TY - JOUR
AU - Gutierrez,, Jeffrey
AB - While some have proclaimed that books are dead, interred in decadent libraries soon to be obsolete, David McKitterick—having been for many years the Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge—knows, like Milton, that ‘books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are’. As many libraries turn towards digitization to solve finite space and financial difficulties, McKitterick argues that what to keep and how to keep it is ‘simply an old question posed in a twenty-first century context’ (p. 323). His latest book, expanded from the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library in 2015, is an exploration of the development of ‘rarity’ through a meticulous survey of international library and bookseller catalogues—‘the building blocks of canons of collecting and of price’ (p. 123)—and how overwhelmed librarians and booksellers attempted to control a bulging, international market that included ‘not just books, but also pamphlets, broadsides, newsbooks, periodicals, and newspapers’ (p. 51) of widely varying quality. They needed a filter, and many sought control through bibliography. Early institutional libraries understood that ‘all texts, manuscript or print, existed as parts of hierarchies’ (p. 52) even though they were often housed together until the early seventeenth century when ‘the medium took priority over content’ (p. 47). Printed books were prized for their novelty and ‘there seems to have been an assumption amongst at least a few people that some books would be set aside as requiring special care and security’ (p. 44). At the University of Oxford, Thomas Bodley advised its librarian Thomas Hyde that some books were to be readily available to readers on open shelves, and others suche as are within the grates, and vnder the Custodie of the Keeper alone, that they may not be wasted with muche handling and tossing (being bookes of special worth, for their antiquitie, or raritie, costlinesse, or beautie, or other note of prime account) it shall be a part of the Keeper’s dutie, when any man is desirous to vse any of those kindes, to deliuer them out by hand, and by tale, and with condition, that they shall be studied there in sight, and after presently restoared, before the partie goe from thens. (p. 44) Hyde then created a catalogue arranged under authors to aid readers in selecting from its growing collection. Elsewhere, Petrus Bertius organized Leiden University Library’s catalogue by subject with an author index; and Paulus Merula, building on Bertius’s work, created a specialized listing, catalogus rariorum, of the books not on open shelves that included ‘adversaria, those considered to be important old editions, books brought from distant lands, and maps, atlases and globes’ (p. 46). Nicolás Antonio’s Bibliotheca Hispana sought ‘to list not just Spanish books, but also Spanish writers, wherever they were, whether in Europe or in the colonies of south and central America’ (p. 53). To catalogue François-Chrétien de Lamoignon’s ‘near-encyclopaedic library’, Adrien Baillet read—or ‘sampled’—each book and included ‘the opinions and judgements of others’ because ‘God had given us only a short time on earth, and without guidance people would not know what was worth reading until they were near their end’ (p. 54). For booksellers, buyers determined the market and the sale catalogues incarnated it; and McKitterick carefully explores the development of description in bookseller catalogues. Early catalogues resembled the simple entries found in library catalogues. The Great Fire of London in 1666 caused a revolution in the London book trade around St. Paul’s Cathedral as booksellers consolidated their remaining stock and needed new ways of quickly luring buyers. Thomas Rookes’s minimalist catalogue still listed catch titles—‘Chaucers Works’ or ‘Erasmi Adagia’—and added a note that further detail could be attained by visiting his relocated shop near Gresham College. Robert Scott’s 200-page international catalogue of his overseas stock, despite its many shortcomings, became an influential and well-used reference guide for other booksellers. Robert Littlebury’s four-leaf catalogue listed the names of printers when ‘they seemed to add lustre or authority’ (p. 116). Auctions allowed books to be sold quickly and advertisements in newspapers increased interest and excitement. The sale of Robert Harley’s collection in the 1740s was entrusted to the well-known bookseller Thomas Osborne, who is often remembered now for his entanglements with Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. He had paid a lump sum of £13,000 to Harley’s widow and needed to produce a catalogue quickly to recover his money. Osborne and his small team—that also included a young Samuel Johnson—advertised a detailed catalogue; however, money and time forced the team to simplify the entries resulting in five volumes where ‘space was lavished on a few books, while the vast majority were dismissed in a line or two of basic bibliographical information’, particularly on books considered ‘rare’: The contemplacyon of synners was described as ‘a very scarce book’, and allotted over half a page of description: just seven copies are known today. But the next entry for A lyttel treatyse called the Lucydarye, attributed to Caxton on the basis of the printer’s device and in fact printed by Wynkyn de Worde, was dispatched with no explanatory prose. It was rather more scarce: only three copies are now known in total of de Worde’s two editions. (p. 177) McKitterick deduces that the idiosyncratic length of descriptions ‘is most probably the result of the enthusiasms of the cataloguers, rather than any strategy on the part of Osborne’ (p. 177). Many of the books sold for lower than expected prices, but Osborne’s catalogue—retained by booksellers in England and abroad—showed that ‘increased expenditure on catalogues did not guarantee increased sales’ (pp. 187–8). The library of the duc de la Vallière often assimilated whole libraries into its collection, becoming ‘one of the greatest private libraries of all time’ (p. 209). After his death, its auction was entrusted to Guillaume de Bure and Joseph van Praët, who hurriedly produced ‘nine principal volumes of two series of sale catalogues’ (p. 217). While ‘the descriptions offered little concerning the appearance of the books’ (p. 213), the catalogue notably included some full-page illustrations, not of the frontispiece