[Inaugural lecture delivered at the Warburg Institute in 1996 as Director of the History of the Book postgraduate programme at the University of London.]
For the
significance of these book covers see towards the end of the lecture.
HOME
THE BOOK AS REVELATION
and
Book History as an
Academic Subject
If it is conceded that libraries constitute the sum of human memory then the objects themselves, in whatever form they may be, constitute the components in revealing that memory. The processes which scholars have traditionally used in dealing with what I will call simply "texts" are generally comprehended in the discipline called bibliography. Put another way: If it is conceded that libraries constitute the sum of human lnowledge we might even agree with De Bure that bibliography is ultimately concerned with “the history and description of books”.
In the debates which have taken place from the beginning of thought and philosophy about the nature of being and existence, and the possible answers to ultimate questions about the universe and our place in it, there has been, it would seem, as much argument based on belief as on reason. To believe that reason is the key which can unlock the unfathomable truths is a paradox, as powerful indeed as that which holds that belief is reason enough. Greek philosophy gave us an alternative to the power of faith to understand nature and our place in it. Science, it is often thought, provided an alternative to both reason and faith, for it assumed a universe predicated upon predictable assumptions. And yet there have been scientists. like Lecomte de Noüy, Sir Peter Medawar and, more recently. Paul Davies, who accept the fact that any discovery is a voyage into the unknown".[1] Rationality and order, so dear to the French thinkers of the Enlightenment, could not account for a Rousseau and the emphasis he placed upon that least understood of human capabilities ‑ "feeling". In the various theories which have been propounded to explain the nature of what is "human" and the universe we humans inhabit there is a perpetual shift between the knowable and the unknowable. The history of the book, it seems to me, mirrors the history of our understanding of faith or reason, since that understanding is, whether we like it or not, only available from memory as recorded in written language. We are denied conversation with Plato, or any of those who have helped to shape our consciousness of self: all we have are incisions on stone or clay, or ink on some substance capable of withstanding mutability. What time has left us is a record as baffling as any ruin that one has visited, and what we witness today at Ephesus is about as comprehensible as the reasons why Virgil thought the Aeneid unworthy of publication. Science has so far failed to answer many questions about "realité”, and the history of books, how they came to be written, produced, disseminated and read is a discipline every bit as full of mystery as enquiries into the reasons why the universe functions as it does. There is, I believe, a certain beauty in the discovery of a "law" of nature ‑ like Newton's discovery of gravity ‑ but there would be something even more beautiful in a discovery which demonstrated how that "law" came to be perceived. Such discoveries will come, I think, less from solitary contemplation than from a kind of textual archaeology which we are just beginning to understand.
Books have a life, and are part of the evolution of
understanding, every bit as real as that which Darwin brought to our attention
about the evolutions in nature. There is, however, one significant difference
between the evolution of thought and the evolution of a species. No one, I
believe, has ever witnessed an evolutionary change in process. Yet, it is
possible, with care and discipline to perceive how ideas have developed ‑
for example how Regiomontanus' treatise on the Ptolernaic Almagest published
in 1496 influenced the young Copernicus.[2]
If we could not achieve this little,
then historical disciplines are a manifest absurdity. More important, perhaps.
is the fact that books, and not just science books, can change the cast of a
scientific mind: one as great, let us say, as Sir Peter Medawar, who willingly
confessed that one of the most exciting books he read in his later years was
Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie.[3]
Brief books, as he says in that briefest of books on ultimate
knowledge ‑ The Limits of Science ‑ gave him models for reducing ideas of extraordinary complexity
into prose which has the clarity of sunlight on marble. And so, with evidence
we can hardly contest, there is a case ‑ one amongst many ‑ for the
book as an agent of change: not simply political change; but change of a very
special kind. The trouble with this is, I suppose, that fewer humanists read
Medawar than perhaps scientists read Sidney. The assumption that the
development of ideas, in whatever discipline, lies outside the
culture of books is a conceit unworthy of attention. The study of reading, and
the power it can exert on the creation of new ideas, has for too long been
confined, for reasons we understand. to writers of imaginative and
philosophical literature: Shakespeare. Harvey, Milton, Blake, Coleridge,
Southey, Lamb, Joyce in English; Lessing, Kant or Nietzsche in German; Rousseau
or Sartre in French. But where are the studies of books owned by Jean Riolan?[4]
William Hunter?[5] Joseph
Priestley?[6]
George Hamilton?[7] I suspect
that there is more to be learned from the books in Newton's library (preserved
at Trinity College, Cambridge) than from those which Gibbon owned ‑ for
which we have a catalogue in the British Library compiled on the backs of
playing cards.[8]
The history of the book has distinctive traditions in Britain; in America; in France. What is not generally appreciated in Anglo‑American discussions of bibliography and book history is that both fields of study have their origin in Renaissance Italy in establishing principles for the editing of classical texts. The key figure is the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), editor of and commentator on Athenaeus, Cicero, Epictetus. Herodian. Homer, Horace, Martial, Persius, Plautus, Plutarch, Terence and Virgil.[9] In Britain and America the emphasis has been on what one might term "literary" texts. Important as the study of such texts undoubtedly is, there nevertheless remains a universe of books concerned with all the arts; all the humanities; all the social sciences; all the sciences. Until these come within the legitimate study of book history we will be guilty of intellectual elitism.
