The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organization, and Functions

Amy Blakeway

Sir Hans Sloane achieved many accolades in his own lifetime, including the influential and covetable positions of Royal Physician and President of the Royal Society. Sloane’s rise from humble physician to pillar of eighteenth-century society is epitomized in the glamorous locations in Kensington and Chelsea which to this day bear his name, and those of his descendants. To people who have never heard of Sloane, the epithet ‘…of Sloane Square’ immediately places him in the highest rank of social and historical importance. Despite significant achievements during his lifetime, perhaps Sloane’s greatest legacy was posthumous: namely, as the man who accumulated the massive collections which formed the basis of the British Museum and, indirectly, of its children the Natural History Museum and the British Library. In spite of the importance of Sloane’s collections, including his books, as recently as 1988 Margaret Nickson observed that bibliographers had hitherto ‘been very little concerned with the history of this remarkable collection’. 1 Fortunately, this can no longer said to be the case. Collections of essays such as those edited by Arthur MacGregor in 1994 and by Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor in 2009 have emphasized the scale of Sloane’s collections and their importance both in his lifetime and after his death; 2 such studies have also explored aspects of their organization and rationale. The Sloane Printed Books Project, led by Alison Walker, has made substantial progress in identifying Sloane’s extant library holdings. At the time of writing, c. 26,500 books are listed on a fully searchable online database: their number is growing daily. 3 Despite this progress, much still remains to be learned about Sloane and his collections; this paper presents an update on work in progress on the subject. The information now stored on the Sloane Printed Books Project database enables us to build on Nickson’s research on Sloane’s catalogues to provide a more detailed picture of the development of his library, its catalogue, and thus the broader pattern of his acquisitions of books. As Nickson observed, Sloane employed a number of amanuenses to maintain an accurate catalogue of his ever-growing collection. At a basic level, their duties comprised recording bibliographical details, yet it is apparent that their role could also extend to substantial autonomous control over reorganizing or rearranging the library. Taking a chronological approach to Sloane’s catalogues enables us to explore the developments to the catalogue made by each of his main library employees. Before examining the catalogue’s development, however, it is important to consider existing literature on Sloane’s library holdings.

I would like to thank Alison Walker, John Goldfinch, Michael Hunter and Giles Mandelbrote for their comments on this paper in draft form. 1 Margaret Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane, Book Collector and Cataloguer, 1628-1698’, British Library Journal , xiv (1988), pp. 52-89. 2 Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary (London, 1994); Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (eds.), Libraries Within the Library (London, 2009). 3 http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sloane/ [accessed 29 December 2010].

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To date, Nickson’s work remains the cornerstone of our understanding of Sloane’s library catalogue. Her clarification of the relationship between the three main extant catalogues of Sloane’s book collection is particularly pertinent to this research; although ‘the relationships between these catalogues are complex’, they can be characterized at a basic level as follows. 4 Sloane MS. 3972C is the main catalogue of Sloane’s library, comprising eight volumes. Originally, this dealt with the vast majority of his holdings bound in book format, including books of dried plants (the ‘horti sicci’), engravings, heavily illustrated volumes, manuscripts, vernacular printed books ranging from the grandest folio to the cheapest broadside ballad, and all Latin books discussing non-medical topics. This catalogue can be searched by reference to Sloane MS. 3972D, an index by author-surname or, in the case of anonymous works, title or significant words from the title. Following Sloane’s death, in 1758 the Trustees of the newly founded British Museum determined to remove leaves which mainly contained entries of manuscript works and rebind these in a separate volume. Where manuscripts were entered on pages with mostly printed material, these entries were copied into the new volume and deleted from the old catalogue. The volume of manuscript material so formed now survives as Sloane MS. 3972 B. At present, therefore, index entries in Sloane MS. 3972D could relate to folios bound in either Sloane MS. 3972B or Sloane MS. 3972C. Whilst Sloane MS. 3972C describes the vast majority of Sloane’s book holdings, there is one crucial area of his collection which it does not include. Sloane’s medical works in Latin were catalogued separately from the remainder of his printed books, and in a quite different manner. Medical bibliography was an expanding genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Sloane owned several examples of such works. 5 The most up-to-date and complete work had been published in 1686, when G. A. Mercklin produced an edited, expanded, and revised version of Johannes Antonides van der Linden’s medical bibliography, known as Lindenius Renovatus . Van der Linden’s work had originally been published in 1637; Sloane did not own the first edition, but he did own Mercklin’s 1686 revision and an unrevised 1651 reprint of the original edition, both of which he annotated. 6 Sloane’s copy of the Mercklin version in particular is very heavily marked. These annotations will be discussed in more detail below, but for the moment it should be noted that they include identification numbers, demonstrating that Sloane used this printed work as the basis for a catalogue of his own medical holdings. These identification numbers are highly distinctive, taking the form of a letter (lower or upper case) and a number, and they are usually described as ‘Sloane numbers’. To facilitate this use of Lindenius Renovatus as a catalogue, Sloane arranged for his copy to be interleaved so that Latin medical texts published subsequent to 1686, or which Mercklin had omitted, could be added at the appropriate place in the volume. Whilst the exact date at which Sloane began to use his copy of Lindenius Renovatus in this manner is unclear, it is evident that he acquired the volume on his return from Jamaica in 1689. 7 Prior to this purchase, in February 1684/5, Sloane had commenced a book list, in

