WHEN TOPLESSNESS WAS RELEVANT (Or; Early Feminist Fashions)

J. Lo's got ancestors.

Even Wikipedia will tell you “The French have traditionally been relaxed with nudity and toplessness in entertainment”. And while it’s a statement that seems more instinctual than sourced, I recently came across a rare and strange little book that has quite a lot to add to the colourful (or better yet, pale and pasty) history of topless women.

It’s a book roughly translated to “Cancer, Or Covering the Breasts” published in 1635, written by a canon of Theology from Cambrai named Jean Polman (whose only other claim to fame, a book called the Breviarium Theologicum (1650), was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books).

The “Cancer” in the title tips you off that this isn’t just your typical condemnation of female nudity. It’s a nitty gritty portrayal of nudity as disease. Polman spends the better part of the book attacking exposed breasts and nipples (“du seine et des tetins” are now two new French words in my limited vocabulary, repeated feverishly and to almost poetic proportions per paragraph). He’s blunt: from the very first paragraph he argues that cancer in women is most likely to be breast cancer, and that breast cancer is caused by exposing the breasts to the air, that the air just “clings to the udders”. And as David Kunzle writes in Fashion and Fetishism: “With aid of repeated puns on the word for cancer (chancre) and the cut-out of a dress-neck (echancrure), he equates the horrible…cancer of the flesh with…the cancer of fashionable nudity”.

STOP AMERICAN CENSORSHIP

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I’ve censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet–a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/10182/uncensor

—

What is most difficult when writing on censorship is that it includes just about everything. It is rarely anything less than a catch-all term. It casts its shadow over all branches of knowledge, from astronomy to zoology, with broad human rights implications in between. It a time-tested companion of power, be it among the Catholic Church, royals, politicians, or businessmen.

At its most infamous, censorship has placed a bull’s-eye on the most important historical advances we have made: Copernicus, Kepler, or Galileo’s writings on the sun-centered universe. It has also called attention to some of the worst trespasses against individual rights: why else surpress descriptions of hard labor in the Soviet Union as depicted by the Gulag Archipelago? Or the overwhelming racism Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man? Or the horrors of working standards and hygeine in the meatpacking industry depicted in Sinclair’s The Jungle? Or presented without comment: Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?

This was evident even 500 years ago.

And no matter where ideas are suppressed the consequences ranged far beyond national boundaries and continental boundaries, then as now.

The earliest books to be burned by the Catholic Church (in 1491) were a) a legal treatise aimed at restricting the power of the Pope, and b) a work on the dignity of man, using that dignity as the basis to argue for progress in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and all fields of knowledge. Was too much power in the hands of too few a bad idea after all? You’re getting warmer. Were individuals instilled with the free agency that entitled them to the secrets of the universe? Too hot.

At its best, censorship takes on many forms that in turn give rise to many more circumventions:

During this 16th century the suppression of books became more systematic through the passing of laws. In the Catholic Church, books meant to be destroyed in their entirety were placed on Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum), or the Index of Expurgated Books, where books with only partial transgressions were meant to be edited at publication, or by readers afterward. But policing the European publishing industry in this way was full of uncertainties. One group’s hit-list could be the bestseller list of another, particularly between Catholics and Protestants, as was the case with Thomas James’s, first librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian. In 1627 he published an “Index of Books Prohibited by the Pope in Use at the Bodleian Library” – it contains not only a general catalogue of anti-papist and prohibited books, but a finding aid for all banned books that can be found in the library.

On the home front, readers charged with editing or erasing individual sections of their own books responded in many different ways, if they bothered at all. Sometimes works were fully cut or blotted out, other times crossed out and fully legible, or covered with an easily detachable strip of paper that halfheartedly warned “prohibito”. Sometimes, when pages were left blank to mark the absence of excised text, readers filled in what was missing, as they had with Petrarch’s poetry. His “Babylonian Sonnets”, critical of the decadence of the Papal Courts at Avignon and Rome (entitled “Flames from Heaven”,  “Greedy Babylon”, and “Font of Sorrow”) were banned by Pope Clement VIII in 1595.  Poems were ordered to be erased in all prior editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, but the results vary:

A copy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Petrarch at Yale.