If we take the libraries of scientists, for example, it seems that, notwithstanding Ellen Wells' valuable handlist (published in Annals of Science in 1983),[10] they have been little studied. apart from certain figures like Boyle. Newton and Ray. Yet, until the last half of the nineteenth century, scientists were less "narrow" in the books they collected. In Britain considerable libraries are associated with physicians ‑ one of the most notable being that of Richard Mead, whose library was sold by Samuel Baker in 1754.[11] Of the 880 libraries listed by Wells, no fewer than 642 belonged to physicians. One of these, the Dutch doctor Aletta Gerritsen, who died in 1929, accumulated a wonderful feminist collection, now at the University of Kansas. The next largest group were botanists (37), mathematicians (34), and chemists (24). Sloane's vast collection formed the nucleus, of course, of the British Museum Library. Scientific libraries that have enjoyed little more than passing comment include those of Tycho Brahe,[12] Bartholin,[13] Boerhaave,[14] Buffon,[15] Hutton,[16] Alexander von Humboldt,[17] Babbage,[18] Linnaeus,[19] Francis Cole,[20] and so on.
The ways in which books shape our lives, our manner of
thinking and the vocabulary we use to express thought, is a comparatively
recent object of study. Of primary importance must be books written for
children. A study of the books collected by a Renier[21]
or an Ople[22] are
obviously fundamental to such an enterprise. The books in question might be
alphabets; grammars; spelling books, fairy tales; comics. The great research
libraries have huge collections for all these genres, in many languages and and
from all periods of recorded history. They have been studied as part of the
history of education: but they have not been studied as part of the development
of consciousness, of those processes which connect feeling with thought (what
we used to call rhetoric); words with concepts (what we used to call logic);
grammar with perception (what we used to call philosophy); pictures with social
meaning ‑ for which we have no adequate label. All these facets of the
book come into sharp focus when we consider the contribution of a figure like
Noah Webster to the development of a distinctive "American" language
through his Dictionary and
Grammatical
Institute the
three parts of which sold over eighty million copies ‑ a total perhaps
only exceeded by the Bible.[23]
We are born with a genetic inheritance which we are powerless to resist. Upon that is imposed another inheritance: the product of the family and educational environment; the grasp of language we are encouraged to develop; the books we read; the conversations in which we participate; the religious beliefs we are expected to observe; the landscapes we are exposed to; the music we hear. One might, indeed, say that who we are, what we think, and how we express our thinking, is the product of a remarkable amalgamation of what the Romantics called "sensations". Is the symbolic language of mathematics either more or less significant than the weaving of words into a poem? There are as many truths in phrases as there are in formulas: and both have a special kind of beauty. The phrase may be a cadence; a single line; Einstein's formula for the theory of relativity.
Take the problem of public health, with which we seem today to be pre‑occupied. Edwin Chadwick. a forerunner of Greenpeace and the author of a book every bit as important as Einstein's slim pamphlet, put together a collection of "pamphlets" on sanitation which is in the British Library.[24] Chadwick's Report was read by Engels and directly contributed to the passage of the Public Health Act of 1848. It was read by Marx. Chadwick's collection has suffered at the hands of British Museum cataloguers who dismissively consigned to obscurity copies of pamphlets owned by Jeremy Bentham ‑ and annotated by him ‑ as "duplicates" ‑ and their obscurity remains guaranteed until they are brought to light.[25] Librarians with vision can assist in making books instruments of progress; but they can also contribute to a peculiar kind of intellectual eclipse. The Times responded to Chadwick's Repori[26] with characteristic and familiar British contempt: “We prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than to be bullied into health. England wants to be clean, but not cleaned by Chadwick." The Prince Consort took his chance ‑ and died of typhoid at the age of fifty‑two because of the appalling sanitation at Windsor Castle.
