Council’s Choice 2024

Council’s Choice 20242024-12-21T13:31:04+00:00

A monthly series of bibliography- or book-related links recommended by members of the Society’s Council, initiated by Margaret Ford, Past President.

Earlier posts can be found at Council’s Choice.

January 2024

The Melville Electronic Library

The parts of the Melville Electronic Library which may be of particular interest to bibliographers [who will already be aware of the author’s system of classification of whales from folio to duodecimo, in Chapter 32] are the ‘Model Editions’ including the side-by-side Moby-Dick comparing the British and American first editions of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel.
The parallel page images of these two ‘first’ editions, which appeared months apart, as well as a digital transcription with pop-up ‘Revision Narratives’ on screen, offer objects on which to hang discussions of copyright, piracy, typesetting, stereotyping, authorial revision, editorial intervention, paratextual elements (including the changed title), and reader responses. While modern readers too often put the book down unfinished, readers of the British first edition could not read the complete book even if they tried, as it lacked the ‘Epilogue’ describing the fate of Ishmael after the disastrous meeting of the ship Pequod and the white whale.
Apart from a wealth of material appealing directly to Melvillites, general users of MEL will find a ‘Tool Kit’ pointing to digital resources for editing and collating sources.

Alexandra Franklin, Member if Council

February 2024

The Plantin Press Online

Christophe Plantin was born near the French town of Tours, probably around 1520. After working in Caen and Paris he moved to Antwerp, then one of the most important commercial cities in Europe, where he established a successful publishing house. In 1576, he purchased a building on the Vrijdagmarkt where his family and descendants lived and worked for three hundred years. The last owner, Edward Moretus, sold the house to the City of Antwerp in 1876 and it is now the Plantin-Moretus Museum, the building and its contents on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Since 1876 successive Museum Directors have researched and published on different aspects of the Plantin-Moretus firm. Max Rooses, the first Director, edited Plantin’s correspondence and wrote the first history of Plantin and the publishing house (1919 French edition). Perhaps the most enduring work is the six-volume bibliography of the Plantin Press compiled by Leon Voet (Director 1950-1982) and Jenny Voet-Grisolle.

The Museum, in collaboration with Brill publishing, have now launched an online open access research tool, based on the Plantin Press bibliography. As well as detailed information on all publications printed and/or published by Plantin (in Antwerp and Leiden) this incorporates the latest bibliographical findings and corrections to the print edition. It includes references to typographical material, woodblock and copperplate collections, correspondence, and the Plantin archive still preserved in Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, as well as links to digital reproductions and references to recent research. The dataset has been and will be continuously updated and complemented by scholars working on Christophe Plantin and his printed legacy.

The Plantin Press Online

Julianne Simpson, Member of Council

March 2024

The History of Information (dot com)

At first glance, the intriguing website HistoryofInformation.com looks like just another aggregation of historical facts. It isn’t!

Jeremy M. Norman has set himself the task of building a meta-history site: a history of data collections tagged by subject category. The resulting website is a rich source of information about books, printing, bookbinding and many related topics, arranged and constrained in chronological order.

If you want just items about “printing by handpress or by hand” from 1500 to 1700, for example, pick the topic and set the timeline on the left to discover entries for the first book printed using chiaroscuro woodcuts (1557), Charles IX of France proscribing printing without permission under penalty of death, and the advent of the term “incunabula”, among the 40-odd result set. Each item is well illustrated and described, with onward links to references and sources as appropriate.

Bibliography, Book History, Book Illustration, Book Production, Book Trade, Bookbinding, Papermaking, and Printing along with their sub-divisions by topic, will also be of interest to bibliophiles. I find it helps to constrain your browsing using the left-hand date ruler so you can focus on the time period of most interest. Each item is cross-referenced to its other relevant topics, so browsing can turn into a fascinating near-random walk through the information.

I think of it as a useful guide-to-information site – cataloguing the information items about aspects of history instead of cataloguing history directly. However, in his lengthy introduction to the site (in the “About” section), the author likens it to a commonplace book. That severely undersells what he has achieved; this is a valuable site both for direct research and secondary searching, or “pearling” to discover new information.

David Macfarlane, Member of Council

April 2024

Historical Conversion of Currency

Studies of book history invariably involve determinations of monetary value, and even though we all know how imperfectly historical values are correlated with contemporary ones, it doesn’t stop us from trying. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! I’ve always been unhappy with attempts to establish contemporary equivalents for historical values, but I reached a tipping point when giving a series of lectures on Jane Austen some years ago.