There have been efforts across history to preserve, at least, the names of what we have lost: I can read Sappho’s fragments as a reminder of how much we have lost of her writing, because it is recorded that Savonarola destroyed all manuscript copies of her poems in Florence, 1498. Conrad Gesner in his 1545 Bibliotheca Universalis preserved lists of books and manuscripts he knew had been destroyed in the 1527 destruction of the library at Buda in the Kingdom of Hungary when the Ottoman Turks under the lead of Suleiman the Magnificant (pictured left).

We can also produce guerilla editions to combat the books taken away, for instance Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The first edition in 1651 was so scandalous and sought-after, that to both avoid breaking the law and supply a very demanding market, later re-prints (which had been forbidden) fake the year 1651 on their title page. The penalty for being caught, as John Redmayne found out on 28 September 1670 when his printing shop was raided, was that his stock was seized and his machinery “taken downe and demolished”. Other editions under the same  guise were successfuly printed in Holland and smuggled into London. The risk was worth the profit.

Notice I am making a distinction between guerilla editions and pirated editions: this is not about intellectual property, I’m just talking in-your-face gagging, banning, tearing, burning.

The Internet is more recently premier real estate for representing various survivors across history (i.e. http://www.banned-books.org.uk/ and http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html to post only a few), and the Index on Censorship works on an international basis to publicize breaches of the freedom of expression. It’s also one of the best ways of circumventing suppression while still reaching wider audiences.

But the Internet is also more recently a target for censorship. And this brings us to now, to the United States, and a bill in the House that’s close to being passed called SOPA “Stop Online Piracy Act” (and its equivalent in the Senate, PIPA or “Protect Intellectual Property Act “). And despite the name of the Campaign to Fight it, Stop American Censorship, the damage it does will extend much further. Exponentially more than publishing, which has always been an international trade, the concentrated power over information, and business, that it would make possible is far-reaching not only in geography but in time. As an article form Ars Technica reports:

The House bill is shockingly sympathetic to a narrow subsection of business interests. For instance, buried deep in the back of the >70-page document is a requirement that the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator prepare a study for Congress. That study should analyze “notorious foreign infringers” and attempt to quantify the “significant harm inflicted by notorious foreign infringers.” (Talk about assuming your conclusions before you start.)

The report, which is specifically charged to give weight to the views of content owners, requests a set of specific policy recommendations that might “encourage foreign businesses to adopt industry norms to promote the protection of intellectual property globally.” Should the bill pass, the US government would be explicitly charged with promoting private “industry norms”—not actual laws or treaties—around the world.

The difficulty with the language of SOPA is that it uses the language of intellectual property and even parasitism (in the E-PARASITE Act) as blanket terms for powers that also extend to suppression of non-pirated material, for instance in targeting websites like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Youtube is at stake. So is Ubu Web, a repositories of poetry. Heck, this website is probably at risk as well. Rather than effectively combating piracy, SOPA singles out some intellectual property as more important than others.

I wonder whose?

For the majority of the bill’s proponents who prefer “small government” and letting the markets self-regulate, SOPA is an about-face. Why the contradiction? My money is on money – money that lobbyists are able to allocate to members of the House and the Senate. It may not be a coincidence that Lawrence Lessig’s work on Free Culture has taken a back seat to his latest book, Republic, Lost (it may also not be a coincidence that Lessig has denounced SOPA and PIPA, but channelling his energy elsewhere these days).

