Various American Repositories of Hone Materials
The Beinecke Library, Yale University:
The Beinecke houses a couple of brief letters (see Osborn MS 43.275) and a most interesting MS in Hone's hand of the introduction and draft title page to The Lives of those Eminent Antiquaries, Elias Ashmole Esq. and Mr. William Lilly. This was apparently intended to be a reprint of the volume by Charles Burnam first published in the 1770s. Whether the volume ever appeared with Hone as editor is not clear, but, in any case, Hone's concern with Ashmole and Lilly offers an intriguing link between nineteenth-century radicalism and seventeenth-century culture.
The Berg Collection, New York Public Library:
The Berg Collection holds an Album of original sketches, proofs, and plates (most of them for works published by William Hone) and of letters from Cruikshank to Hone, in 2 vols. The Berg also has an unpublished G. T. Lawley manuscript about the collaboration of Cruikshank and Hone.
The Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library:
Has a long letter (Misc. 263) from Hone to Basil Montagu, 10 May 1830. Hone is seeking financial help in setting up a London Coffee House which he intended to operate with the help of his daughters.
The Folger Shakespeare Library:
Two very brief letters from 1826, and an intriguing letter to John Payne Collier, the Shakespeare editor (Y. d. 341 / 77). The latter reads, in part:
Dear Sir
I have some intelligence to give you which may enable you to work out, from
a hidden vein, some new & genuine stuff repecting Shakespeare personally,
as a man, & an author.
The note is especially interesting in light of the use of Shakespeare as a kind of secular anti-Bible by some radicals of the early 1840s. See Joss Marsh, pp. 112, in the Secondary Source Bibliography.