Wilhelm Busch and Lewis Carroll were exact contemporaries: both were born in 1832, and both published the works which made them famous in 1865. Though perhaps amongst the most widely read books in English and German respectively their creations have, over time, appealed to quite different audiences. Yet it cannot be doubted that behind the "authorial intention" of Alice in Wonderland and Max und Moritz primarily to entertain children lies a subtle, satiric and decidedly darker purpose. As Manfred Görlach has observed in his quite extraordinary anthology of Busch's classic in English dialects and creoles: “the story has also fallen victim to a fate which is the worst that any literary work can meet abroad: bad translators."[27] Busch and Carroll took great care with their words and pictures, and they are intended to react together in a total meaning as if they possessed no independent existence. This, as we know, is one of the significant features of much of the world's literature written for children, yet it is only recently that the serious study of this literature has become academically respectable. In the reprinting of the classics of childrens' literature inaccuracy and inattention to detail is, I have noticed, conspicuous ‑ of the five electronic versions of Jabberwocky checked not one comes anywhere near the text of 1865.
The systematic use of carefully designed illustration in books produced for the young seems to have come quite late In Europe. Comenius was, perhaps, the first to attempt it in his Orbis sensualium pictus which went through numerous editions and was translated into several European languages.[28] Apart from the woodcut interpolations used by Newbery and others in eighteenth‑century children's books, it is not until Marshall that we begin to get illustrations specifically designed for the text. For fiction, accessible to young and mature alike (which means excluding illustrated editions of Fanny Hill,[29] it is not until Dickens that words and images acquire an associative unity, and though artists like Palethorpe tried to devise new illustrations, usually published quite separately from the text, for generations of readers of Nicholas Nickleby the illustrations by Hablot Browne were the only authentic ones.[30] The sense in which pictures may condition our responses to narrative when we begin to read, or have books read to us, deserves more study than it has received.
The disappearance of independent, privately controlled publishing has led in the past few years to the creation of conglomerate companies. The consequences this will have for the variety of books made available to readers remains to be seen, but I suspect that the marketing muscle commanded by the conglomerates will make it ever more difficult for those independents that remain to reach the readers loyal to them ‑ the Peterloo Poets is a case in point ‑ or win new readers. Ordering a book from a bookshop has now become a tiresome and protracted transaction and the sameness of the stock currently on display in the average High Street bookshops means that impulse buying of books has been seriously diminished ‑ with the exception of the pervasive remainders.
Oddly, the shrinkage in independent publishing has occurred at a time when the process of getting print on paper has never been easier, or cheaper. The equipment needed to produce a volume of poems is now within the grasp of university students, and the production part of the publishing process has become the least significant component. Distribution ‑ getting a book into the hands of a reader ‑ is now by far the most complex element in the circle of communication. Unless, of course. one subscribes to the view that electronic publishing ‑ viewed naively as free ‑ represents the future of the author-reader cycle. Two problems associated with this alternative to the traditional book need to be addressed: quality and control of intellectual property.
The chain which links a manufacturer of a marketable commodity with an end‑user is the basis on which the economics of our society functions. The final link in that chain is when you find what you want and decide to purchase it. But you can only choose from what you have been offered, and that choice is determined by distribution arrangements over which you have no control. In publishing, as with food, the distribution arrangements are increasingly dominated by organisations with access to vast capital funding enabling them effectively to exercise control of the marketplace. The difficulty we face when required to exercise choice in a hypermarket environment is that of balancing convenience with quality. One‑stop shopping does have convenience, of course, but it is predicated on the assumption that we are all homogenised shoppers with needs that have been calculated by the accountants who seem inexorably to control our education, our work and our leisure. Quality, a word which pervades the meaningless jargon of management rhetoric, is being subtly re‑defined as a respectable prop for what is nothing more than economic efficiency. The casualties are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more obvious than in the range of books on offer in the lists of the conglomerates.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the opportunities available electronically to communicate are being seized by those who feel disenfranchised by the traditional medium of print. But because there is so little control over what is distributed on the electronic highways, we are facing a situation in which there are so many choices available that intelligent selection becomes increasingly difficult. A serious problem which faces those who monitor the ever‑growing traffic supported by the World Wide Web is the redundancy of so much of what is available with links between resources effectively disguising the fact that most websites actually provide very little of substantive interest that is not readily available elsewhere. The near‑obsessive urge to create a “Home Page” as a heraldic device which then gets neglected seems to me neither useful nor entirely healthy ‑ the sheer waste of time (not to mention network resource) consumed in sightseeing the Internet in the hope of a useful encounter constitutes a new leisure activity which I will call infotourism. Its ultimate value and importance for the future of serious research is as yet unproven. Maintaining the accuracy and currency of a localised information system ‑ such as the British Library's Portico ‑ is no trivial task, especially when one considers the rapidity with which that Institution's organisational structure changes.[31] For a university supporting the activities of hundreds of departments, groups and societies the problem of currency can become a major ‑ and daily ‑ chore. And if, for example, a staff list is not current then what use does it serve?
