The Mellon Cataloging Project and Five Centuries of Book Ownership (original) (raw)
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Printed catalogues of booksellers as a source for the history of the book trade
Printed advertisements and lists of books for sales were used by publishers and booksellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively to promote and increase the sale of books in distant markets. This article proposes an overall interpretation of the uses of these catalogues in the trade in books, the purposes they were designed to fulfil, and the reading public(s) they aimed to reach. Specific attention is paid to the book prices which are found in about 30% of the surviving printed catalogues. These represent a reliable testimony to the pricing policies some of the most important publishing firms, and the segments of the market they intended to serve. The catalogues are therefore among the main sources for our understanding of the mechanisms of the early modern book trade and its economic structure. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Modern Philology, 2016
There is a saying among scholar-librarians that goes something like this: all manuscripts are copies, and all printed books are unique. 1 In the past, such bibliographical witticism served to keep newcomers to the field of rare books and manuscripts on their toes. Today, such truths may not be selfevident. Manuscripts seem to promise greater research value because of their apparent uniqueness, and they continue to command high sale prices in the marketplace, even while the cost of many antiquarian books continues to fall. Curators of special collections, meanwhile, are increasingly asked to justify purchases of printed materials that may seem unnecessary, redundant, or even burdensome when electronic surrogates are readily available via digital libraries such as Google Books. Some commentators treat the discarding of physical books as a fait accompli: "What are we going to do with all that space that was once devoted to storage in the form of stacks?" 2 It is here that David McKitterick has much to teach us. Written as a companion to his Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), Old Books, New Technologies explores what McKitterick calls the "myth of the uniformity of print" (42). We learn about the vexed historical role that printed books play as unique, physical artifacts that, more frequently than not, are presented as identical copies. Yet it is only by analyzing multiple wit-For permission to reuse, please contact
Books from the Bookshelves 1-1500
Book Shelves, Day by Day This is a list of the books on my bookshelves in Brisbane and Berlin. I have listed a book a day on Facebook with a photo of the book and sometimes the title page and inscriptions etc. I've done this because my shelves have become very jumbled with various toing and froings, and I'd thought it might help me master what I actually own and where. And I hoped by FB friends, or at anyrate some of them, might get something out of this steady drip of book titles, covers and remarks. I have posted it here as much for my own sake (so I know what books I have actually listed) as for any readers. But there may be someone out there who would enjoy dipping into this. November 2017 Book 1: John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. (1757) To amuse myself as well as to keep a record I have decided to post a photo of a book a day in the (unsorted) order that my books are currently shelved in our apartments in Brisbane and Berlin. And a little comment on the book. So all kinds of books. Hope this isnt too annoying. Right now we are in Brisbane, so here goes with one the first books ever of what will become social critique. Book 2: John Gay, Fables (1793). Note the publisher, John Stockdale, who was not especially reputable and dealt sometimes with the radical underground, but with this book is chancing a luxury commodity in a genre popular in the 1790s, and roping William Blake into the project... Book 3. Richard Bentley's strange, interventionist 1732 edition of Paradise Lost published by a "congeries" of booksellers headed up by the famous Tonson. As the titlepage suggests, the book's "newness" was commercially motivated. And this was not the first time that the Tonson firm had made commercial leaps off Milton's back.... Book 4. Hawksworth's 1768 translation of Fénelon's Telemachus, one of several such translations. A luxury subscription edition of the century's most popular French book (and Rousseau's favorite) which fictionalizes a populist absolutist political theory. Translated by the opportunist John Hawksworth and dedicated to the Earl of Shelburne, patron of Bentham, Priestley, Horne Tooke, Richard Price et al., some of whom would form the intellectual backbone of the radical "new Whigs" after 1789. It would be interesting to do an analysis of the subscribers. But Smollett's translation of Telemachus is better I suspect. Book 5: second edition (1751) of John Brown's Essays on [Shaftesbury's] Characteristics. I have a theory that this book does more to explain how the 18thc began with Dryden and ended with Coleridge than just about any other....That said, it is hardly a household name, even among the experts.... December 2017 Book 6: a tatty copy of the 2nd edition (1731) of Matthew Tindal's (anonymously published) Christianity as Old as Creation, arguably the most influential of all the English deist texts. English deism remains condescended to by intellectual historians and theorists of secularism alike, I dont know why. This book, by an Anglican lawyer and don, pretty much ushers in what will become enlightened humanism, i.e. the notion that history is the progress towards human perfection.