Book Collecting

Published in Dana Wyse, How to Turn Your Addiction to Prescription Drugs into a Successful Art Career, Paris: Editions du Regard, 2007. ISBN 9782841051991

Les livres sont des paradis artificiels. Ils ouvrent à des mondes possibles et impossibles, réalistes et irréels, dont chacun, dans l’acte de la lecture, produit les représentations pour un unique spectateur : soi-même. Ces représentations, cependant, ne sont pas plus innocentes qu’originelles : on les dirait plutôt téléguidées par toutes sortes d’images avant soi. De ces images stéréotypes, plutôt qu’archétypes, Dana Wyse tient l’archive. Sous le titre de Recipe for Life (Recette de vie), elle collecte et expose toutes les promesses d’une vie meilleure contenues dans ces livres sans littérature, que sont les livres dits « pratiques ». Un projet dont elle fait à la fois sa bibliothèque et des expositions, une collecte et un objet de collection.

The aim of this study is to show the rich variety of marginalia written in the books by the hand of their owner, Giovanni Bernardo Bonifacio (1517—1597)‘, also known as "helluo librorum", a "book devourer". Most of the author’s attention has been focused upon recognizing the types and func­tions of the hand written comments left in the margins of the books by the Italian humanist. The role of the annotations has been seen as a part of an „intimate scholarship” performed by an individual rather than a by-product of a book-culture.

Niniejsza praca zawiera analizę jakościową i ilościową zespołu analogów, składającego się z około 30 druków (XVI wiek), oprawionych w średniowieczne rękopisy muzyczne na pergaminie z zapisem neumatycznym (XIV/XV wiek) z księgozbioru Jana Bernarda Bonifacia (1517-1597), fundatora Biblioteki Rady Miejskiej w Gdańsku (Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis). W centrum interesowania autorki znalazły się wyżej wymienione oprawy, a w szczególności ich anatomia. W opracowaniu przedstawiono także hipotezę dotyczącą miejsca i czasu powstania omawianych opraw. Autorka nie odpowiada na pytanie, gdzie i kiedy powstały wymienione w niniejszej pracy rękopisy muzyczne. Niniejszy tekst jest więc jedynie pewnym sygnałem o zespole druków, cennym - między innymi - ze względu na ich „neumowe” oprawy.              -            -              -              -              The essay features a group of 29 bookbindings made of medieval musical manuscript leaves. The bindings, made of discarded parchment, cover books once belonging to Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio marquis of Oria (1517-1597). About 546 volumes (50% of Bonifacio’s original collection) have survived into our age. 5% of Bonifacio’s books are bound with medieval musical manuscripts. When Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio marquis of Oria (1517— 1597) arrived in Gdańsk with his library composed of more than one thousand books, the Gdańsk City Council was given an incentive for creating a city public library. Bonifacio was a typical representative of the Italian Renaissance. He travelled with his book-collection across Europe as he had been accused of heresy and the inquisition’s sentence had forced him into exile. Bonifacio spent about 40 years of his life wandering through Europe. At the end of his life, the Italian exile decided to settle down in Gdańsk. He donated his collection of manuscripts and early printed books to the Gdańsk City Council. On the basis of the unique book-collection the Library of the Gdańsk City Council (Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis) was founded in 1596. In the late 15th century waste material from broken or defunct manuscripts was reused to create new bookbindings. Medieval liturgical manuscripts lost their original role and meaning due to at least four factors: the changes within liturgy brought about by the Reformation, the development of print technology, the reform within the Church introduced by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and last but not least the binders’ economical use of expensive material. The process of using late medieval manuscript waste as book covers lasted from the 15th till 17th century. Originally, the individual manuscript leaves that were used as binding material for Bonifacio’s books may have been an integral part of missals or graduals used in the liturgical ceremonies in the late Middle Ages. Basically, the manuscripts contain a kind of neumatic notation on a set of four horizontal lines. The notation accompanied the Latin liturgical texts written in Gothic minuscule script. The paper argues that Bonifacio’s books lost their original covers and were rebound in Gdańsk in the liturgical manuscript bindings.