Republic Lost investigates systematic corruption of Government not through outright bribery (which is illegal), but through dependence on campaign funds provided by interested groups. Not quid pro quo so much as Fundraising Party pro quo. Lessig makes several points in his really excellent (and scary) book.  First, bills which come before the House are immensely well-funded. The industries (the financial and banking at the helm) which pay lobbyists to advocate for their causes determine which issues are brought to a politician’s attention. It’s not that they force out discussion of other issues, its that those other issues won’t even make it onto the radar of the session’s agenda to being with. And once they are, the same  interests which paid their way to the front of the room continue to pay lobbyists to keep congressmen informed as the issue moves through the stages of passing. You can see the cycle we’re locked into here. Secondly, it has historically been in the interest of enterprises which benefit from deregulation to push for regulations that keep them at the top. As I have mentioned in other contexts, the internet is part of the private sector. It’s a huge moneymaker that’s still unpredictable – there is much to gain by regulating its development from the top, especially for copyright holding companies of film, music, etc. whose property has been dramatically changed by the digital age.

This struggle contributes to a modern definition of “censorship” which, for all its complexity, will only ever be articulated in the old ways. The only added complexity in this case is that the boundaries have become harder to parse between protecting intellectual property and harmful policing (in ways that are difficult to predict but are not limited to ruining businesses all the way up to ruining all of the internet!). Above the cases of censorship throughout history I offered are clear cases of institutional disapproval for ideas that often relied upon belief in protecting ideas as justifications. That’s the same, misleading nature of SOPA and PIPA. There are only so many ways to shut someone up. Book burning is one, printing house raids are even faster and cleaner, and now domain blocking and/or deleting are the latest technologies in efficient suppression.

UPDATE: Via Boing Boing, Everybody Who’s Anybody Hates SOPA: Yahoo Google et al. It’s Silicon Valley v. all of the hugely wealthy Copyright holders in Hollywood, the Music Industry, etc.

INTRODUCING: THE UNIVERSAL SHORT TITLE CATALOGUE

This past 22-23 November marked the launch and celebratory conference of the latest database resource for scholars and book collectors of the 15th-16th century: The USTC, or Universal Short Title Catalogue. The ‘universal’ appeal we’re talking here is very Western: “all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century” as they put it on their website.

Job Koelewijn‘s Mobius bookshelf

But the ‘universal’ also means access in a truer sense of the word. It is a worry that the preservation of cultural heritage is a little too confined within institutions of higher education, but this database is free and open to the public, has done well to link with digital copies of texts where possible, which really gives face to a name in a way that would appeal to anyone (an area that will only expand), and in the meantime, the opening party was widely attended: Italian, French, and German consulates were all there and yes, even the Edinburgh Renaissance Band provided the music and did it in period costume. To add to the excitement, the launch dovetails with news that the project, based at St. Andrews, has received funding to expand into the 17th century.

For anyone that couldn’t attend, but would have liked to, I’ve tried to make sense of my notes here:

WITCH-HUNTING THEN AND NOW

Happy HalloWEEK! Appropriate to the time of year, books about Witchcraft were among the most popular when the printing press was in its infancy of invention and development (that is, before 1500, when books are known as ‘incunabula’ coming from ‘cuna’, the Latin word for cradle).

The image above comes from the first illustrated book to be printed on Witchcraft, Ulrich Molitor’s De Lamiis of 1489. The three women are witches, although granted they are a far cry from the Sanderson Sisters. There’s also some distance between this opening image and the title of the work, where the word for ‘Witch’ refers to Lamia, the mythological Queen of Libya who turned into a demon with an insatiable hunger for children. It doesn’t even come close to other outrageously entertaining depictions of that creature. This one comes from Topsell’s translation of Gesner’s Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, which includes as many fantastical creatures as it does cats, goats, and wolves:

'The Witches' Sabbath' (1510) by Hans Baldung Grien - apprentice to Durer.