My American students were bewildered first by an unfamiliar currency but even more by its disconnection from values that they understood. How much is Mr Darcy’s £10,000 a year in ‘real’ money? Or more to our point, if someone spent a guinea for a copy of Emma when it was first published, what is that worth today? It’s a tantalizing problem, and there’s no perfect way to solve it, especially since there are more factors than currency that determine value.

My breakthrough as a dilettante in economic history came when I lit upon the work of Sir Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins whose A Perspective of Wages and Prices (1981) contains two related indices drawn from data in southern England over seven centuries. One index was of a ‘composite unit of consumables’, a sort of rudimentary version of the Consumer Price Index. Through some simple math which I explain on a related page (A Method for Determining Historical Monetary Values), I devised a convenient web form to convert English currency from 1264-1983 into US currency in any target year from 1913 to the present: Pounds Sterling to Dollars.

The website is updated annually with new data and feedback is gratefully received.

Eric Nye, Hon. Treasurer for America

May 2024

Priorities and Perils

In this series celebrating and promoting digital resources that support book history, perhaps we should pause, take a minute’s silence, to reflect on the recent calamitous events at the British Library? I’m sure all readers will know that the BL’s website, services and e-resources went offline following a cyber-attack in October 2023, and that many of them remain unavailable while the long struggle to return to something like normality continues. It has reminded us just how central the BL’s catalogues and databases are to our field – ESTC and the Database of Bookbindings are the things I most immediately miss, others will have different go-tos. The ripples have been felt in other copyright libraries who could suddenly no longer provide access to electronic legal deposit material.

Some will see here a dire warning to our e-world, see what can happen, we need to go back to ink on paper as the way of doing things. But doors falling off planes don’t make us return to ships, any more than car accidents make us saddle up horses. Technological advances that become integral to society are not readily given up. Myself, I was struck by how little coverage the whole incident seemed to get – how can something like this happen to the national library, and go on for so long, without more public alarm? Why was there nothing on the DCMS website? Does the BL’s place in our cultural and intellectual infrastructure not deserve more fuss? Colon, discuss.

The BL has now published a detailed account of the incident, how it happened, what the future path is, the lessons for us all: https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf. There will be much blame-gaming, particularly from those who can’t imagine how complex organisations with competing priorities and financial pressures aren’t spinning every plate that they should, perfectly, all the time. Which is not to say that the partly outsourced IT infrastructure and aging systems described in the review paper don’t paint an alarming picture – how many public institutions are in a place to cast the first stone? It’s a sad story, for the BL, and for everyone who cares about everything it stands for. Let’s hope that those bedrock e-resources become available once more.

David Pearson, Hon. Editor of Monographs

June 2024

A union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World

FIHRIST is the union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World, a collaborative project to map the manuscript collections housed in more than twenty participating institutions in the UK and Ireland. It is a fast-growing catalogue, with new holdings added regularly and existing records being updated and expanded over time.

The platform is completely open-source and manuscript descriptions are created in TEI/XML, an international standard for encoding text. The records incorporate elements of codicological/bibliographic description (including Name Authority and

), links to digitized resources if available, information about how to request an item, and a “comments” function which allow users to contact relevant curators. For a sample record see Persian MS 579 (The John Rylands Research Institute and Library).

FIHRIST is a powerful discovery tool. Apart from a keyword search engine, which allows users to explore holdings housed in various libraries, it offers a browse function that allows scholars to explore collections by four macro-categories: classmarks, titles, people, and subjects. Additionally, FIHRIST offers the possibility to filter results by various parameters such as media, decorations, and an extensive selection of “roles” for individuals associated to the production or ownership of each manuscript.

 

The combined “browse” and “filter” functions afford researchers the ability to collate items on a certain subject or works compiled by a specific author. Similarly, it is possible to recreate digitally entire collections that are now dispersed across multiple institutions simply by clicking on the name of a former owner.
FIHRIST is a sophisticated, yet user-friendly discovery tool, and indeed a valuable resource for all those working on or interested in knowing more about manuscripts from the Islamicate World.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Yasmin Faghihi (Cambridge University Library and FIHRIST Co-Chair) for advising on this month’s Council Choice.

Alessandro Bianchi, member of Council

July 2024

A digitised card catalogue for Russian books

One of the problems of using common databases such as OCLC/WorldCat when researching Russian books is their comparative incompleteness. Many titles simply aren’t listed at all.