In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), book collecting evolved from an elite pastime into a widespread obsession. ‘Bibliophilia’—the passionate love for books—drove many book collectors to exhaust their fortunes or even trade their concubines for books. As books became indispensable towards gaining respectability in Chinese society, scholars, merchants, and landowners ensured that their residences were thoroughly infused with the prestigious “fragrance of books”. Some literati even regarded book collecting as a man’s most important undertaking in life. Ming private book collectors broke away from tradition and made their private collections available for others to view, exchange, or copy, greatly promoting the circulation of books. Through their incredible attention to the collection, classification, storage, and proofreading of books, Ming bibliophiles contributed enormously to the preservation and transmission of Chinese culture.

Belgium is still a rich country with a high percentage (higher than to compare with its immediate neighbours) of wealthy people. The two main layers of this historical accumulation of richness are the 16th-17th c. for the Flemish cities and the second half of the 19th c. This paper tries to estimate the place of bibliophily in a broader collecting context It starts with a description of the bookseller Jean-Baptiste Verbeyst, called "the most famous European bookseller", who accumulated nearly 300,000 books recuperated in the great turmoils of the preceding decades (suppression of the order of the Jesuits, French Revolution, Napoleonic wars). It continues with a comparison between coin and book collectors in Belgium, confronting the habits of their respective national societies.

Resumen: En este artículo se presenta un documento sobre los inicios de la etnolingüística argentina en el siglo XIX, el Apéndice a la colección de Pedro de Angelis que contenía documentos etnolingüísticos importantes conformado por manuscritos e impresos, principalmente escritos en las reducciones jesuíticas del Paraguay. La creación de redes de contacto entre investigadores argentinos interesados en el tema comenzó en el siglo XIX. Esto se inició con el interés de coleccionistas que querían poseer “curiosidades”, como primeros manuscritos de lenguas indígenas u obras gramaticales y vocabularios impresos por los jesuitas. La figura más prominente entre éstos es el coleccionista de origen italiano Pedro de Angelis, que desarrolló su interés lingüístico hasta un alto nivel. De Angelis vendió la mayor parte de su colección al Emperador del Brasil (ahora en la Biblioteca Nacional en Río de Janeiro) pero conservó una pequeña colección etnolingüística de gran calidad que vendió separadamente a algunos amigos en Buenos Aires.
Esa parte es solo conocida a través de un Apéndice, publicado en Buenos Aires, para completar  su  principal  bibliografía  hecha  para  la  venta  en  Brasil  en  1853.  La  propia contribución  de  De  Angelis  a  la  lingüística  ha  sido  completamente  descuidada  hasta ahora.

"Small, inexpensive, and well-designed, Peter Pauper Press books fit fetchingly into a suitcoat pocket or evening bag. With dependably colorful, decorative dust jackets and entertaining, easily digestible content, few books could be as cheering to give and receive. Perhaps this is why so many found their way into US upper-middle class (and striving) den bookshelves and kitchen cupboards in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Pauper’s attractively printed cookbooks, poetry volumes and lifestyle hints now recirculate through libraries, discerning used bookstores and as collectibles on eBay. Tantalizing traces of consumption linger in these used books – some apparently stored, tight and unopened, in a bedside table, forlornly filed away in an attic trunk, or boxed and forgotten in a basement bin, while others indicate heavy use, as cherished recipe book, favorite collection of poems, or crucial guide to concocting cocktails. Via an examination of collective collecting memory, this chapter explores the aesthetic dimensions of books – given, received, coveted, and inscribed, then rediscovered and displayed as cultural icons or nostalgic treasures.

We argue that the popular value of used goods – including books – contradicts the notion that ‘clean’ and ‘new’ determine the borders of consumer desire. We analyze examples from a proliferating personal library in some detail, describing and examining the material pleasures of these used texts, including ‘inscriptions’ such as previous owner’s marginalia – written annotations, highlights and notes left in the pages. Opening these thin volumes for the reader illuminates the gift book genre, the used book market, and the collectibility of particular books."

From the 16th to the 19th century, illuminated manuscripts were collected by the great printer-publisher Christophe Plantin and his Moretus successors and descendants. Ranging in date from the 9th to the mid-16th centuries, the manuscripts in the Museum Plantin-Moretus come from all over Europe, chiefly the Southern Netherlands and France with a significant representation of 15th-century Dutch illumination. More surprisingly, about a quarter of the collection comes from England: manuscripts of the 10th to 15th centuries that left the country with Catholic refugees. Alongside the acknowledged masterpieces and rarities, like the Bohemian Bible of 1402, are volumes that have remained virtually unknown, their aesthetic appeal and historical or textual interest often passing unnoticed in the absence of published reproductions. In this beautifully produced catalogue, each of the 102 volumes is illustrated in colour, with more extensive coverage of the 55 volumes with the most rewarding illumination. For the first time it is possible to gauge the extent and nature of this fascinating and under-explored collection, still housed in the building on the Vrijdagmarkt in Antwerp to which Plantin moved his famous sign of the Golden Compasses in 1576.