The point of the image of the three women, iconic in its time since the book was popular enough to reach half a dozen editions before 1500, is that any woman could be a witch. None of the lore was dropped of course: witches were still identified by how many children they had devoured, how many men they had poisoned, how many thunder storms they had cooked up, and how many times they had slept with the devil, only rather than portray pure evil as a wet hot scaly mess, the power of this widely circulated book is that the face it gave to the name was, well, a few grannies sitting around a table having a cup of tea. Maybe one of them is a housewife. Each of them could be anyone.

ROWLAND VAUGHAN’S WEIRD WATER-WORKES: A GUIDE TO SOLVING UNEMPLOYMENT

The other day I successfully bid at auction on this seemingly unwanted book, Rowland Vaughan’s Most Approved and Long Experienced Water-Workes (London: George Eld., 1610) not only because it has the distinction of being the first book in English about Crop Irrigation, but because when I turned to the last page of the work I found this:

It seemed odd to me that at the end of a practical treatise on a uniquely boring area of husbandry there would be a blank promissory note, that is, a note that in theory enables the reader to lend money to the author alone, without interest and to be paid back within five years. Not your average happily-ever-after or colophon – moreover as the note passes without explicit mention at the beginning or end of the book, and references to the book (STC 24603) lists that the note does not occur in every copy. Why would Vaughan take up the space to ask you to lend him money, confident that the space is worth taking up, and confident that he can pay you back?

In times like this it helps to start reading the book, I guess. The first 20 or so pages contain various poems about what an all-around great guy the author is. The first, by Vaughan’s cousin John Davies (“A Panegyricke”) didn’t answer my question about the promissory note, but did change my opinion on how entertaining water works could be, and how good Vaughan is in the “royall TRENCH”

This puts the Leaze in Sleaze.

The poem continues to compare Vaughan to King David, King Arthur, God himself, and a variety of pagan deities; in the next poem, Robert Corbet turns the trench into a hive, and Vaughan into that time-honored workaholic, the bee. Each poem paraphrases the story of Vaughan’s discovery of the new technology (told by the author himself later in the book). Once upon a time, he noticed the greener grass on the one section of his property that well-watered because of a molehill that let water flow freely into the small valley below which it created. He spent the next 20 years trying to copy from his observation. The book, these opening poems promise, will include a detailed description of this as well as instructions as to the the season and length of time to “drowne the Grounds”, the type of trenches to be dug depending on the terrain, and other handy tips, including how to keep moles out of the waterworks. And Vaughan delivers.

The exuberant praise for Vaughan and his irrigation system is no less exuberant than the author’s own introduction to the Earl of Pembroke, which takes up half of the volume, and here is where the promissory note is given the full force of its impact. It’s not just water works Vaughan needs to borrow money to fund, but instead he wants to build an entirely new society based upon his advances in crop irrigation, a new social order that will eliminate unemployment and rejuvenate his local economy: he wants to “raise a golden world…in the Golden-Vale of Herefordshire” (check out the side-note below “The richest Country breeds the idlest (therefore the poorest) people)”

In the Herefordshire of the early 17th century there are many in need, by Vaughan’s count there are five hundred out of a job within a mile and a half from his house in all directions. The poverty stems from unemployment, or an employment cycle that lasts three months and entails so much traveling that it results in a loss of income rather than a gain, the equivalent of paying cheap rent so far out of Central London that your travel fair in pounds per annum & hours lost to the commute leaves you exhausted, and what’s more, prevents you from saving any money at all. “There is not one amongst ten that hath five shillings to buy a Bale of Flaxe” to weave into linen, without several days worth of travel and wasted time.

In other words, if you give me money, I can make the system that worked for me work for everyone!

In controlling the flow of water, Vaughan controls his crop yield as well as the mill that grinds it into profitable corn, such that he can build offices and rooms to house all of his workers and “meckanicals”. Building from this model, “Two thousand imploide in the under-business of the Common-wealth” will be made possible when corn from the Mill is used both to feed laborers but also in trade for other goods to employ other tradesman: leather for tanners and shoemakers, flax and pelts for clothiers and glovers, etc. Each trade will have one master in charge of its administration, and as many apprentices as that master sees fit. “A famous preacher shall be maintained” to teach children and give sermons. There will be a Church but no seminaries or monasteries, an almshouse for the elderly and infirm.

