sometimes the text was taken from books already published, or from information supplied by other antiquaries (both acknowledged); sometimes Grose collated material himself from which he could work up an article. From 1772 onwards, he also toured the country to visit and draw sites for inclusion in The Antiquities. The fourth and last volume came out in June 1776, and Grose almost immediately began work on a supplement.
His publishing career was interrupted however, when the Surrey militia was again called into service between 1778 and 1783. This was not a happy experience for him. Where previously Grose had been able to spend his summers visiting and sketching ancient sites, he was now obliged to attend his regiment in various training camps. He did not get on well with his new commanding officer, and he handled regimental finances in a slipshod manner. The result was that he incurred debts towards fellow officers that would take years to straighten out. The financial pressure forced him to increase both the rate and the range of his publications.
The Supplement to The Antiquities was resumed in 1783, this time with a higher proportion of the illustrations being done by other artists. Drawing on his own fieldwork, Grose also branched out into producing dictionaries, including the famous A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787). Though intended to amuse, they give an unusually vivid picture of the speech of the day which would not normally find inclusion in standard dictionaries, and contained, in all, about 9,000 terms which more scholarly works of the time habitually overlooked. He produced books on military antiquities and armour, as well as satirical essays, and in 1788 began the first of several tours of Scotland in order to produce The Antiquities of Scotland. It was on the second of these tours, in summer 1789, that he met and immediately formed a friendship with the poet Robert Burns. Burns met him while he was staying with Robert Riddell at the Friar\'s Carse, collecting material for his Scottish work. Burns suggested to him that he should include Alloway Kirk in his Scottish Antiquities, and Grose agreed on condition that Burns provided a witch tale to go with his drawing. In June 1790, Burns sent Grose a prose tale with a variant in a letter to Grose, following it up with a rhymed version, Tam o\' Shanter.
Grose was the first art critic to affirm, in his Rules for drawing caricaturas: with an essay on comic painting (1788), published in William Hogarths The Analysis of Beauty (1791 edition), that aesthetic emotions emerge from a specific cultural environment, and that aesthetics are neither innate nor universal, but formed by their cultural context. Grose therefore has a claim to be considered as the first critical aesthetic regionalist theorist in proclaiming the anti-universality of aesthetics

Seller, John 1632 – 1697
Seller was an English compiler, publisher, and seller of maps, charts, and geographical books. From 1671 he was hydrographer to the King.
Seller, son of Henry Seller, a cordwainer, was baptized in London on 29 December 1632. In 1654 he became a freeman of the Merchant Taylors\\\' Company, and he became a brother of the Clockmakers Company in 1667. He was a compass maker, and continued this occupation throughout his career.
Seller\\\'s subsequent career was affected by being put on trial in 1662, accused of high treason: it is thought he repeated a rumour about a plot involving a cache of arms. Those involved were executed, and although Seller was found guilty and imprisoned, he was later pardoned. In this way his name and occupation became known: the episode may have been a factor in his eventual appointment in March 1671 as hydrographer to the King.
In that year he published the first volume of charts and sailing directions, entitled The English Pilot. It was dedicated to the Duke of York, to whom he had appealed from prison. The trade in maritime maps and charts had until then been dominated by the Dutch, and, in many instances, earlier Dutch plates, from which the original title had been replaced by an English title, were used here. The English Pilot ran through many editions, until the end of the eighteenth century, new maps from time to time taking the place of the old.
The Coasting Pilot appeared in 1672, and Atlas maritimus in 1675. Atlas Anglicanus, a projected large-scale atlas of England and Wales, was not completed, although new surveys of six counties were published from 1675 to 1681, and a map of London by John Oliver, who was associated with the project. Atlas caelestis, the first British celestial atlas, appeared in 1680.
Seller wrote textbooks including Practical Navigation (1669), A Pocket Book containing several choice Collections in Arithmetic, Geometry, Surveying, Dialling, &c. (1677); and The Sea-Gunner, shewing the Practical Part of Gunnery as it is used at Sea (1691). He also produced nautical almanacs.
Seller was for many years settled in Wapping; he had also a shop in Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange. He and his wife Elizabeth had three daughters and two sons; John Seller, junior, had a shop in Cheapside, where his fathers publications were on sale.
He died in May 1697, and was buried at St John\\\'s Church, Wapping