The catalogue is published by Peeters Publishers
http://www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=9254

What makes books “rare” is problematic and endlessly debatable. But we all know one of the main causes of books becoming “scarce.” People throw them away. In library parlance this process is politely called “weeding,” “deaccessioning,” “discarding,” “deselecting,” “withdrawing,” and the like. But to call a spade a spade, it is no more than dumping the books. They are left on carts in library vestibules to be taken for free or sold in grocery bags for 10¢ each, and thus are dispatched to uncertain fates and probably eventual demise. Only if we are lucky are they traded to other repositories or advertised on listservs as “Free to a Good Home.”

Profiling Michael Widener's illustrated law books collection at Yale Law School, and recent associated shows and events (at the Grolier Club in New York and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). Reflecting on the relations between law and the visual arts, from medieval/early modern times to the present.

Winner of the 2017-2018 Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize (University of Oxford).
How many times do we hear that the discovery of one book can change the direction of someone’s life? Well, quite often. Too often, to be true. But in my case, this somehow proved to be undeniable. In general, my essay shows how finding a strange-looking book of English nonsense poetry as a schoolgirl in a random bookshop in a provincial Russian city (that used to be closed to foreigners) can eventually lead one to researching nonsense poetry at Oxford. This book in a way was my Golden ticket that allowed me into the Book factory. As a professional translator, I started looking into the multiple problems of translating Lear’s nonsense into Russian without losing the magic, that is why now I have every possible edition of Lear’s works translated into my mother language, and their number keeps growing as the admirers of the ‘untranslatable’ do not give up that easy. But Lear’s nonsense represents an interesting literary and visual challenge for illustrators too. For this reason, in my Master’s dissertation I chose to analyse different editions of Lear’s nonsense works illustrated by various artists, both British and Russian, trying to pin down, among other issues, how a shift in meaning through translation affects the image and how it affects the reader’s perception. During this research, I managed to get first-hand interviews with some of Lear’s surviving illustrators, as well as some new unexpected editions to my collection. I am also planning to start a web project called “Lear Illustrated” which would gather all possible illustrated editions of Lear’s works.
Although the main focus of my nonsense collection is books by and about Lear (including original editions, various biographies, selected letters, translations, etc.), the significant part of it is devoted to what I call ‘nonsense in context’ as it includes nursery rhymes and various collections of limericks. Thus, both strands complement and enrich each other and reinforce that nonsense is a unique genre, which straddles the blurred line between folk culture, literature and art. As for my long-term aspirations, I am always working on building up my collection and at the moment I am particularly interested in nonsense alphabets, both by Lear and other authors. As we know, different alphabets have different number of letters (e.g. 26 in English against 33 in Russian), as well as different associations caused by those letters. It would be interesting to look at the translated versions of Lear’s numerous alphabets and see what transformations they undergo and how translators cope with extra letters.
Finally, I am interested in visual representation of Lear’s nonsense in modern children’s picture books and how nonsense is generally translated into modern culture and become one of its pillars. So, as you can see, the scope of my collection is quite diverse, and due to Lear’s prolific heritage and the renewed interest in nonsense literature there are almost no chances that I will ever own enough bookcases to contain it.

In the Arabic classic medicine a great number of manuscripts survives, partly preserved in Libraries all around the world, and partly sold by Auction Societies, like Christie's and its Department of Islamic Art in London. The author lists here some important manuscript which has been on sale in recent times.