The promissory note is all but mentioned explicitly, as Vaughan has no problem asking for money from his readers, particularly those from the upper tiers of society, the rich to pay for the poor (they are probably even more than the 99%). “I cannot see how mony can be wanting, I have so many honourable friends…yet I thank God they cannot say I want honorable friends, such as the Lord Bishops,  your Lordships with others, which may lend me money (if please you and them) I will not for a million anger any of you, to make a motion to borrow money: if lendings come in out of your honourable dispositions…its a better course (tenne to one)  then to take money to usury…”

As an added enticement, Vaughan will keep at his own expense “a dining-roome to entertaine a world of worthy benevolent Contributors: The Table perpetually furnished to intertaine forty of those Contributers dayly in expectancy”. The room will be “wainscoted, and fairly hang’d with Arras” and it will have venison pasties and as many other meats as possible whenever they are available. If only Kickstarter campaigns promised that!

The word Utopia is never mentioned, even though it might be coming to your mind as it does to mine. But the work is distinctly unscholarly and estranged from the genre: “I have not observed a precise scholler-like Decorum: for Mars his University…affoords no rules of speaking in Print”, Vaughan writes: he was formerly a soldier, and the University of Mars the god of war seems to me as something like getting a Ph.D at the School of Hard Knocks. The only references made are to the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He doesn’t imagine a chance to start over on a far off island, but instead borders Wales and answers to Parliament, and he doesn’t engage with More, Campanella, or even Bacon, he just wants a job and lots of meat for him and his neighbors. It’s not a Utopia because of being a “nowhere”, as the etymology of that word leads us, it’s in his own back yard.

The way he accomplishes this vision through local poets, a vibrant letter to the equivalent of his local representatives (nobles who had a say in Parliament) , and serious innovation: it is a shame this list of accomplishments, as well as the material addition of the promissory note to make good on his ideas, falls far afield of the usual templates of Early English Literature. It is a grass-roots stab at social policy, more than political philosophy, with a very reasonable approach to jump-starting local growth with liquid assets: give jobs and salaries to those who will immediately put that money into their subsistence. Unlike the usual praise and flattery confined to the limits of dedicatory addresses, Vaughan gives his readers the chance to actually make good on their support for his new social order with a peculiar boldness that I have not found in other treatises on husbandry, Utopia, or any other book of the period. The ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) lists a book published over a hundred years later in 1791 that includes a promissory note, only this note is to fund the publication itself, not a comprehensive view of society.

Has this entry become relevant to contemporary politics yet? Is cataloguing this book political? Is it possible that thinking critically about obscure texts from the distant past has something to say to us now? That history’s bidding is more than a return to more bookishness? I hope so, but I also thought it would be cool to write about this so something more substantial would come up when you google “Rowland Vaughan” or “Crop Irrigation”.

PROPAGANDA FIDE PRESS & THE FIRST GEORGIAN TYPE

Just a little 32-page curiosity for your Tuesday: the Alphabetum Ibericum sive Georgianium (Rome; Propaganda Fide, 1629. BM STC Georgian. CLC R673.), aka the first printed book in Georgian. The text begins with the thirty-six letters of the Iberian or Georgian alphabet, presented in four columns – formation, name (in both alphabets) and force.  Some letters have additional italic comments to the side, referring to and giving the same phoneme in other languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Greek, entailing the use of type in 5 completely different alphabets on a single page.  The second section explains the numerous ligatures when Georgian letters are combined.   Finally, the book practices what it preaches and vice versa with settings of The Lord’s Prayer, Hail  Mary, Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, Corporal Works of Mercy, The Seven Sacraments, The Ten Commandments, concluding with the Canticle of the Virgin Mary.