4 For a more detailed discussion of the following, see Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, pp. 52-8. 5 John Symons, ‘Medical Bibliographies and Bibliographers’, in Alain Besson (ed.), Thornton’s Medical Books, Libraries and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the Medical Sciences (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 239-66; Estelle Brodman, The Development of Medical Bibliography (Baltimore, 1954). 6 London, British Library [BL], 878.n.8 and BL 550.a.35 respectively. Two further British Library copies of Lindenius, the 1637 edition (554.e.3) and the 1662 edition (271.i.32) bear no marks of Sloane’s ownership. 7 M. A. E. Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’ in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary (London, 1994), pp. 263-277, at p. 264.

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which he recorded the amount he had paid for each volume. 8 At this early stage, Sloane had not yet instituted the practice of numbering his books. However, he did record acquisition date and price on volumes in code, a practice which was apparently intended as a reminder of an item’s cost should he ever have needed to sell it. 9 Nickson suggested that Sloane commenced the catalogue of his non-medical collection, then numbering some 3,000 books, in 1693: this dating will be refined in this paper. By the time he began this catalogue Sloane had begun to inscribe his books with his distinctive ‘Sloane numbers’, initially employing each letter of the alphabet once, with capitals A, B and C used for folios, and lower-case d- o for smaller books, a scheme quickly expanded to include capital P for folios, and lower-case q-y for smaller works. 10 Whilst Nickson focused upon Sloane’s cataloguing, Giles Mandelbrote, by contrast, turned his attention to Sloane’s acquisition patterns, with particular reference to the purchases made at the sale of Robert Hooke’s library in 1703. 11 Drawing upon Jeremiah Finch’s work of the 1940s, Mandelbrote noted that the variety of marks made on Sloane’s extant auction catalogues reveals a process behind a decision to purchase which comprised more than one stage: an initial set of marks highlighting items of interest was then refined to exclude works already present in the library, presumably a process undertaken with reference to Sloane’s catalogues. 12 By examination of the annotations which accompanied these marks, such as ‘you have it’, Mandelbrote concluded that in the examples he observed it was Sloane who made the provisional selection, and library assistants who undertook the checking to refine the lists. In other instances, however, this process could have differed. Acquisition dates for items known to have been purchased at a particular sale are clear, yet an approximate acquisition date for other items can be deduced by reference to Mandelbrote’s identification of the plausible start and end date for each volume of Sloane’s library catalogue. 13 The dates he proposes are largely supported by the research outlined in this paper. To date, therefore, the broad dating of Sloane’s catalogues; the meaning of his purchase codes; his acquisitions at certain sales; and the relationships between his early book list, two main catalogues, Lindenius Renovatus and Sloane MS. 3972C, and the list of his manuscripts in Sloane MS. 3972B (as derived from the original contents of Sloane MS. 3972C) have been elucidated. By contrast, this paper provides a primarily chronological account of Sloane’s book catalogue, expanding upon established research and highlighting new avenues for exploration. To achieve this, we shall consider the catalogue as a series of different sections undertaken by several authors. The men whom Sloane employed to help develop his library are often described as ‘amanuenses’, a term which is accurate in so far as it draws attention to Sloane’s continued supervision of his collections. Nevertheless, several of Sloane’s employees were scholars of note in their own right and exercised their own judgement and discretion in the day-to-day management of Sloane’s collections. Whilst any attempted periodization of the catalogue and the library’s development is, to a certain extent, arbitrary, this focus on the librarians involved has the merit of foregrounding two hitherto neglected aspects of Sloane’s collecting and cataloguing. First, this approach demonstrates the influence of a variety of individuals involved in the monumental undertaking of managing

