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Abstract
Despite the number of studies which set out to reconstruct an individual’s library, critical reviews of the methodology of library reconstruction seem to be lacking within the discourse of library history. So, the question arises, ‘How do you reconstruct a historic, private library?’ This article examines the practical ‘how to’ of library reconstruction with a view to offering guidance to librarians and, particularly, to students and new researchers who have encountered the remnants of, or clues to, ‘lost’ libraries and wondered where to go from there. As such, the article reviews the approaches used in previous reconstructions and considers whether these might be distilled into a reconstruction checklist which may guide the researcher as to actions to take and issues to consider when embarking on their reconstruction project.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Dr Julie Mathias for reading an earlier incarnation of this article.
Notes
1 Library reconstruction writings take many forms and may concern: lost (e.g. David Arans, “A Note on the Lost Library of the Moscow Tsars,” The Journal of Library History 18, no. 3 (1983): 304–16), obscured (e.g. Alison Walker, “Lost in Plain Sight: Rediscovering the Library of Sir Hans Sloane,” in Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe, edited by Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 414–38), plundered (e.g. Sam van Schaik, “The Tibetan Dunhuang Manuscripts in China,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65, no. 1 (2002): 129–39; Robert G. Waite, “Returning Jewish Cultural Property: The Handling of books Looted by the Nazis in the American Zone of Occupation, 1945 to 1952,” Libraries & Culture, 37, no. 3 (2002): 213–28), or destroyed collections (e.g. András Riedlmayer, “Libraries are Not for Burning: International Librarianship and the Recovery of the Destroyed Heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Art Libraries Journal 21, no. 2 (1996): 19–23). Reconstructions may undertake to physically reconstitute collections, for instance: The John Rylands Library, “Steps towards the Reconstruction of the Library of the University of Louvain,” The John Rylands Library Bulletin (n.d.): 251–74; Linda K. Tesar, “Forensic Bibliography: Reconstructing the Library of George Wythe,” Law Library Journal 105, no. 1 (2013): 57–78.
2 “[V]irtual reconstruction” is used, for instance, by: Graham Jefcoate, “Mr Cavendish’s Librarian: Charles Heydinger and the Library of Henry Cavendish, 1783–1801,” Library & Information History 32, no. 1–2 (2016): 58–71; William Whobrey, “The Carthusian Library at Buxheim: A Virtual Reconstruction,” in Old Books, New Learning: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Books at Yale, edited by Robert Gary Babcock and Lee Patterson (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2001), 67–79. “[I]ntellectual reconstruction” is favoured by Svetlana Kochkina, “Listening to the Dead with our Eyes: François Olivier-Martin’s Library, a Mirror Image of a Legal Historian,” Library & Information History 32, no. 3 (2016): 203–18, while “bibliographical reconstruction” is the term adopted by Maria Teresa Biagetti, “Dispersed Collections of Scientific Books: The Case of the Private Library of Federico Cesi (1585–1630),” in Lost Books, edited by Bruni and Pettegree, 386–99.
3 The precedence for guidance works in the area of bibliographical methods is of long standing (Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)). Recent primers take a broader view of bibliography, informed by alterations in attitudes towards the import of books and what historical insights they provide. A modern classic of practical bibliographical handbooks is the recently reprinted book by David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019). The last decade has seen handbooks appear that aim to give all-round overviews of book history or insight into the “how to” of studying it. Examples include: Joseph Dane’s introduction to the study of books as physical objects (Joseph A. Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012)); Thomas Tanselle’s introduction to analytical bibliography, which explains how to analyse clues about a book’s manufacture and examine the significance of a book’s design (Thomas G. Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)); Mark Bland’s introduction to the language and concepts used in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship (Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)), and Sarah Werner’s student guide (Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800: A Practical Guide (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019)). Werner’s list of questions to ask when looking at books (chapter 4) parallels what is attempted in Part II’s checklist.
4 Jackson Campbell Boswell, Milton’s Library: A Catalogue of the Remains of John Milton’s Library and an Annotated Reconstruction of Milton’s Library and Ancillary Readings (New York: Garland, 1975); T. A Birrell, The Library of John Morris: The Reconstruction of a Seventeenth-Century Collection (London: British Museum Publications for the British Library, 1976); Alan Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980); James Brasch and Joseph Sigman, Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record (New York: Garland, 1981); Robert DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed (New York: Garland,1984); Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Walter Harding, Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia [by] the University Press of Virginia, 1967).
5 William Baker, Wilkie Collins’s Library: A Reconstruction (London: Greenwood, 2002); Dirk Friedrich Passmann and Heinz Vienken, The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, part I: Swift's Library in Four Volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003); David Selwyn, Edmund Geste and his Books: Reconstructing the Library of a Cambridge Don and Elizabethan Bishop (London: The Bibliographical Society, 2017).
6 The reconstruction studies discovered during the literature search can be grouped into ten areas of focus (see Table A1); the most prevalent areas concern the libraries or reading of figures from the arts, royalty, nobility, or ecclesiastical figures.