It’s also the first work to be published by the Propaganda Fide Press, or Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, (an offshoot of Tipografia Vaticana) founded as a Counter-Reformatory tactic to aid the spread of Catholicism among missionaries. Incidentally, it was the first western press to cast and print in Middle and Far Eastern languages, making it also the first to work on a truly international scale.

Before it was an official department of Vatican in 1622 by Pope Gregory XIII, it was merely a collection of cardinals charged with fulfilling the practical needs of various missions in America, Africa, and the East. Printing was first and foremost among these needs – but you’ll notice on the title page above that this first work was not issued until 1629. That’s due to a good seven years of hiccups made possible by the deaths of Gregory XIII and after Gregory XV. Nevertheless, in 1626 King Teimuraz I of a depressed and cut-off Georgia sent Nicephorus Irbach as his ambassador to Rome to visit the Pope Urban VIII, and Irbach was enlisted to instruct monks in his native language. His arrival coincided with the foundation of the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome (1627), dedicated exclusively to the uses of the Propaganda Fide. The jurisdiction of “Propaganda” was at that time any non-Catholic country – so they had their work cut out for them – and Urbaniana was from the beginning a powerhouse of language instruction for the future missionaries of the 17th century (a purpose it fulfills to this day). Irbach oversaw the casting of the first Georgian type, and according to an essay on Georgian language and literature funded by NATO, this short grammar and prayer book was the first of three printed that year:

1. “Iberian or Georgian-Alphabet with Prayers”, Rome, 1629 (Alphabetum Ibericum, sive georgianum, cum Oratione Dominicali. Romae, Typis Sac. Congr. de Propag. Fide, MDCXXIX).

2. “Georgian and Italian Dictionary”, Rome, 1629 (Dittionario Georgiano e Italiano, composto da Stefano Paolini con l’aiuto del M.R.PD. Niceforo Irbachi Georgiano, Monaco di S. Basilio… In Roma, Nella Stampa della Sagra Congr. de Propag. Fide, (I)DCXXIX).

3. “Litaniae Beatae Mariae Virginis Lauretanae (Prayer of Virgin Mary of Laureto, translated from the Latin into Georgian by Nicephorus Irbach). Rome, 1629.

In a lapsed follow-up, the first Georgian grammar was not printed until ’43 by the same press. Books were not printed in Georgia until 1709, at Tbilisi, and there was scarcely a study of National history or literature in Europe until the 1790s. Wouldn’t it be neat and really difficult to draw a timeline mapping national languages, when they were typecast, in what print frequencies, and represented by what genres, from literature to scholarship?

SCHOLARSHIP AND THE BOOK TRADE: THE CATALOGUES OF E. P. GOLDSCHMIDT

If visions of the tweed-clad ranks of booksellers, one part drowsy and three parts out-of-touch, are your ideal, or if a view of bookselling as a neatly pressed 9 to 5 job gives you peace of mind, you may not have heard of Ernst Philip Goldschmidt.

Sure, Goldschmidt published works and lectures are still useful today: The First Cambridge Press in its European Setting,The Printed Book of the Renaissance, Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings, and his favorite, Mediaeval Texts and their First Appearance in Print. But he accomplished this during rockstar hours, aka all night, never waking up before 11:30 save for auctions at Sotheby’s (he found it extremely difficult to be on time), & spending most of his late afternoons lunching at Brown’s Hotel (waiters put screens around his table if he was in a bad mood), and staying up all night with his friends and his research. He lived on black coffee. He smoked a minimum of 40 cigarettes while handling the incunabula, fine bindings, and other treasures among the early printed books and manuscripts he specialized in. Once, when trying to determine the provenance of a book up for auction, a colleague merely sniffed the pages. The scent of tobacco that saturated the book meant it had surely belonged to E.P. Goldschmidt, and he favored a peculiar Turkish blend.