8 ‘A Catalogue of my Books’, Feb. 1685, BL, Sloane MS. 3995. 9 Margaret Nickson, ‘Sloane’s Codes: The Solution to a Mystery’, Factotum , vii (1979), pp. 13-18. 10 Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, pp. 62-3. 11 Giles Mandlebrote, ‘Sloane’s Purchases at the Sale of Robert Hooke’s Library’, in Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (eds.), Libraries within the Library (London, 2009), pp. 98-145. 12 Jeremiah S. Finch, ‘Sir Hans Sloane’s Printed Books’, The Library , 4th ser., xxii (1941-42), pp. 67-72; Mandelbrote, pp. 101-5. 13 Mandelbrote, p. 109.

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Sloane’s vast book holdings. Secondly, it reveals the impact of events in Sloane’s personal and professional life on his collecting and cataloguing practices. Sloane’s library can only be understood in the broader context of his life and times. Exploring Sloane’s catalogues through such a historical approach provides new explanations for important, yet hitherto neglected, facets of the library’s development.

Before the catalogue: the 1685 list – 1693

The list of Sloane’s books and their prices which he began in 1685 (now Sloane MS. 3995) was finished in 1687, when Sloane left for Jamaica in the service of the Duke of Albemarle. At this stage, Sloane had evidently not assigned Sloane numbers to his books since none are recorded in this list. This is confirmed by two medical bibliographies which he owned during this period: the 1651 edition of Lindenius, and a bibliography compiled by the bookseller and bibliographer Cornelius à Beughem, published in 1681. 14 It is probable that Beughem conceived his work as an update to van der Linden, to be used in conjunction with the then most recent edition of 1651. The title page states that the bibliography listed works published from 1651 onwards, including medical works in both Latin and vernacular languages. Although Beughem did not mention Lindenius by name in either his dedication of the work to Elector Frederick or his note to the reader, it is highly plausible that non- duplication of materials in van der Linden dictated this choice of date. Neither Sloane’s early edition of Lindenius, nor his copy of Beughem, has hitherto been considered as evidence of his early cataloguing or library practices, yet both of these works bear marks which are comparable to those made in Sloane’s Lindenius Renovatus . In contrast to Lindenius Renovatus and Sloane MS. 3792C, however, neither contains Sloane’s numbers. The meaning of the marks in these two volumes, and their relationship to those in Lindenius Renovatus , is unclear. Some items were marked with symbols including horizontal lines, on occasion crossed by one or two vertical lines or, more rarely, a circle. Several possibilities regarding the meanings of these marks have been examined and rejected, including the possibility that they referred to the books’ subject matter. For instance, works marked by a horizontal line crossed by two vertical lines in Beughem’s bibliography include Gerard Boate’s Histoire Naturelle d’Irelande (Paris, 1666) and Jean Fernel’s Ouvres en Medicin (3 vols, Paris, 1655). 15 Nor do the marks relate to categorization based on language or some aspect of publication details. It also appears unlikely that such marks relate directly to accession. For instance, Jean Jacob Wecker’s Secrets et Merveilles de Nature (Paris, 1666) and Jean Varande’s Traite de la Maladie des Femmes (Rouen, 1651) are both marked with the horizontal and two vertical lines: Sloane owned the former, but the latter does not have an index entry in Sloane MS. 3972D, where, had Sloane acquired it, it would have been indexed as a vernacular work entered in Sloane 3972C. 16 Furthermore, although similar marks were made in Lindenius Renovatus , it appears that either the meaning of the marks or the categorization system to which they appertained had changed: frequently the mark in Beughem or the earlier Lindenius (see above) does not correlate to that in Lindenius Renovatus .17 It is possible that such marks indicate desiderata, or a qualitative assessment of a work, but it appears unlikely that firm evidence will be forthcoming to support either possibility.