7 Alan Gribben, “Private Libraries of American Authors: Dispersal, Custody, and Description,” Journal of Library History 21, no. 2 (1986): 300–14 (311).
8 For example: Ralph J. Coffman, Jr, “The Working Library of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Journal of Library History 21, no. 2 (1986): 277–99; Gribben, “Private Libraries”; Gribben, Twain; Jeanne E. Krochalis, “The Books and Reading of Henry V and his Circle,” The Chaucer Review 23, no. 1 (1988): 50–77; Van Schaik, etc.
9 Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library, xxvii.
10 Passmann and Vienken, ix.
11 American authors (Capps; Gribben), kings (Krochalis), Shakespeare scholars (Arthur Sherbo, “The Library of George Tollet, Neglected Shakespearean,” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981): 227–238), or founders of the Romantic movement (Coffman).
12 E.g. Baker, Wilkie Collins’s Library; Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library; Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, 1910–1940: An Inventory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Dirk van Hulle, “Valéry’s Serpent and the ‘Wake’’s Genesis: Toward a Digital Library of James Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2010): 427–43.
13 Reading studies might consider the reading habits of particular socio-economic groups or individuals during a specified period, e.g. Vivienne Dunstan, “Book Ownership in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland: A Local Case Study of Dumfriesshire Inventories,” Scottish Historical Review 91, no. 2 (2012)” 265–86; Eugene R. Kintgen, “Reconstructing Elizabethan Reading,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 30, no. 1 (1990): 1–18.
14 John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vii.
15 Passmann and Vienken, ix.
16 Boswell, xi.
17 Richard L. DeMolen, “The Library of William Camden,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 128. 4 (1984): 327–409; Birrell.
18 The breakdown of approaches into types illustrate the trends observed within the literature; no “type” is judged to be superior; each has merits in different contexts. That type B is referred to as speculative or conjectural is not pejorative. Indeed, where evidence in an author’s writings clearly suggest that they engaged with a text, it may demonstrate more than a type A inventory-dependent study which may only be able state that the title was on the author’s shelves. One drawback of the type B approach, however, is its subjectivity; where one person discerns an allusion to Milton, another may not.
19 Boswell, ix.
20 Boswell, ix.
21 Birrell, xiv.
22 Grounds for inclusion: (a) the book bears Morris’s signature; (b) it includes his notes; (c) it has the Old Royal Library (ORL) bindings and “J.M.” on the spine; (d) it is a tract volume where “all the tracts called for by the ORC fit”; or (e) the book has “an ORL binding, and/or the blue octagonal [BM] stamp, but no sign of ownership whatever, and where the only ORL copy called for in ORC is a Morris book” (Birrell, xxii). In the case of (e), “the pressmark has been given in italics” to indicate that “the ascription is a strong probability” (Birrell, xxii).
23 Passmann and Vienken, ix.
24 Edward Potten, “‘A great number of Usefull books’: The Hidden Library of Henry Booth, 1st Earl of Warrington (1652–1694),” Library & Information History 25, no. 1 (2009): 33–49.
25 Tesar, 59.
26 e.g. Arans; Cornelia C. Coulter, “The Library of the Angevin Kings at Naples,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 75 (1944): 141–55; Dunstan; Anthony Gerbino, “The Library of François Blondel 1618–1686,” Architectural History 45 (2002): 289–324; Marcella Grendler, “A Greek Collection in Padua: The Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601),” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1980): 386–416; Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library; Krochalis; Kerry McCarthy and John Harley, “From the Library of William Byrd,” The Musical Times 150, no. 1909 (2009), 17–30; Leona Rostenberg, “The Library of Johann Albrecht, Duke of Mecklenburg, 1525–76,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 15, no. 2 (1945): 131–38; Ernest G. Schwiebert, “Remnants of a Reformation Library,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 10, no. 4 (1940): 494–531; Van Schaik; R. Weiss, “Henry VI and the Library of All Souls College,” The English Historical Review 57, no. 225 (1942): 102–5; etc.
27 For example, in his type A reconstruction of Morris’s library, Birrell spots notable absences of works a man like Morris would have owned (e.g. Bibles, Ovid, Xenophon).
28 Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library, xxxii.
29 Beside searching physical and digital locations, sources of information relevant to a reconstruction may be obtained via appeals in academic publications (see Riedlmayer). Another invaluable source of information is serendipity (Gribben. Mark Twain’s Library and “Private Libraries”), which dealt Gribben a long-lost accession record detailing items from Twain’s library donated to Redding Library, Connecticut.
30 For instance, while researching the books of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648), Dunstan Roberts discovered a “fascinating” though “probably wrong” account, dating from 1670, of Parliamentarian forces destroying Herbert’s library. Here Roberts highlights improbabilities, e.g. the incongruity of chaining in a private library and the library being housed at Montgomery Castle (belonging to Herbert’s brother), which already had a library. Roberts, “‘Abundantly replenisht with Books of his own purchasing and choyce’: Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Library at Montgomery Castle,” Library & Information History 31, no. 2 (2015): 117–36.
