Book Catalogues and Life: A Preliminary Witness*

My high-school Latin teacher recommended the catalogues of George Allen, a Philadelphia dealer who sent me several offers of early editions of the classics. The Renaissance was not a concept to me, but J.C. Scaliger was; so I could see that for fifty or one hundred dollars I might possess a book in which he had taken part, but I didn’t have the money, so Mr. Allen’s catalogues went to waste. Not so with those from the House of El Dieff. I had resolved to read everything written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and that led to the accumulation of a whole bookcase of American reprints and the reading of the Higher Criticism (that pseudo-scholarship published by the American Sherlock clubs). Lew David Feldman’s catalogues helped me to organize my lists and provided desiderata: they were as close as I came to–“Bibliography,” if you will.

At college I dealt in second-hand books from my dormitory room. American literature was available, and I could sell it. For instance, once I had obtained my own copy of Oscar Wegelin’s bibliography of Early American Poetry, I found that I could locate and sell items unrecorded there. I got a lot of catalogues to help me price and identify the rarities. My favorite was the Wakeman sale catalogue from 1929, the offset reprint of a priced copy. I virtually memorized it, trying to make up for my total lack of experience. When John Kohn displayed proudly to me from his safe in the Seven Gables Bookshop a copy of Longfellow’s Noël, I could tell him why it was printed and the size of the edition: he offered me a job! (Alas, I was already booked by Goodspeed’s.)

I composed some extremely modest catalogues on my own, but they provided the thrill of receiving from strangers both orders and checks in the mail. (Most librarians have no idea what book catalogues are really all about.) I missed that at Goodspeed’s, where I confected hundreds, if not thousands, of descriptions, but by the time the resulting catalogues were sent out I was back at school or in the army.

When I came to Harvard as assistant to the Houghton librarian I noticed right away that the librarian’s office was lined with catalogues. I asked for a tour. Mr. Jackson explained that he had collected them in order to discover – in the small institutional and private library catalogues – and keep track of – in the dealer and auction catalogues – English books printed before 1641, as he was working on a bibliography. By then, I hasten to note, the Renaissance had been partially revealed to me, but not the STC.

Within months I decided to revise Wegelin’s bibliography and to collect catalogues on early American literature. The latter project, as it grew, fed the former, but also provided a context. From the Philadelphia sales of the E. D. Ingraham library in 1855, the New York sale of R. W. Griswold’s library in 1859, and the 1867 sale at Sotheby’s of the Rev. F.J. Stainforth’s library, “consisting entirely of works by British & American poetesses,” the collection continues with the expected catalogues of A. G. Greene, C. F. Harris, Leon & Brother, C. B. Foote, P. K. Foley, and so on. The Anderson Galleries 1922 sale catalogue of the library of Henry Cady Sturges gave me a preview of the unlocated or unrecorded poetry I was to collate several years later at the Huntington Library, which had swept the sale. I met Mr. Wegelin, who gave me his notes of unrecorded titles and permitted me to purchase his own (annotated) set of his catalogues. Without them, how could I have published in the BSA Papers “Oscar Wegelin, Pioneer Bibliographer of American Literature”? The base-line for any study of a bookdealer is a record of the catalogues – the typically missing feature from those AB histories of bookdealing in various American cities. In the case of Wegelin I could even cite the names of his customers.

When I went to Brown as Curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, I entered wholeheartedly that hurly-burly of checking, searching, and ordering from dealers’ catalogues. I would seize the mail, check fast, and race about the card catalogue and the file of uncatalogued out-orders and receipts for Midland Rare Books, Henry Wenning, Seven Gables, the Phoenix, and literally hundreds of others. Book catalogues dominate the schedules of folks like me. On my last day at Brown, before returning to Harvard, I even beat the Houghton Library for a book! A month ago, on a seminar day – which I usually devote to class preparation and my continuing study of the Renaissance – I marked two important catalogues before nine o’clock in the morning and managed the searching to order before noon. It may be exciting for the bookseller to receive an order, but only one customer for each item, don’t forget, and that makes hard, fast work for librarians. Our annotations could be informative one day to library historians.

More and more, it seems, I use catalogues in my research. They provide six out of 124 entries in “Lost Books: American Poetry before 1821.” You will notice that ten pages of my Malkin lecture on William Gowans (q.v.) are devoted to booksellers’ catalogues; without them there would be no lecture, no discoveries about the development of subject bibliography, and subject catalogues in this country. The annotations to my reprint of Farnham’s (1855) A glance at private libraries are punctuated with references to catalogues which show what happened to the collections there described. It seems that nearly half my bibliography of J.-C. Brunet is devoted to his book-auction catalogues, the stable element in his career that most have forgotten – if they ever knew it. And that begs the question of the influence of book-trade experience on concepts and structure of bibliography. Consider the impact of Hans Bolliger’s series of Dokumenta catalogues on art-historical bibliography in the future. The most difficult of assembly, but the most essential part of my article on Georges Heilbrun (q.v.), is the account of his catalogues. I’ve had the experience of putting together catalogues of different dealers and houses over a century in tracing the collecting of American literature, but I’ve never tried to view all the catalogues of a particular city and time – say, Boston before the Civil War – or to use catalogues to understand the structure of the book trade – as Pollard and Ehrman did.

Beyond our typical, parochial interests in times, places, subjects, and historical figures there is the issue of erudition in the trade, the kind of thing that Munby delved into for Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures, 1750–1850 (1972). New angles – Percy Muir’s New Paths in Book Collecting comes to mind – can be discerned not only, say, in the catalogues of John Carter and David Randall but even in my American literature catalogues, when the impact of Vernon L. Parrington’s (1927) reexamination of the Main Currents in American Thought becomes evident in the catalogues of the first-edition dealer Bradford M. Fullerton. Today’s catalogues of counter-culture ephemera will be totally fascinating to the future – if any of them survive! The annotation of catalogues, their blurbs both bibliographical and historical, needs its own history. Both social and intellectual historians can use book catalogues, but we need to make more indexes for their purposes.

These instruments of commerce circulate and recirculate the books and manuscripts that make all collections, public or private, great and small. Their study can inform us about that enterprise in its circularity. Beginners can overcome, partially, their lack of experience of a subject, of pricing, and so forth. Catalogues can take the place of bibliography, until bibliography is discovered or published. They can feed bibliography, in the sense that they are a place to look for books. Sometimes they provide the last description – the final sighting – of a book or manuscript that we cannot find today.

For that matter, any trained scholar or experienced researcher will find the way to book catalogues when they fit into a research plan. That’s question-and-answer stuff over the desk in the reference room. What I’m not quite grasping and conveying here is that book catalogues are part of the literature of awareness – scanning, not reading, is the mode – surprise, not relief, is the response. Collectors can find things they never heard about and buy them; scholars can find things they never heard about and use them.

If a library catalogue in books or cards or database is a motion picture of a collection over time, then our book-trade catalogues are snapshots of book collections that were in one place at one time before dispersing a hundred ways. The snapshots are not easy to find, even when we know that they existed. They are fading fast.

* Originally an address to the 1995 BSA Conference on Book Catalogues, Today and Tomorrow, Reports and Presentations. First printed in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 89:4, December 1995.