From the earliest days of book manufacture (whether manuscript or printed) the necessity to gain control over what was available has been crucial and the history of archives in the ancient world testifies to this. Documents, if they have significance, whether commercial or intellectual, cannot be allowed simply to accumulate without management ‑ unsorted heaps of documents such as one has seen in many a third world country are, for practical purposes, of no use whatever. The discipline which has, since Mesopotamia, sought to impose order on documents is records management, firmly anchored in an administrative context. Since the development of the codex it has been bibliography, which attaches a greater significance to the object and what it contains as well as the sources from which it springs, and its power to influence the future. Documents may, indeed generally do, have legal significance, but they seldom possess the special attributes which we assign to a text. Since the late fifteenth century the distinction between document and text has become less precise because research libraries, in particular, have traditionally accumulated manuscripts as well as printed books, and manuscripts can be part of the historical record as well as texts in their own right. Assurbanipal’s "library" at Nineveh contained every kind of material including literary texts, grammars and dictionaries.[32] It contained the earliest known book written for children as well as the text of the epic Gilgamesh which contains a story extraordinarily close to that of the Flood. The Cottonian collection is another example of such a mixture.
Anyone who has engaged in historical research understands the essential difference between a collection of manuscripts possessing characteristics in common with printed books and an archive: the former can, without too much difficulty be catalogued and indexed according to principles established a century ago; the latter, however, presents unique problems for description and therefore for access, which is one reason why we seem to have made better progress in adapting descriptions of books, whether manuscript or printed, to automated cataloguing than we have for the multi‑level elements in an archive. Where historians of the book have to deal with sources drawn from research libraries, manuscript collections and archives, the history of a text can become exceedingly complex. There are, for example, twentieth century authors whose texts can only be adequately understood by reference to: (1) manuscript/ typescript drafts; (2) printers' proofs; (3) publishers' and authors' correspondence and files, (4) published copies with authorial corrections for a later edition. and so on. For authors like Yeats who seems to have regarded each successive edition of a work as an opportunity to view it anew, the complexities are daunting. Interest in, and access to, publishers' archives is a comparatively recent development, created (in part) by the dissolution of private publishing and the total lack of interest shown by the conglomerates in anything other than the balance sheet, with the result that research libraries have been provided in recent years with a rich harvest of materials that they have seldom bothered to consider as worth acquiring - even as a gift.
Every book has a history which encompasses aspects before, during, and after publication. It follows that the history of the book is no simple discipline but one which draws on several which have hitherto been regarded as separate: biography; social and political currents; authors' reading and their intellectual mentors; the audience addressed; the means of reaching that audience and their reaction; readers' marginalia; subsequent editions in the author's lifetime. For most books the witnesses are silent, but the research libraries and archives of the world are full of witnesses that have never been called, just as the archaeological sites of Asia Minor have surrendered but a fraction of their buried evidence. What seems to me to be the challenge facing those who would take the history of the book forward as an academic subject of study is to demonstrate convincingly that we are as surely shaped by what we have read as anything in our experience.
One way in which the potentially rich complexity of the
history of the book can be
demonstrated is to look at the history of a
book, and the book I have chosen is W.B. Yeats' The Secret Rose. It happens to be a book which has been thoroughly
studied, and the following owes much to the work of my colleague Warwick Gould.[33]
The Secret Rose had
been planned at least as early as 1893 and the stories it contained, each with
its 'moment of revelation', appeared over the next four years in The New Review, The Sketch The National
Observer, and The Savoy. Like so
much of Yeats' work, the stories underwent changes between their serial
appearance and thereafter through the editions published in his lifetime. For
the planning of the stories the key document is a notebook of Yeats in the
collection of Michael Yeats. Yeats saw the stories as representing “the war of
spiritual with natural order" and concluded the dedication to Æ: “and when
one looks into the darkness there is always something there.” Three stories
were omitted from the collection first published in 1897 but were privately printed in the same year.[34]
At the time that he was writing The
Secret Rose Yeats was much concerned with apocalyptic moments, influenced
no doubt by his wide reading in the literature of "revelation". As anyone
who has dabbled in the literature of alchemy knows it is but a step from the
“light of nature” to its correlative darkness. The history of alchemy shows
clearly the transformation from concern with the external to the internal
universe, and the mystical systems which evolved in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries can be seen as precursors of modern psychological symbolism. We know
that Yeats was impressed by the Harleian manuscript (3469) of Trismosin's Splendor
Solis, but what else in the Opus Alchymicum did he study? Did he
know William Backhouse's translation of Trismosin ‑ The Golden Fleece, Sloane MSS. 2503 and 3619?