Goldschmidt did whatever he wanted probably because he was raised to feel he could: the scion of a major Dutch banking family, connected with most of the major banking families throughout Europe, he was reputed to be the richest undergraduate at Cambridge while there from 1905-9. I write all this by way of saying: if you win the E. P. Goldschmidt fellowship at Rare Book School, you have a great responsibility to yourself and E. P. to infuse your study of books with some high class badassery.

Although his interest in old books dates from his time at Trinity College (upon graduation he privately issued a catalogue of his favorite books to his friends), his first major step into the book trade was in 1917. One day while passing the firm Gilhofer & Ranschburg in his native Vienna, he noticed in their window books on display he had specifically requested, for sale. He went inside to complain. If you are not satisfied with our level customer service, he was told, you are more than welcome to try and run the business yourself. As the story goes, he did, becoming co-owner that year.

In 1923 he moved to 45 Old Bond Street, London to set up E.P. Goldschmidt & Co. Ltd. Not forgetting his roots, the price-code he kept for his stock was the same as Gilhofer & Ranschburg: REPUTAZION. And his reputation remained intact: “There has been no shrewder dealer in the business in our time”, John Carter (of ABCs of Book Collecting fame) wrote in his personal note on the death of his friend. Not only that, but

There have been scholars before now who have dabbled in bookselling. There have been, and are, booksellers who are also scholars. But I do not recall, in the long and honourable history of the book trade, any man since Giovanni Aurispa…. who, being by nature, aptitude, and avocation a scholar, embraced the antiquarian trade as his means of livelihood and used it as a platform from which to deploy his scholarship. (John Carter ‘E.P. Goldschmidt: A Personal Note’, Antiquarian Bookman, 10 April 1954)

More important than the book-length publications put out by Cambridge University Press, however, what made Goldschmidt a great scholar-bookseller were the catalogues of stock he produced. In our reference collection, we happen to have a few, the earliest of which (9) I have decided post on .pdf form here to make my point as to its sheer readability and usefulness as a work of entertainment AND reference.

Some people chain-smoke in front of a typewriter long enough to write On the Road, and others produce scholarship on no less than thousands of books, paying attention (in many instances) for the first time to works of major historical significance. For instance in no. 86 Goldschmidt presents a 3 page description of “AN UNRECORDED AMERICANUM OF 1506″: Johannes Glogoviensis’s Introductorium compendiosum in Tractatum Spere Materialis (Cracow: Haller, 1506). The book is a wealth of information about 367 different books, ranging from incunabula to Americana, medicine, botany, and to books of art and reference. It includes fold-out plates of relevant images: maps of the New World, and an Anatomical fugitive sheet. It seems a shame that this kind of work slips from notice so easily in comparison to other books who entered this world in a similar form of many-typed slips, but there’s the politics of the canon for you. Although the large scale on which it remains unnoticed by scholars, librarians, and other booksellers, is a little harder for me to understand. Of course, there is the age-old dilemma of space. As A. N. L. Munby wrote:

Current booksellers’ catalogues present a grave problem. space forbids that they should all be retained, yet it is a sad wrench to part with them. No ephemeral literature approaches them in fascination. … Only when a mountainous accumulation of catalogues demands drastic action can I bring myself to throw a proportion of them away. Then, perhaps once in three years, there is a gigantic sorting; some are earmarked for permanent retention as works of reference; the rest are reluctantly destroyed after certain material such as plates of bindings and manuscripts has been cut out and transferred to a growing series of folio scrap books, ‘cutting up books to make other books’ as an unsympathetic friend once described it.