A free online resource I like to use is the old card catalogue of the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg which has been digitised on their website: https://nlr.ru/e-case3/sc2.php/web_gak. I type an author’s surname in Cyrillic in, say, Word, then copy and paste it into the search field (or you can use the little keyboard feature next to the search box). You can then click through the results, which, along with pagination etc, will often give you the first name and patronymic of the author (Russian title-pages frequently give an author’s initials rather than their full name), and their dates, and obviously you can also see what other books they wrote to help put the book you’re researching into some kind of context. Sometimes the cards have been annotated by helpful Russian librarians, too, giving further details.

By using this albeit slightly old-fashioned online catalogue, I have often found information which is simply not available in Western catalogues.

Simon Beattie, member of Council

August 2024

The CERL Thesaurus : naming the world of early modern Europe

The CERL Thesaurus is one of the many resources made available by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. The linguistic diversity and the troubled history of Europe mean that there often are dramatic variations in names used for the same persons, be they names for authors, printers, publishers, or former owners,  or for places or corporate bodies, such as former owning institutions. Such variations can be simply linguistic but they can also reflect past and present nationalistic policies. The Thesaurus can assist your search of all CERL resources by drawing on a very large number of authority files and authoritative records from CERL member institutions, and other contributors such as major bibliographical research projects. This means that, for instance, you don’t have to know its Danish, Latin, or Icelandic name in the correct grammatical case to search for books printed in Copenhagen in Latin or Icelandic. Your search for Copenhagen will give you even records which themselves only contain a Danish, Latin, or Icelandic name form.

Not only is it used for CERL resources: Individual libraries are free to use the Thesaurus for assisted searching of their own catalogues.

The records in the Thesaurus include links to images of printers’ devices and to other electronic resources, and draw in relevant rights-free images from Wikipedia. Place names are georeferenced. The Thesaurus is deliberately not an authority file itself, while it draws on numerous authority files, and authoritative records. Instead it offers all the recorded variants, letting you know where they have been used. The Thesaurus enables users to navigate this complexity, without CERL setting itself up as an international judge of what is the “proper” name of a city or a person.

In addition to being a tool for assisted searching, the Thesaurus is a useful source of reference for book-related people and places. Thus, the record for Wrocław will tell you the multitudinous names which the city has been given in imprints of books, and the names of printers and publishers who have been active in the city (in the screenshot only a small part of the many names appear). The non-normative approach means that the CERL Thesaurus in itself can be used to research and understand the multilayered geography of our continent. This is an aspect that is further enhanced because it is  also available as Linked Open Data so that you can use it for your own data analysis or visualisation.

Kristian Jensen, Past President

September 2024

AALT: Digitised documents from medieval and early modern England

The website of the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT.html) is the result of a collaboration between the University of Houston Law Center in the US and The National Archives (TNA) in the UK, which was first drawn up in 2006. Its aim is to provide digital images of TNA documents from medieval and early modern England, as a free resource for research into the history of English law and related subjects. Since its inception, some non-TNA material has been included, but by far the majority of images are from huge series of English governmental, judicial and royal sources held at Kew.

The website now contains millions of images of series such as Chancery proceedings (C 1), Exchequer Plea Rolls, King’s Bench Plea Rolls, Pipe Rolls, Court of Requests, and proceedings of the Court of Common Pleas, as well as a selection of royal wardrobe accounts. They are arranged by regnal year with little other accompanying apparatus, and so for much research this is simply a remote substitute for being in the reading room. In some instances, however, AALT is compiling indexes to enhance accesibility. The most notable example is the records of the Court of Common Pleas (CP 40), for which a growing number of modern indexes are providing a whole new way into this incredibly rich resource, featuring individuals from all walks of life and areas of the UK from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

Matthew Payne, Hon. Treasurer

October 2024

The Koopman Collection at the KB, The Hague

Anyone interested in the French illustrated book or in modern artist’s books will enjoy the online presentation of the Koopman Collection at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands:  https://collecties.kb.nl/en/koopman-collection

With a focus on French literature and the book arts from 1890 to the present, the site describes and illustrates over 180 key books from the Koopman Collection (which numbers over 10,000 books). It is curated by Paul van Capelleveen. The homepage groups books in time-periods of around a decade each (with especially prolific periods such as the interwar years further subdivided). Each entry has several high-quality photographs, an invaluable contextual essay (available in Dutch, English and French) and a physical description with references. The physical description is especially useful where the books do not conform to standard bibliographical formats. Further menus allow searching and browsing by author, artist, publisher or keyword and each screen allows a direct search of the KB online catalogue.