Warwick Gould has laid out in detail the considerable body of evidence which must be taken into account in order to understand what he has called a "total book" in which the symbolic design of the covers for The Secret Rose by Althea Gyles become part of the text (which we know only from the page proofs) concerning the fatal vellum book in the library of the Order of the Alchemical Rose having "a rose‑tree growing from an armed anatomy. and enclosing the faces of two lovers painted ‑‑‑on the one side, to symbolize certainly the coming of beauty out of corruption, and probably much else". The book as object has, in effect, become part of the process of revelation.
I can think of no better exemplification of this principle of revelation than to ask you tonight to consider a truly extraordinary book, which you will not find in the great research libraries, but which nevertheless has an intriguing history. That history is hard to recover because it is an eccentric performance: written, printed, illustrated and bound by a Huddersfield telephone operator who in the early hours of the graveyard shift, conducted remarkable conversations with the emotionally unbalanced. From these experiences he extracted enough substance to write John in Limbo: the Text for a Secular Cantata. It was composed and printed a page at a time on an Adana press, similar to that employed for the first part of Poems 1928 by Auden and Spender. The sheer effort of producing seventy copies of this was, I happen to know, colossal, and occupied Granville Ellis for some years. I introduced him to Auden at the Ilkley Literature Festival in 1973, but the great man by now had no use for such quaint enterprises. Whatever one might think of Ellis as a poet the book is a remarkable testimony to human endurance. The unwary should be warned that the Foreword is an elaborate piece of satgire. Ellis attracted some attention in the autumn of 1953 when Hutchinson published his satiric novel about the music establishment Lesser Fleas, written in the style of early Waugh.[35] But he was up against stiff competition, for it appeared at the same time as a novel by a hitherto unknown writer called Ian Fleming who introduced the reading public to 007 in Casino Royale.[36] I am not sure whether, at some future time, John in Limbo will be re-discovered: but if it is, historians of the book are going to have a problem explaining its ancestry. I gave a copy to the British Library in April 1973 – but until 1992 it seems to have joined John, for it was not catalogued for nineteen years.[37]
As the history of the book moves from the specificity of mere bibliographical description into what one might call a holistic phase, with fewer circumscriptions as to what determines legitimate evidence, we might well find ourselves engaged in a truly multidisciplinary study in which science and technology will have a part to play, but which, like archaeology, will depend on the sensitive interpretation of historical evidence. Technology is already assisting us in the revaluation of the Beowutf manuscript, with emendations suggested by early Saxonists being demonstrably false, and readings which have never been seen, giving a new life to a manuscript which just a year ago seemed to have exhausted all possibility of new discoveries, and it will doubtless assist us as more problematical sources are subjected to high‑resolution digital photography, in particular manuscripts which are suspected of being palimpsests. New methods of pigment analysis are helping to place illuminated manuscripts into a more correct chronology. Meticulous analysis of medieval bookbinding structures can help determine not only the localisation of a binder but the class of owner for whom it was made, as well as identifying changes in technique necessitated by the flood of books which needed to be bound after the invention of printing. Reading habits are beginning to be studied from unpublished diaries, a rich source of information on the role of the book in the process of transforming readers from adolescence to adulthood: such studies can help us to understand better not only what authors read but what their readers read. The study of marginalia will, one hopes, be enriched by finding aids which can guide us to sources which exist in abundance in the research libraries of the world. Family papers in archives frequently shed light on publishing history not available elsewhere, but the volume of such papers is daunting and archivists face a challenge of unprecedented proportions to make such evidence more easily available than it currently is. In the past fifty years reading has been critically influenced by film, television and video: yet the evidence proposed for this assumption has been less than convincing. The computer, some believe, is destined to shape our responses to words on the page in ways that we can as yet only dimly grasp. Given that the computer screen is so unlike the page of a book it may be that, if the electronic book does become a reality, in a few years we will be composing prose in a quite different manner than we currently do.