14 Joannes Antonides van der Linden, A. vander L. de scriptis medicis libri duo, quibus præmittitur ... manuductio ad medicinam (Amsterdam, 1651), BL, 550.a.35; Cornelius à Beughem Bibliographia Medicina et Physica novissima (Amsterdam, 1681), BL, 618.a.2. 15 Beughem, Bibliographia Medicina et Physica , pp. 314-19. 16 Ibid., pp. 327-8. 17 See, for example the entry for Paulus Ammanus, Character Plantarum Naturalis (Leipzig, 1660); Beughem, Bibliographia Medicina et Physica , p. 4; Lindenius Renovatus , BL, 551.a.61, p. 866.

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Nickson plausibly suggested that Sloane purchased Lindenius Renovatus following his return from Jamaica, although precisely when is uncertain. 18 He almost certainly owned it by 1693, in which year he left the service of the now widowed Duchess of Albemarle, with whom he had initially remained following his return from Jamaica; in 1693 he departed her service to set up a medical practice in Bloomsbury. 19

Phase 1: Sloane: 1693 - 1698 20

As indicated above, Nickson argued that Sloane started his book catalogue in 1693. This research refines this date, suggesting that Sloane’s catalogue was commenced in late 1692. Nickson’s suggestion of 1693 was based on her examination of the alchemical date-codes assigned to manuscript items catalogued in the first 218 pages of Sloane MS. 3972C volume I, and her attempt to identify the point at which their purchase codes started to run in a consecutive sequence. This, she conjectured, would indicate that retrospective cataloguing was complete and new acquisitions were being entered as they were purchased. Nickson’s focus on Sloane’s manuscripts was determined by the fact that these items had maintained their identity as a discrete collection to a greater degree than Sloane’s printed books, and were therefore easier to examine as a body. Her examination of the manuscripts catalogued in volume I of Sloane MS. 3972C, ff. 86-113, revealed that this constituted a near complete list of Sloane’s manuscripts purchased prior to 1694. Nickson also observed that the printed items assigned to classmarks a, b, z, and D, which appeared for the first time from f. 71 onwards and were ‘arranged in a regular numerical order unlike the scattered entries on earlier pages’, were acquired in 1693. 21 She therefore drew the conclusion that, since items first appeared to be catalogued in consecutive date order from 1693 onwards, the catalogue must have been begun in this year. The Sloane Printed Books database, however, has made it possible to carry out a similar examination of Sloane’s printed books to that which Nickson undertook on his manuscripts, since details of these can now be analysed and compared with far greater ease and rapidity. The revision of Nickson’s dating results from searching on the Sloane database for books which were catalogued in the first 218 pages of the catalogue, or which were catalogued in Lindenius but were part of the sequence of Sloane numbers visible in the same section of Sloane MS. 3972C as was examined by Nickson for evidence of purchase codes which reveal their date of acquisition. It therefore constitutes a refinement of Nickson’s method by using a greater quantity of data, which reveals that amongst the printed books, consistent ordering in chronological order of acquisition began in 1692. 22 Nevertheless, Nickson was right in suggesting that 1693 was also a significant year for Sloane, since, as we have seen, this was the year in which he moved out of the Duchess of Albemarle’s house and set up in his own premises. An enigmatic sheet amongst Sloane’s papers raises the possibility that this move entailed substantial rearrangement of his books. Elaborately written in a formal hand, which is clearly not Sloane’s, with certain words picked out in Gothic script and rubricated, the paper reads:

18 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 264. 19 Arthur MacGregor, ‘Sloane, Sir Hans, baronet (1660–1753)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB], Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25730, accessed 24 Nov 2010]. 20 Sloane entries relating to the first stage of this catalogue can be found in: Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 1-202, rectos only and Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 1-28, rectos only. 21 Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, p. 62. 22 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 43-45, 47, 50-54.

