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Book Reviews the First Printed Catalogue of the Bodleian Library

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Book Reviews the First Printed Catalogue of the Bodleian Library Book reviews The first printed catalogue of the Bodleian library 1605. A facsimile. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. ISBN 0-19-817388-1, £ 35. The earliest catalogues of institutional libraries are at least as rare as auction catalogues of private book collections. Some library historians, indeed, are not even aware of the existence of the earliest library catalogues. For example, in The Library Quarterly, 46 (1976), p. 248, Carolyn O. Frost wrote: 'The first two printed catalogs of the Bodleian Library have secured a special place in the history of cataloging. The 1605 catalog is the first general catalog to be printed in Europe, and that of 1620 is the first alphabetical author-title catalog.' And in other library historical publications too, such as that of James Thompson, A history of the principles of librarianship (London 1977), p. 163, we read that the Bodleian catalogue of 1605 is regarded as 'the first general catalogue of a European library'. As far as we now know, it is not the first, but the fourth printed catalogue of an institutional library. Leaving aside the printed catalogues of manuscripts, the list looks like this: 1595, the Leiden catalogue of Petrus Bertius: his Nomenclator was the first separately pub- lished general catalogue of an institutional library; 1600, the comprehensive cata- logue of the city library at Augsburg in oblong folio (560 pp., with an index of authors running to 76 pp.); 1601, according to Gabriel Peignot, Repertoire bibliographigue universel (Paris 1812), p. 50, saw the publication of the 'Catalogus librorum bibliothecae academiae franekerensis, (secundum materias dispositus.) Franekerae, 1601, in-4'. The catalogue of the Bodleian Library was followed in 1608 by that of the city library in Utrecht, after which the catalogue of the city library in Antwerp appeared in 1609, compiled by Aubertus Miraeus, and the bet- ter known Amsterdam city library catalogue in 1612. Only the last of the list is - reasonably accessible to research, through the facsimile edition in 100 copies edited by H. C. Rogge in 1881. In 1986 a facsimile of the first catalogue of the Bodleian Library appeared. On the dust cover only, there is a statement that 'the copy reproduced is the only presentation copy known, being a gift from Bodley to Robert Bowyer on 10 July 1605'. The anonymous introduction gives a brief review of the acquisitions and the structure of the library in about 1600. Substantial monetary contributions enabled Thomas Bodley to employ two London booksellers: John Norton and John Bill, with a more or less unlimited commission to purchase. As early as 1599 Bodley was discussing with Thomas James the arrangement of the new library. As was customary at other libraries of the day too, the books were arranged according to faculty. What was unusual was that the books within each faculty were shelved in a rough alphabetical order. From the letters that have survived we know quite a lot about the cataloguing of the collection, which was already large. The introduc- tion contains all the information necessary for the reader to understand the struc- ture of the catalogue and the meaning of the signs I and *. 320 When Bodley saw the proof sheets for the catalogue in the autumn of 1604 he was far from satisfied. Despite his instructions that the mistakes in the Hebrew must be corrected, this had still not been done half-way through 1605. He then pro- posed asking 'Joannes Drusius the Younger, Professor of Hebrew at Leiden' to compile an errata list (p. xii). 'This was done with great rapidity, and the list ap- peared as the last sheet of the catalogue, with the corrections transliterated into Latin because of the deficiency of Barnes's Hebrew characters.' Since the copy re- produced was presented as early as 10 July 1605, the Drusius concerned cannot have been far away. Joannes Drusius the Younger (1588-1609) was in London in 1605, but he was never professor at Leiden. His homonymous father (1550-1616), on the other hand, was professor of oriental languages at Leiden from 1577 and at Franeker from 1585. The catalogue contains about 8,700 entries, making the collection in Oxford somewhat larger than that in Augsburg in 1600 (the catalogue for which runs to about 8,500 entries). The Oxford catalogue went on sale in the summer of 1605. It was not the printer Joseph Barnes but chiefly the London bookseller John Norton who looked after distribution in Europe. To judge by the entry 'Catalogus Bibliothecae publicae Oxoniensis a Thoma Bodleio equite Aurate institutae, in 4. Londini' in the stock catalogue of the bookseller Cornelis Claesz of 1608, the book could be bought from him in Amsterdam. Here too, the name 'Londini' tells us where Cornelis Claesz acquired his copies: the book appears in the catalogue of the autumn fair of 1605 (Leipzig, Lamberg, 1605, fo. C4r.) with the address 'Londini in Nortoniana', so at the Franfurt book fair it was being sold by the great bookseller John Norton. The superbly printed and bound reprint is an invitation to reading, not just reference. Any specialist browsing through the work is bound to find some in- teresting titles, even indeed something completely new to him. In 1605 the library already had a number of works in Dutch, such as those by 'Lud. Van Ceulen Vanden Circkel &c. 1596' (p. 310), by Simon Stevin (p. 383), and the Spieghel der Zeevaerdt by Lucas Jansz Waghenaer (Leiden, Plantin, 1584) (p. 411). However, the catalogue fails to make it clear whether Hans Vredeman de Vries's book on ar- chitecture of 1577 (p. 636) is the Dutch (BT 4819) or German version: the word 'Germanice' is used for both languages. On page 394 there is a reference to an unknown edition of the arithmetical work by Anthony Smyters: 'Les Fondemens d'Arithmetique par Ant. Smyters. Ant. 1582 in 8°'; the earliest known (but alas now lost) edition was published by Jan van Waesberghe at Antwerp in 1589 (cf. H. L. V. de Groote in NBW, vol. 1, col. 922). The booklet 'Les deviz familiers' by the schoolmaster Noel van Barlaymont is an unknown work; the 1587 edition in octavo (p. 296) was presumably printed in Antwerp. Only now is it possible in a number of libraries to lay the catalogues of Leiden (1595), Oxford and Amsterdam (1612) side by side. Even if the Utrecht catalogue of 1608 was not compiled on the model of the 1605 Bodleian catalogue, it seems to me that this must have been how the Amsterdam catalogue was compiled: it is certainly the first Dutch catalogue to which an alphabetical index of authors is ap- pended. The reprint of the Bodleian catalogue will thus serve as a powerful impulse not only to bibliographical research but also to library history. BERT VAN SELM .
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