Historians of the book will soon discover. I believe, that their's is a world where the boundaries of evidence are few and the problems of legitimising such evidence many; the sources are widely dispersed, and I am sure that they will be assisted by technologies as yet undreamed of. But ultimately, the historian must know how to interpret evidence gathered by whatever means, and such knowledge is not easily gained. That is why I have called this contribution The Book as Revelation, and why I believe that by engaging the various talents and interests that it does it holds the promise of being a truly multidisciplinary subject worthy of academic study within the new School of Advanced Study.
Notes
1. Lecomte de Noüy, L’Homme et sa Destiné: Human Destiny. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1947. Sir Peter B. Medawar, The Limits of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. There are pertinent comments in his autobiography. Memoir of a thinking Radish. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Paul C.W. Davies. Space and Time in the modern Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; The Ghost in the Atorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Other Worlds. London: Dent. 1980.
2. Johann Müller, known in his time as Regiomontanus, published his Epitome of Ptolemy's Almagest at Venice in 1496. It is not known whether Copernicus owned a copy of this work but it has often been suggested that his new heliocentric model of the solar system derived from a study of the inaccuracies in the Ptolemalc tables. The full text of the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium did not appear until 1543 (printed at Nuremberg), and the first copy was given to him on his deathbed.
3. Sir Peter Medawar (1915‑1987) was Professor of Zoology at University College London and published widely on immunology and the life sciences. His liberal intellectual achievements can be seen at their best in The Threat and the Glory (Oxford. 1990) and The Limits of Science (Oxford, 1985). His papers are at University College London.
4. Jean Riolan (1580‑1657), French physician and anatomist. Two catalogues of his collection were published, at Paris in 1654 and London in 1655 (British Library 821.b.1(13)). R.L. Thornton, “The two catalogues of Jean Riolan's library, Paris, 1654 and London, 165”, Journal of the History of Medicine, xxiii, 1968, 287‑89.
5. William Hunter (1718‑1783), Scottish anatomist. His library is in the University of Glasgow library. Mungo Ferguson, The Printed Books in the Library of the Hunterian Museum (Glasgow, 1930).
6. Joseph Priestley (1733‑1803). Priestley's library was sold by Thomas Dobson in Philadelphia in 1816, and by Grelaud in Philadelphia in 1821. Douglas McKie, 'Priestley's laboratory and library and other of his effects', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, xii, 1956, 114‑36; E. Robinson, 'Priestley's library of the scientific books: a new list', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, i, 1970, 145‑60; L.S. Weatherby, 'An alchemist manuscript from the library of Joseph Priestley', Journal of Chemical Education, iii, 1926, 129‑33.
7. George Hamilton (1808‑1885), American physician. Hamilton's library was sold by Henkel in Philadelphia in 1886 in seven parts, covering medicine, lexicography, history, biography and natural history, poetry and classics, general literature, and theology. In all the sale contained 3,188 lots.
8. British Library. MS. Add. 34716 A‑B, compiled ca. 1780.
9. Angelo Poliziano (1454‑1494 ‑ family name Ambrogini) was sent to Florence at the age of ten to study Latin and Greek under the distinguished teachers Cristoforo Landino, Kallistos and Argyropulos. From Ficino he learned philosophy and particularly the works of Plato. He translated Homer in 1470 and attracted the attention of Lorenzo de Medici who took him into his household and became his patron, securing for him a professorship at the University of Florence. Amongst his many celebrated pupils there were Reuchlin, Grocyn, Linacre and Tessiras. His influence on the editing of classical texts can hardly be over‑stated. His Orfeo ranks as the first secular Renaissance play on a classical theme. His output was prodigious, given that he died at the age of forty. Of the various editions of his Opera (1498, 1499, 1533. 1536. 1546) the best is probably that published at Basle in 1553. Friedrich Otto Mencke's Historia vitæ et in literas meritorum, Angeli Politiani (Leipzig, 1736) is a mine of information not found elsewhere.
10. Ellen B. Wells, 'Scientists' libraries: a Handlist of printed sources', Annals of Science, xl, 1983. [3171‑89. Wells' handlist covers sale catalogues, printed catalogues of collections in institutions and secondary literature. The handlist could be expanded considerably if identified scientific and medical collections for which no secondary literature exists were to be added. A few examples will suffice: King’s College London: the libraries of Robert Todd (1809‑ 1860), Sir John Phillips (1855-1928), Sir Hugh Beevor (1858‑1939), Frederick Burghard (1864‑1947), Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802‑1875), William Adams (1836‑1915), Reginald Gates (1882‑1962), Thomas Stebbing (1835‑1926); Royal College of Obstetricians: William Blair‑Bell (1871‑1936), Roy Dobbin (1873‑1939), Sir Eardley Holland (1879‑1967), Miles Phillips (1875‑1965), Alistair Gunn (1903‑1970; University College London: Robert Grant (1793‑ 1874), William Sharpey (1802‑1880), Sir Richard Quain (1800‑1887), Edmund Parkes (1819‑1876), Sir John Tweedy (1849‑1924), Sir John Erichsen (1818‑1896), Marcus Beck (1843‑1893). Reconstituting the libraries of scientists is often difficult because of the practice adopted by librarians of dispersing in general collections books of a non‑scientific nature, made more difficult without adequate provenance finding‑aids.