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A Table shewing the Place of each Book in my Library wherein to be Noted, that the Books whose Numbers are accompanied with a Letter of the Alphabet and another Number (and which amount to 678) are Books added, since the last Adjustment thereof. 1693. 23

There is no explicit connection between Sloane’s books and this title page, now separated from the table which it accompanied; however, it is highly probable that it was connected to Sloane’s library. First, the date of 1693, when we know Sloane moved house and therefore must have reshelved his books in a new location, is strongly suggestive. Secondly, the formula of ‘a Letter of the Alphabet and another number’ added to new purchases, is an accurate description of Sloane numbers such as, for instance, ‘a 1’ or ‘R 200’. Thirdly, the presence of ‘another number’ could well refer to Sloane’s earlier system of date and price coding. If this sheet does relate to a lost document which served as a finding aid for Sloane’s library, then it implies that the first books to be given ‘proper’ Sloane classmarks were newer acquisitions; that older acquisitions were provided with numbers at a later point; and that ‘adjustment’ of Sloane’s books was a relatively frequent occurrence. This information is supported by an examination of the allocation of Sloane numbers. Of the seventeen books assigned Sloane numbers beginning with ‘A’ which also bear purchase codes, a majority of six were purchased in 1692, implying that the classmark was begun in that year. By contrast, of thirty-seven books bearing Sloane codes ‘B’ and an extant purchase code, those with numbers below 74 were bought during the 1680s, whereas those with higher numbers were largely purchased in 1693. This indicates that Sloane initially used ‘B’ as a mark for his existing library, and that at some point in 1693 he had ceased to assign this mark to older items in his library and, rather, had begun to use it for new works. The majority of items assigned a code ‘C’ were purchased during the 1680s, indicating that initially this letter was assigned to previous purchases. Amongst the lower-case letters, a, b and z were started in 1693; by contrast, approximately the first thirty items assigned ‘y’ appear to have been 1692 purchases, implying that ‘y’ was first used for new purchases made that year, alongside upper-case A. Other lower-case letters, such as d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, q, r s, t, u and x were initially used to number existing material and eventually assigned to new purchases. It thus appears that Sloane first assigned numbers at the very beginning and end of the alphabet exclusively to new purchases, and that subsequently he made the decision to extend the system of a letter and number code to the rest of his collection, employing the middle of the alphabet for this purpose. This raises questions regarding the relationship between the numbering of Sloane’s books and the beginning of his catalogue. If the catalogue had been commenced at the same time as Sloane’s books were given their numbers, and retained its original order, it would open with the first books assigned Sloane numbers A, a, b and y used for the new purchases made c. 1692-3, of which there were 678 by 1693. However, the first forty-three folios are filled with items assigned letters d-x, interspersed with a small number of scattered As. 24 At first, items appear to have been catalogued in small groups of volumes assigned the same letter, but these volumes do not appear in alphabetical order of Sloane number. Since the foliation in the top right of each page does not appear to have been undertaken at the same time as the catalogue entries were made, this raises the possibility that the opening folios of the catalogue are no longer in their original order. The foliation is by Sloane, and from around folio 43 items appear in acquisition order. It is therefore evident that the pages have been in this order from the early 1690s onwards. Examination of the contents of each folio shows, however, that an alternative ordering of the sheets could produce an alphabetical series of Sloane numbers. This is outlined in Table A.

23 ‘A Table shewing the Place of each Book…’, Sloane MS. 4019, f. 178. 24 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 3, 7, 13, 42, 44, 48.

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Table A: Original Foliation of Sloane MS. 3972C volume I

Modern foliation Items Catalogued 7 d 23-43 e 5 A 66-68 9 d 49-67 e 12-68 8 e 70-73 f 2-51 33 f 52-101 g 5- g 24 32 g 25- g 97 31 g 98-g 120 h 8-h 78 30 h 79-h 146 i 4 47 i 7-i 101 k 8-k 39 48 y 30-42 C 30 A95-A99 49 k 46-k 49 35 k 59-k 107 l 3-l 56 34 l 57-l 132 m 7-m 15 37 m 17- m 56 36 m 57- m 93 39 m 94- m 126 38 m 130- m 149 46 m 150- m 175 n 5-n 49 41 n 57- n 167 40 n 168 o4- o 56 11 o 63-o 66 P 15-P 84 q 2-q 8 10 q 10-q 33 4 q 34-q 55 5 q 36-q 45 e 13