Hernando Colón's activities as an explorer, courtier, cartographical consultant for the Hispanic monarchy, lexicographer, and pilot major at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville are of a piece with the rationale that went into the making of his library. As cartography sought to visualize and carve up the regions explored and colonized by European powers, Hernando's library was designed to collect and classify all available knowledge in a single universal project. He was also acquainted with an important group of scholars who included Peter Martyr, the first historian of the Americas, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who penned an early anthropological description of the New World (Historia General de las Indias, Seville, 1535). A personal friend of the Columbus family, Bartolomé de las Casas used the books and documents of Hernando's library for the elaboration of his Historia de las Indias. This paper intends to examine how the Biblioteca Hernandina and Hernando's networks contributed to shape the controversial historiography of Bartolomé de las Casas within the milieu that also saw the formulation of an early version of international law in the work of contemporaries like Francisco de Vitoria.

This text, the first comprehensive biography ever published of the Fourth Count of Monteagudo as a collector, shows him not only interested in art patronage, but also in bibliophily and the display of relics, as a faithful repetition on a smaller scale of Philip II’s collecting habits. Hurtado de Mendoza, member of one of the most highborn families of Spain, also belonged to Antonio Pérez’s party and was a counsellor of the Prudent King, who rewarded him with the Imperial Embassy and the presidency of the Council of Military Orders.

An extended review of Mark R. Godburn, Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016), a landmark study of the origin of dust jackets (or dust wrappers), and an excellent companion to G. Thomas Tanselle’s, more scholarly, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011).

Book review of:
Willa Z. Silverman: The New Bibliopolis. French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print 1880–1914. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2008, 2013. xvii + 312 oldal.
and:
Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875. Spoils of the Lumber Room. Eds. Paul Goldman–Simon Cooke. Farnham, Surrey, England és Burlington, VT, USA, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012. 224 oldal.

"In the twelfth century anthologies were the most common form in which short poems in Latin such as lyrics, epigrams, and occasional verse circulated in written form among the reading public. Since twelfth-century anthologies are not identical with their twentieth-century descendants, it would be wise to describe the genre in general before scrutinizing Houghton MS. Lat 300 in particular.

The English word anthology derives from the Greek anthologia, which means "flower-collection" or "bouquet." During the Byzantine era the Greek word became a metaphor for a collection of flowers of verse, that is, of small choice poems; the homonym anthologion was applied to hymnals. Although the Neo-Latin term florilegium is a calque of anthologia, the two are not synonyms. Whereas an anthology tends to be a conglomeration of complete texts, florilegium usually denotes wise sayings or memorable passages extracted from longer works. In the Middle Ages various metaphoric terms related to flares were used to describe such collections of extracts. Modem English uses the word excerpt, which sustains the floral imagery since it derives from a verb meaning "to pluck.""

Souvent détruites une fois leur lecture achevée, de nombreuses éditions «populaires» de la Renaissance italienne sont pourtant conservées dans les principales bibliothèques parisiennes : celle de l’Arsenal en détient un ensemble particulièrement riche, venant de la collection du Marquis de Paulmy (1722-1787), fondateur de cette même bibliothèque. En cherchant à donner un premier regard sur cet ensemble, cette contribution se penchera aussi sur les raisons de la présence en France de ces éditions, élément qui questionne aussi les caractéristiques du collectionnisme philo-italien d’ancien régime.

Expanded from published version (additional illustrations). Studies a unique copy of the pioneering monograph on Leonardo’s own personal library, and the fate of that very copy across the years, as it passed from scholar to scholar, all intent upon identifying the titles on Leonardo’s bookshelves.

Powerpoint of the paper presented on February 4th, 2013

La figure de l’abbé Leblond, né Gaspard Michel (1738-1809), s’était effacée de la mémoire collective jusqu’à ce qu’une exposition récente, organisée en 2009 pour le deux centième anniversaire de sa mort, ne le fasse redécouvrir aux yeux d’un plus large public . Cette exposition s’est tenue dans ce bâtiment, à la bibliothèque Mazarine dont il fut le bibliothécaire et dont le titre de l’exposition rappelle qu’il peut être tenu pour son second fondateur . De cet homme énigmatique dont on ne connaît aucun portrait nonobstant sa qualité d’académicien et les charges importantes qu’il occupa dans les commissions issues de la Révolution, le cabinet des médailles de Vienne possède dix lettres inédites à Joseph Hilarius Eckhel, le garde du médaillier viennois et l’auteur de la Doctrina numorum veterum, souvent qualifié pour ce haut-fait de « père de la numismatique moderne ». Celles-ci jettent un éclairage nouveau sur l’homme en même temps qu’elle recèle d’importantes informations pour l’histoire de l’étude des monnaies.