11. Bibliotheca Meadiana, sive catalogus librorum Richardi Mead, (London, Samuel Baker, 1754‑55). The sale lasted twenty‑nine nights. His pamphlets were sold in 1783. Mead, like Sloane. had extensive collections of pictures, prints, drawings. gems, coins, &c. The 1755 catalogue of the sale by Abraham Langford drawn up by the numismatist George North has the title Museum Meadianum. and extends to 262 pages.
12. F. Kleinschnitzova, 'Ex Bibliotheca Tychoniana Collegii Soc. Jesu Pragea ad s Clementem', Nordisk Tidskrift för Bokoch Biblioteksräsen, xx, 1933, 73‑97; Wilhelm Prandtl, Die Bibliotek des Tycho Brahe, Wien, 1933. Brahe's library is in the University Library at Prague.
13. Thomas Bartholin (1616‑1680) was Professor of
Anatomy at Copenhagen University and is celebrated as the discoverer of the
lymphatic vessels in 1654. Elected as professor honorarius with
no routine duties he settled at Hagestedgaard where he could devote himself to
reading, writing and experimenting. While attending the funeral of his old
teacher Poul Moth his house burned down with the loss of his library. In 1670
he published De Bibliothecee incendto
dtssertatio ad_filios, a melancholy message for his children on the
consequences of burned books which lists 27 manuscripts of his own unpublished
work and 129 titles with which he had been associated, which suggests that he
may have had a catalogue which survived the destruction of his books. No such
catalogue has as yet been identified. An English translation of Bartholin's
address to his sons by Charles D. O'Malley was published by the University of
Kansas Libraries in 1961 as Thomas Bartholin On the Burning of his Library
and on Medical Travel.
14. Herman Boerhaave's library was sold at Leiden in 1739, Bibliotheca Boerhaaviana His specimens and other items were sold in the same year, Museum Boerhaavianum. Many of his books are at Leiden University.
15. Georges Louis Le Clerc, Count de Buffon (1707‑88) was perhaps the most distinguished French naturalist in the eighteenth century. His Histoire Naturelle, was published in 44 volumes between 1749 and 1804, the later volumes appearing posthumously. His library was acquired by Honoré Riquetti, Count Mirabeau, whose library was sold in 1791 by Rozet & Belin, a copy of which marked with prices is in the British Library (269.k.15). The collection was incorporated in 1793 in the newly‑founded Museurn National d'Histoire Naturelle.
16. Charles Hutton's library was sold at auction by Leigh & Sotheby in 1816. Included in the sale were mathematical instruments formerly owned by Benjamin Franklin.
17. Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), polymath extraordinary, amassed a huge library covering all disciplines, and probably the last of the great scholarly working libraries. When Humboldt's servant Seiffert offered the library for sale a buyer could not be found and bids from Berlin and the Astor Library were insufficient. It was sold to the eminent Berlin dealer Asher in 1860. It was bought by Henry Stevens in the same year, presumably with a view to selling it on to Astor or Lennox. By 1861, when the catalogue was well advanced, the outbreak of the Civil War put paid to Stevens' hopes, and even London institutions could not afford it. The printed catalogue (with Stevens' imprint) appeared in November 1863 (British Library S.C.964) with a few copies on large paper (British Library 11903.1.7). The Humboldt auction at Sotheby's was announced for June 1, 1865 (and thirty days following) but did not take place, and on June 29 a fire in the storage rooms destroyed all but 574 books which were eventually sold on March 14, 1871. One has only to browse the catalogue to see what unique treasures were lost: books printed on vellum, annotated copies, association copies from Humboldt's wide circle of friends and admirers.