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Modern foliation Items Catalogued 16 q 45-q 83 17 q 102-q 116 r 4-r 53 21 r 58-r 84 20 r 88-r 158 19 r 118-r 135 15 r 140-3 14 r 147-r 150 22 r 165-r 174 23 s 5-s 66 25 s 67-s 123 24 s 124 t 3-t 72 27 t 90-t 134 u 3-u 94 26 u 97-u 121 x 1-x 33 29 x 34-x 81 28 x 83-x 84 o 67-o 122 A 4 P 96-P 99 f 110-f 132 12 d 132 x 89-x 127 3 x 129-x 133 o 140-168 A 63 d 143-5 x 136 2 x 137-x 142 P 1-P 2 B 3 C 15-C 129

Many of the sheets in this table appear in pairs within which the order has been reversed: for instance, 29 precedes 28, and 8 precedes 7. Two folios, 48 and 49, are the product of a larger single sheet folded in half and remain joined together. Although the majority of these folios are single sheets, the reversed pairs, and the remaining joined sheet, within an otherwise unordered section may indicate a several-stage process which originated with large single sheets folded in half. Potentially, when they were being arranged for the current binding, the two halves of each folded sheet remained joined together, but the folded sheets were reordered. Prior to foliation, the front and back of many of these sheets were reversed:

8 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions this could have been achieved either by refolding the sheet along the same crease line but in the opposite direction, or by cutting the sheets in half. This reorganization could have been the product of either accident or design. It appears likely that Sloane himself undertook this reordering, although why he did so remains a matter for speculation. It is possible that in placing the earlier purchases with mid-alphabet codes before later purchases coded ‘a’ or ‘b’ Sloane sought to reflect the arrangement of items in order of acquisition which prevailed throughout the remainder of the catalogue. This rearrangement may have taken place when Sloane recatalogued his manuscripts in 1693, as discussed by Nickson. Table B outlines the dates of acquisition of items catalogued by Sloane; the use of purchase codes almost exclusively amongst this group enables far greater precision than is possible for later purchases which were very rarely coded in this manner.

Table B: Acquisition dates of items catalogued by Sloane

Modern foliation Acquisition dates of items Sloane numbers employed ff. 2-42 1680s-1691 A, B, C, P; d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, q, r, s, t, u, x ff. 43-45, f. 48 1692. Folios 43-9 are the A; g, i, k, l, q, t, x, y changeover point between cataloguing existing items and new purchases and contain a mix of items ff. 46-7, 49 1680s-1691. Folios 43-9 i, k, m, n are the changeover point between cataloguing existing items and new purchases and contain a mix of items ff. 50-54 1692 A ff. 55-80 1693 A, B,; a (from f. 72), e, f, q, y, z ff. 81-87 1694 B, D, ; b, k, z ff. 88-115 1680s-1693 Manuscripts 25 ff. 116-129 1695 D; c, f, ff. 130-191 1696 a, c, d, g, m, p ff. 192-206 1697 26 D, a, d, e, f, s, g, p

25 For details of the manuscripts catalogued on these pages see: Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, pp. 64-84. 26 There is some conflicting evidence regarding this section, which is best illustrated by the entry for Antoine Mejnot’s Opuscules posthumes (Amsterdam, 1697), which bears a purchase code for the previous year, 1696. It is possible that this confusion may have arisen if Sloane considered the year to start on the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, but was cataloguing works whose publication date had been determined by the year commencing 1 January. His 1684 book list bears the date ‘1684/5’, which implies Sloane had begun the list between January and March 1685 but that in some circumstances he continued to consider the change of year to occur on 25 March. Sloane 3972C, I, f. 192r; Antoine Mejnot, Opuscules posthumes, ... contenant des discours & des lettres sur divers sujets, tant de physique & de médecine que de religion (Amsterdam, 1697), BL, 775.g.1; ‘A Catalogue of my Books’, Feb. 1685, Sloane MS. 3995, f. 1r.