31 Kochkina cites her reconstruction as “a timely reminder of the need to use multiple sources, both internal and external to the books for establishing or confirming the past ownership of books in order to minimize the possibility of error” (205). During the reconstruction of Olivier-Martin’s library, she dismisses evidence offered by (a) an ex dono book plate pasted into a volume after Olivier-Martin’s death and (b) an unreliable bibliography of Olivier-Martin’s books.
32 Baker is unusual, citing “four models [which] have constantly been before me,” see William Baker, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library (London and New York: Garland, 1977), xi. These models are: Harding; A. L. N. Munby, Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons (London: Mansell, with Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1971); Harrison and Laslett; Nancie Campbell, Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1971).
33 Gribben, “Private Libraries,” 306.
34 Gribben, “Private Libraries,” 310. For instance, a study of an author’s library will combine skill sets of librarians and literary scholars. See Gribben, “Private Libraries,” 311.
35 Gribben, “Private Libraries,” 311.
36 Non-specialist audiences may be engaged via platforms such as legacy libraries, https://www.librarything.com/legacylibraries (accessed 10 October 2019).
37 See Richard Oram, “Writer’s Libraries: Historical Overview and Curatorial Considerations,” in Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers’ Libraries: A Handbook, edited by Richard W. Oram and Joseph Nicholson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 1–28.
38 For Oram, it was the mid-century rise of systematic bibliographical scholarship, in particular, which drove the field’s growth.
39 Baker, Wilkie Collins’s Library, 70.
40 Thomas E. Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography (Buffalo: University of Buffalo, 1955).
41 Pearson, 240.
42 Simon Burrows, “Locating the Minister’s Looted Books: From Provenance and Library History to the Digital Reconstruction of Print Culture,” Library & Information History 31, no. 1 (2015): 1–17 (1). The provenance-centric digital humanities project Burrows focussed on was the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project, https://jesuitlibrariesprovenanceproject.com. Alongside this might be added the Sion College Provenance Project, https://sionprovenance.wordpress.com, Provenance Online Project, https://provenanceonlineproject.wordpress.com, Footprints, https://footprints.ccnmtl.columbia.edu, and Book Traces, https://www.booktraces.org, which document markings that reveal where books were acquired, who owned them, and the ways people used them (all accessed 10 October 2019).
43 See Burrows, “Locating”. Examples include: (i) the Atlas of Early Printing, http://atlas.lib.uiowa.ed; the Mapping Colonial Americas Publishing Project, http://cds.library.brown.edu/mapping-genres, and Geography of the London Ballad Trade, 1500–1700, http://ebba.english.ucbs.edu/baladprintersite/lbp_main.html (all accessed 10 October 2019); (ii) The Netherlands’ “Global Historical Bibliometrics” project, http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/global-historical-bibliometrics, or the Universal Short Title Catalogue, https://www.ustc.ac.uk, of every European book produced in the first centuries of print (all accessed 10 October 2019).
44 Of course, some libraries are the product of numerous individuals or generations of one family (e.g. country house libraries); here there will be evidence of several signatures and bookplates which can obscure a book’s original owner. In these cases, reconstructions can be hampered by a library’s complex compositional influences.
45 This said, no matter what method is used, a successful reconstruction is not guaranteed. The reconstruction may be impossible. The sources may not be extant. Conversely, a serendipitous discovery may occasion a successful reconstruction. Success is not wholly dependent on method.
46 See Edwina Penge, “Reconstructing Historic Libraries: A Critical Methodological Review and Case Study” (unpublished master’s thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2019).
47 Factors compromising the utility of inventories, noted by Benito Rial and Pettegree, include: (i) omission (or bundling) of ephemera; (ii) books overlooked or confused through errors of transcription, dictation, and inexperienced compilers; (iii) details recorded reflect the valuation purpose of inventories and can frustrate volume identification. See Benito Rial, “Sixteenth-Century Private Book Inventories and Some Problems Related to their Analysis,” Library & Information History 26, no. 1 (2010): 70–82; Andrew Pettegree, “The Legion of the Lost: Recovering the Lost Books of Early Modern Europe,” in Lost Books, edited by Bruni and Pettegree, 1–27. On the use of a badly compiled sales catalogue to reconstruct the Thrushcroft Grange library, see Bob Duckett, “The Library at ‘Thrushcroft Grange’: The Pennine Library of Robert Heaton,” Library & Information History 32, no. 1–2 (2016): 72–87.
48 One “walk through” of how to approach a reconstruction source type, though not as part of a reconstruction study, is William Poole’s guidance on booklists. This discusses identifying the type of booklist one has and what questions to ask of it before demonstrating a brief analysis and attribution of such a list. Poole, “Analysing a Private Library, with a Shelf-List Attributable to John Hales of Eton, c. 1624,” in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts, edited by Edward Jones (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 41–65.