18. The library of Charles Babbage (1792‑1871), best known as the inventor of a mechanical computing machine generally regarded as the precursor of the modem computer, was sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge in London in 1872 and was acquired by the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, which also has a part of the celebrated Crawford collection (Catalogue of the Crawford Library of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. 1890). Babbage material is also found in the library of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (founded in 1819 and now part of the University Library collections) and the Royal Statistical Society, which benefited from donations by many social historians such as Adolphe Quetelet (1796‑1874), George Porter (1792‑1852), Karl Pearson (1857‑1936). and George Yule (1871‑1951) The sale catalogue (Mathematical and scientific Library of the late Charles Babbage) is divided into sections covering mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, optics, electricity, pneumatics and meteorology.
19. Carl Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) (1707‑1788) revolutionised botany and the classification of plants. After his death the Linnaean Society was established in London and contains his manuscripts and library. Note Spencer Savage's Synopsis of the annotations by Linnaeus and contemporaries in his library of printed books (London, 1940).
20. Francis J. Cole (1872‑1959) was Professor of Zoology at Reading University (1906‑1939) and his library was acquired by the University Library on his death. Although Cole's non-scientific books have not been traced the University Library published in 1969 (books printed up to 1800) and 1975 (books printed after 1800) The Cole Ltbrary of early Medicine and Zoology: Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets by Nellie Eales. It lists over 8,000 items from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.
21. Anne Renier (née Cliff) and her husband Fernand Renier published many translations of children's books and stories, and put together a vast collection (over 50,000 items) of children's literature now in the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green. These are in the process of being catalogued.
22. Iona and Peter Opie published numerous books on children's literature and amassed a wonderful collection which is now in the Bodleian Library. In 1989 the Opies and Brian Alderson published The Treasures of childhood: books, toys and games from the Opie Collection (London: Pavillon, 1989).
23. See Emily E.F. Skeel's monumental A Bibliography of the writings of Ndah Webster, New York, New York Public Library, 1958; also Luisanna Fodde, Noah Webster, national language and cultural history in the United States of America 1758‑1843, Padova, CEDAM, 1994.
24. The Chadwick collection of tracts on sanitation and health occupy 535 volumes. A manuscript index is available in the British Library.
25. The practice of not cataloguing "duplicates", particularly in collections of pamphlets, was perhaps excusable during the period of the British Museum Library's rapid expansion under Panizzi's leadership, but, as ESTC has convincingly demonstrated, items seemingly identical often, under close scrutiny, turn out to be different. I did bring the Bentham annotations to the attention of the Library but, as yet, nothing has been done to get them incorporated In the catalogue.
26. Sir Edwin Chadwick produced several reports on health and sanitation issues, but his best known one was Report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population published by the Poor Law Commission in 1842‑43, also published as a House of Lords Sessional Paper. 1843, vol. 32.
27. Wilhelm Busch: Max and Moritz in English dialects and creoles edited by Manfred Görlach. Hamburg, Helmut Buske, 1986. This is a sequel to Max und Moritz in deutschen Dialekten, Hamburg, Helmut Buske, 1982.
28. For a bibliography of the Orbis sensualium pictus see Kurt Pilz, Johann Amos Comenius. Die Ausgaben des Orbis sensualium pictus. Eine Bibliographie, Nürnberg. Selbsverlag der Stadtbibliothek, 1967. The first English edition, translated by Charles Hoole, was published at London in 1659 (reproduced as volume 222 of English Linguistics by Scolar Press in 1970). A facsimile of the Nuremberg edition of 1658 was published at Osnabrück by Otto Zeller in 1964 with an introduction by Hellmut Rosenfeld.
29. John Cleland's Fanny Hill has spawned in recent years some explicit editions and derivatives, including The Daughter of Fanny Hill, North Hollywood: Brandon House, 1967. For a review of the work's complex legal history see Charles Rembar's The End of obscenity: the trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill. London: Harper & Row. 1968.
30. First published in the edition in parts. London. 1838‑39.
31. Portico is the British Library's information World Wide Web site.
32. For a brief account of Assurbanipal's library see Laura Arksey, 'The Library of Assurbanipal, King of the World". Wilson Library Bulletin, June. 1977, pp. 833‑40.
33. The Secret Rose, stories by W.B. Yeats: a variorum edition. Edited by Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and Michael J. Sidnell. Second edition revised and enlarged. London: Macrnillan, 1992.
34. See note 33.
35. The British Library copy (the only one traced in a public collection) is at NNN.4331.
36. Reviewed in TLS on April 17. 1953 as "an extremely engaging affair. dealing with espionage in the Sapper manner but with a hero who, although taking a great many cold showers and never letting sex interfere with work, is somewhat more sophisticated. ... Altogether Mr. Fleming has produced a book that is both exciting and extremely civilised."
37. The British Library copy is at YA. 1992.a.9718.