portrait of the owner as had been done previously, but of the books themselves. The catalogue also included an index of authors, along with names of illustrators and engravers. After the sale, de Bure issued a printed price list of the sales, ‘the whole enterprise mingled the demands of bibliophiles, the book trade and of historians of printing’ (p. 215). Whereas catalogues listed books and prices, they were not comprehensive. ‘The concept of a bibliography,’ writes McKitterick, a list not of individual features but of copies in their generality, edition by edition, offered a means of describing this phenomenon of near-identical multiplicity. With this multiplicity grew the concept of rarity. Objects that had been manufactured by the hundred or even thousand could on the one hand be easy to find, but on the other they could be all but undiscoverable (p. 189). Nicola Haym’s Notizia de’libri rari nella lingua italiana (1726), recorded Italian editions from 1472 to about 1600 and distinguished books that could be called ‘raro’, ‘molto raro’, and ‘rarissimo’, these also marked with an asterisk (reminiscent of bookseller Pierre Gosse’s star-system). Improved and enlarged editions appeared after Haym’s death in 1729, culminating in a monumental four-volume edition in 1803 by Angelo Geremia, who set price values beside each entry transforming the work from bibliography to comprehensive price guide. Guides exploring rarity continued to appear, notably Johann Vogt’s Catalogus historico-criticus librorum rariorum (1732) that defined over 15 types of rarity, Guillaume-François De Bure’s seven-volume Bibliographie instructive (1763–1768) offered an annotated bibliographical encyclopaedia, Jean Baptiste Louis Osmont’s two-volume Dictionnaire typographique, historique et critique des livres rares (1768), supplied prices and values for many entries, and François de Los-Rios’s Bibliographie instructive, ou notice de quelques livres rares, singuliers & difficiles à trouver (1777), included his comments on quality and rarity aimed at the general reader. As a culture of book knowledge developed—particularly among the educated and affluent—interest in books as manufactured objects thrived among collectors. London in the second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in individuals frequenting local booksellers. Thomas Lowndes ran a successful circulating library in Fleet Street while George Nicol, James Edwards, Thomas Payne, and Henry Floss dominated the market in Pall Mall. Rudolph Ackermann’s gas-lit galleries ‘became one of the sights of London, enlivened by weekly soirées that brought artists, writers and London society together’ (p. 231). The number of bibliophiles increased into the nineteenth century with publications such as Jacques Charles Brunet’s Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres (1810) and Thomas Dibdin’s Library companion; or, the young man’s guide, and old man’s comfort, in the choice of a library (1824). For Samuel Pepys, like Prospero, his ‘library/Was dukedom large enough’, but bibliophilia easily turns to bibliomania. Few can forget Flaubert’s crazed bookseller in Bibliomania (1836) as he runs through his library at night with ecstasy, caressing his books, feeling the pages with his trembling hands. McKitterick rightly spends only a few pages mentioning what others have assessed in detail: from Thomas Dibdin’s Bibliomania; or Book Madness (1809) to Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (2012). McKitterick’s focus is its early usage and relationship with rarity. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first use of ‘bibliomania’ to Thomas Hearne in his diary (1734) about a letter written by his friend Mr. Tom Brome to Dr. Rawlinson who was auctioning his brother’s books, many at low prices: ‘I should have been tempted to have laid out a pretty deal of money without thinking myself at all touched with Bibliomania’. Yet McKitterick and others agree that there is much evidence that ‘the phenomenon’ antedates 1734. ‘Bibliomania’ is common usage after Edward Harwood’s View of the various editions of the Greek and Roman classics (1775) noted that Some, indeed, whom God has blessed with more opulence than understanding, burn with an insatiable ardour of enjoying every beauteous form of a favourite book that hath ever been exhibited in any country since the invention of the typographical art; and others have the Bibliomania in so dire and frantic a degree, that those rare Editions, which they despair of securing by their wealth, they will not hesitate about secreting from libraries by their ingenuity. (p. 251) ‘Bibliomaniac’ occurs much later in 1816, given by Sir Walter Scott, who describes the enigmatic Don Quixote de la Mancha as ‘the most determined, as well as earliest bibliomaniac upon record’. The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 ends where other scholar-librarians, such as Robert Darnton, have already written: the future of libraries and preservation. McKitterick identifies that ‘the idea of rarity as it is enshrined in artefacts depends on selection: on decisions—conscious or no—about what is worth preservation, and on decisions to pay especial attention to particular objects or groups of objects’ (p. 323). An unprecedented influx of visitors to London in 1851 convinced the British Museum to open to the general public a permanent exhibition of its manuscripts and select books. Many libraries still proudly display their treasures in thick glass with dim lighting: copies of the Gutenberg Bible or Audubon’s Birds of America or the Bay Psalm Book. The Huntington Library also displays the now charred, original draft of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, useless to scholars, but reminiscent of the Oxford-bibliophile John Sparrow’s insistence that ‘the essential element is a desire for possession. The collector’s is not a disinterested passion; it is, I am afraid, a selfish one: “I rather think you haven’t got a copy of this” is a remark that one book-collector will make to another when showing him round his library, and the note in his voice is not the note of compassion’. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - David McKitterick. The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgz050
DA - 2019-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/david-mckitterick-the-invention-of-rare-books-private-interest-and-3lVZVY11xt
SP - 969
EP - 973
VL - 70
IS - 297
DP - DeepDyve
ER -