The excerpt is quoted in Henry Woodhuysen’s chapter on Catalogues in Out of Print and into Profit (pp 123 – 156). Woodhuysen goes on to give an appraisal, based on his own extensive collection and research, of what catalogues in the book trade have to offer (the only longer treatment of the subject I have found is David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook): “Catalogues add value to books, by placing them in context with books of a similar or related kind, their status is enhanced, new subjects for collection are suggested and a spirit of competiton between collectors is promoted.” He charts the ways in which catalogues have shaped interests and scholarship: collections offered of Alexander Pope and other minor poets and plays literally opened up the 18th century for scholars, and single-author catalogues that emphasized manuscript materials, for better and for worse, made the literary establishment’s obsession with the author (and consequently his/her ‘death’) possible. Maggs Bros. in particular issued once-unconventional catalogues that by this point will seem old hat: the first aeronautics catalogue in 1920, alchemy in 1921, Judaica and Hebraica in 1922, and association and presentation copies in 1923 among others. In a more clear-cut sales pitch, they issued in 1924 and again in 1941 a catalogue of incunabula of which “there was no copy in libraries of the United States”. Catalogues sometims included scholarly essays and introductions by famous scholars and writers, or were laid out by some of the major designers of the day: for instance Goldschmidt’s catalogue 106, the year before his death, was the work of Jan Tschichold – whose genius you otherwise may recognize from Penguin and Pelican books of the same era.

Almost as long as there has been a book trade there have been sales catalogues. Konrad Gesner drew from the sales catalogues of the major publishing houses – Aldus (reproduced in Renouard’s bibliography), Froben, etc. during the compilation of the first universal short title catalogue, his Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). And as Woodhuysen can add, “Printed catalogues containing second hand books, imported from the Continent, for sale in England have survived from the 1630s; by the beginning of the next century they were quite common and from about 1730 they started to list books with their prices.” Richard Sharpe has also written an essay on the relative uselessness of these catalogues as printed by the Sheldonian Theatre in the late 17th century under John Fell – he has scrupulously compiled a bibliography of these from the archives, including those of Anthony Wood and John Bagford. The modern catalogue is often meticulously researched (e.g. our Catalogue 59) and sometimes plays a role in determining those works of reference that are used beyond the trade: the secret-seeming language of ‘Adams’, ‘Renouard’, ‘ESTC’ required of a pre-1600 continental book, an Aldine, or an early English Book, are standards of reference that come from our practice of checking stock against documented complete copies – they are practices which scholars and institutions use as well.

Catalogues are hard to collect, and to catalogue: they’re issued inconsistently but in huge numbers by a fluctuating dramatis personae of firms, sometimes in varying formats and without very much information about the time of their publication, there is no standard of appearance, contents, or design. The few collections that exist are incomplete, the Munby Collection at Cambridge, the British Library and Oxford have selections on one side of the ocean, and the Groiler Club and the Folger have a few on the other. Most institutions don’t have the space or the time. The smartest and most exciting answer to this problem has come form Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library: we were very excited when the librarian there, Mike Widener, e-mailed us one day to ask if he could copy and paste our descriptions with their appropriate books on the library’s online catalogue. It would be nice to see other institutions follow suit. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing my very best impersonation of E. P. Goldschmidt and maybe one day will have my cataloguing work reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, too.

As networks of catalogues of the book trade across the centuries are able to tell us all about the economics that propel what we value as cultural heritage, when we begin to value it that way, why, and when that changes, there is a sense that we have a lot to lose in overlooking this strange category of ephemeral scholarship. The main reason for neglect must relate to the bottom-line: as they are meant to sell books, they have been grouped with like categories of sales advertisements. Unfortunately, L.L. Bean catalogues, each object usually entails hours of synthesizing information from bibliographies, works of history and scholarship, books and essays, even personal accounts, past and present. But as it is through these catalogues that the secret history of many an intellectual trend can be traced, hopefully more attention will be paid to them in the future.

Anyone collect catalogues? Or have any neat stories about the books you’ve found in catalogues? Goldschmidt famously said that his favorite client would sent orders by postcard upon receipt of his catalogue in some faraway corner of the world. Agree or disagree?