9 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Although this overall pattern is strong, items occasionally appear in the catalogue or amongst sequences of Sloane numbers which bear a purchase code that does not conform to the overall pattern. In particular, a number of items bearing post-1692 purchase codes were catalogued in the first fifty folios; their presence requires interrogation. For instance, items apparently catalogued in the first fifty folios but purchased in 1695 include Thomas Tryon’s New Art of Brewing (Paris, 1691). 27 1696 purchases include Robert Boyle’s Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things (Oxford, 1670); Jean Bonnart’s Semaine des medicamens des Barbiers (Paris, 1629); and Guillame de Houppeville’s La Génération de l’Homme (Rouen, 1676). 28 1697 purchases include John Rae’s Flora; seu de Florum Cultura. Or, a complete Florilege, furnished with all requisites belonging to a florist (London, 1676); Edmond Martin’s Catalogus librorum qui venales prostant (Paris, 1683); Robert Sprackling’s Medela ignorantiae: or a ... vindication of Hippocrates and Galen (London, 1665); and Leonardo Fioravanti’s Della Fisica (Venice, 1610). 29 Sloane’s copy of the final work entered on folio 1r, Dyonisio Daça Chacon’s Practica y Theorica de Cirurgia (Valladolid, 1595 and 1609), bears the purchase code for 1698. Examining this work in more detail points to a potential explanation for this and, by extension, similar anomalies such as those outlined above. Sloane owned at least two copies of this book; it is therefore unclear whether the volume catalogued on the first page of the catalogue was indeed the item purchased in 1698. The Practica y Theorica de Cirurgia is in two parts and Sloane owned both a complete set and a copy of part II only. The complete set and the lone part II were different editions, but both were given the number C 129. The duplicate copies are revealed because the first catalogue entry was not correctly indexed; the work was thus catalogued twice. Curiously, both catalogue entries cite both editions – this information was apparently added subsequent to the penning of the main entry. 30 The volume purchased in 1698 was part II of the 1609 edition. 31 Sloane’s complete 1595 edition was identified by the black stamp given by the British Museum to books originating in Sloane’s collection, and by marks indicating a previous owner: Joseph Fenton. 32 Sloane acquired several of Fenton’s books in 1686, and his early book list records his purchase of a book described as ‘Spanish Chyrurgia, Vallad. 1595, fol’, for one shilling in that year. 33 There is a strong possibility that this refers to Chacon’s work, and that it was this copy of Chacon which was catalogued on f. 1r.

27 Sloane MS. 3972C, I, f. 26r; Thomas Tryon A New Art of brewing Beer, Ale, and other sorts of Liquors (London, 1691), BL, 969.a.42.(1). 28 Sloane MS. 3972C, I, ff. 23r, 25r, 31r; Robert Boyle Tracts about ye Cosmicall Qualities of Things (Oxford, 1670), BL, 535.b.17; Jean Bonnart Semaine des medicamens des Barbiers (Paris, 1629) 778.a.7; Guillame de Houppeville La Génération de l’Homme par le moyen des oeufs, et la production des tumeurs impures par l’action des sels; examinées dans une lettre écrite à M*** D. M. sur l’ouverture du cadavre d’une femme, où l’on a trouvé plusieurs corps extraordinaires (Rouen, 1676), BL, 1173.e.8. 29 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 1r, 28r; 39r, 45r; John Rae, Flora; seu de Florum Cultura. Or, a complete Florilege, furnished with all requisites belonging to a florist (London, 1676), BL, 441.g.1; Edmond Martin, Catalogus librorum qui venales prostant (Paris, 1683), BL, S.C.16; Robert Sprackling Medela ignorantiae: or a ... vindication of Hippocrates and Galen from the groundless imputations of M[archamont] N[edham], wherein the whole substance of his ... Medela Medicinae is ... considered (London, 1665), BL, 1038.f.23; Leonardo Fioravanti, Della Fisica dell’Eccellente Dottore ... L. F. ... divisa in libri quattro, ... Di nuovo posta in luce, et con la tavola de’ Capitoli (Venice, 1610), BL, C.65.hh.8.(1.). 30 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 1r; Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, f. 104v. 31 Dionysio Daça Chacon, Practica y theorica de cirurgia , vol. i (Valladolid, 1609), BL, 549.l.18. 32 Dionysio Daça Chacon, Practica y theorica de cirurgia , 2 vols (Valladolid, 1595), BL, 549.l.19.(1.). 33 Sloane MS. 3995, f. 13r.