‘The KB’s Koopman Collection contains almost complete collections of authors such as Paul Valéry, Colette, André Gide, Francis Carco and many others’

‘The Koopman Collection was bequeathed to the KB in 1968 by engineer Louis J. Koopman (1887-1968). He had continued the collection of his fiancée Anny Antoine (1897-1933), who died young. Thanks to the Anny Antoine/Louis Koopman Foundation, new acquisitions continue to be added to the collection of literary works. Many illustrated editions have been purchased since the 1970s. Since the year 2000, the focus has been on artists’ books and editions with unusual typography’ (from the KB website).

Highlights include:

The Koopman Collection is among over seventy individually described special collections in the KB and there are presentations devoted to Alba amicorum, Spinoza, book covers (in a broad sense), penny prints, Huygens, clandestine publications from WWII, incunabula, children’s books, cookbooks, songbooks, pop-up books and medieval manuscripts, among others. The texts are all available in English at https://www.kb.nl/onderzoeken-vinden/bijzondere-collecties.

Justin Croft, member of Council

November 2024

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December 2024

Book fittings recorded on the Portable Antiquities Database

My Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society earlier this year (19 March 2024) included details of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database: https://finds.org.uk/

My intention was to draw attention to this well designed and enormous database which might offer suggestions of how to deal with recording printed fragments often found in book bindings.

The database is intended for recording archaeological finds made by anyone, principally members of the public, often with metal detectors, and it is managed by the British Museum. Reporting objects is voluntary, and it is not to be confused with the 1996 Treasure Act, amended in 2023, which is a UK Act of Parliament intended to monitor the discovery of objects of outstanding national interest, at least three hundred years old, and usually made of gold or silver.

The PAS database currently records nearly 1.8 million objects and it is added to constantly. It is easy to search under a wide range of key words, objects are generally well described, and they are usually illustrated.

Sometimes the work of the archaeologist enters the world of the book historian, and here there are many examples. Try searching the fields of “book clasp” or “seal matrix” for literally thousands of examples; an example of a book fitting is below. There are Roman seal boxes and styli, lead pencils of various dates, some early medieval aestels of fine quality, papal bullae which are excavated and now separated from the documents to which they were once attached, post-medieval lead horn books, and the so-called parchment prickers, and parchment clips – which in both cases are unlikely to have anything to do with book production.

Treat yourself to a browse!

Richard Linenthal, Past President

BOOK FITTING
Unique ID: NMS-7D0635

Complete medieval copper-alloy one-piece book fastening of Howsam’s (2016) type A.9.2. It consists of a flat rectangular and hollow plate (or box), open at the attachment end to receive the strap, and a lonzengiform quatrefoil boss projecting from the opposite end followed by a zoomorphic (animal-headed) looped terminal with a separate ring attached. There is a circular hole on the underside of the boss to fit onto a peg mounted on the book cover. Close to the attachment end there are a pair of rivet holes on both the front and rear parts of the plate. One of these retains a remnant of a copper-alloy rivet at the rear.

The front of the plate is engraved with the Christogram ihc: the first three letters of the name Jesus in Greek (ΙΗΣΟΥΣ) transliterated into Latin letters. This is rendered in a reserved and serifed script on a rectangular background field of engraved oblique hatching. The upper and lower serifs of the h have ornate and expanded embellishments that extend beyond the rectangular field.

The boss is thicker than the plate and is moulded into a lozengiform quatrefoil flower motif on the front. At the centre is a very slightly recessed square, divided into nine smaller squares by two vertical and two horizontal fine grooves. On each of the four sides there is a sub-triangular petal with concave outside edges. The overall shape is maintained with minimal expansion from front to rear, or until another element of the object is reached: one petal overlaps slightly with the plate while the opposite one is superimposed on the rear of the animal head terminal.

The head emerges at approximately the same width as the petal and widens sightly and concavely until the brow. From here it narrows concavely again, forming the snout. An arched ridge on the top of each side of the head behind the brow depicts the ears. The snout has a central longitudinal ridge or arris which is concave when viewed side-on. Short, finely engraved grooves depict a pair of lentoid eyes and wrinkles on the top of the snout. The very end of the snout is flat, vertical and immediately joined to the circular loop, which is aligned at approximately ninety degrees to the plate. The attached ring is simple, circular in cross-section and of slightly larger diameter than the loop. It has no gap or visible seam.

The whole object is flat on the reverse. The metal is patinated dark green all over. Cf. Ibid 127, fig. 2-72. Further parallels on this database include IOW-7D75B7, BERK-AC4903, NMS-369AB8 and LIN-74ACFC. Late 14th to early 15th century.

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