10 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

This example highlights the issue of duplicates in Sloane’s library, drawing attention to the fact that when Sloane acquired a duplicate copy of a work, even if this was a different edition to that he already owned, it was sometimes assigned the same Sloane number as his existing copy. Presumably either the two copies were shelved together, or, in some cases, the duplicate may have taken the place of the original on the shelves if, for instance, its condition was markedly superior. 34 This practice provides an explanation for the occasional presence of items which, on the basis of the currently identified extant copies, appear out of chronological order within the catalogue. Sloane worked alone on his library catalogue for five years. During this time, he entered bibliographic data on only the recto folios of the catalogue, filling the entirety of volume I and commencing volume II in this manner. This practice of writing on the rectos, however, ceased when other individuals took over the main responsibility for transcribing entries. Although it was only during the earliest stage of the library catalogue’s development, prior to Sloane employing any assistants, that the versos were left blank, catalogues of other parts of Sloane’s collections frequently contained entries only on the recto or only had the versos filled at a much later date. For instance, in his 1685 book list, having filled up all the recto folios, Sloane turned the volume upside down and filled in the versos from the back forwards. Likewise, entries in his catalogues of fossils, minerals and other objects were often written on the rectos only, leaving the versos free for greater detail to be added at a later stage. 35 For objects such as fossils, about which further information might emerge, it was essential to leave space for the insertion of new data in order for the catalogue to function as a detailed and accurate record of Sloane’s collections. The bibliographic data associated with books would not, however, expand in the same manner. Accordingly, it is possible that Sloane began his book catalogue in the same format as other similar documents, but that a realization that space for expansion was unnecessary prompted a later change in practice, as discussed below. The rectos of volume I and the section of volume II written in Sloane’s hand are the most heavily annotated section of the catalogue. In addition to publication details and Sloane numbers, Sloane marked some entries with a series of symbols in pencil and red crayon. These include lines and crosses, hands, clovers, and clovers with a cross through their stem (fig. 1). Some entries received multiple markings. The small hands and clovers appear to be related to subject categorization, hands indicating works on travel or voyages, and the clovers, natural sciences. However, they appear to represent a sub-selection within these classes as not every potentially relevant work is marked with an appropriate symbol. Since the hands and clovers only appear on folios written by Sloane, it is evident that this attempt at categorization took place at an early point in the catalogue’s development and proved relatively short-lived. By contrast, the introduction of new Sloane numbers proved a longer-lived innovation. Examining the extant purchase codes on Sloane’s volumes reveals that ‘c’ and ‘p’ first came into use in 1695. In this year, Sloane married the wealthy widow Elizabeth Rose (née Langley) and the couple moved into a new house together, though it is unclear whether this entailed the relocation of his practice or book collection. The move to the ‘fashionable’ 3 Bloomsbury Place serves as a reminder of the match’s ‘advantageous’ aspects for Sloane, as identified by his biographer Arthur MacGregor. 36 The increase in income attendant upon

34 For more on Sloane’s duplicates see William Poole, ‘The Duplicates of Sir Hans Sloane in the Bodleian Library: A Detective Story, with Some Comments on Library Organisation’, The Bodleian Library Record , xxiii:2 (2010), pp. 192-213. 35 London, Natural History Museum [NHM], ‘Catalogue of Fossils’, 6 vols, 50.h.6; NHM, ‘Catalogue of Vegetable Substances’, 3 vols, MSS. SLO 25.e.13-15; NHM, ‘Catalogue of Insects’, 2 vols, S.B.q.S.8; NHM, ‘Catalogue of Minerals’, 3 vols; NHM, ‘Catalogus Marmorum’, 224.r.I. 36 Arthur MacGregor, ‘Sloane, Sir Hans, baronet (1660–1753)’, ODNB.

11 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 1. Sloane’s hand: hands and clovers next to some entries. Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 22r.

12 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Sloane’s nuptials would certainly have facilitated the substantial increase in his book purchasing visible from 1696 onwards. The latest dated publication entered by Sloane is of 1698; it is presumably from this that Nickson inferred that it was in this year that Sloane ‘decided to entrust most of the work [on the library] to assistants’. 37 Although Sloane’s paramount role in the development of his collections and library overall remained unchallenged, it is clear that other individuals also played an important part in expanding and developing Sloane’s catalogue from shortly after its inception. It is to their contributions which we now turn.

Phase 2: Hand 1: 1698-1707 and Humphrey Wanley: 1701-3; Hand 2, 1707-09

Hand 1 38

Unfortunately, the identity of Sloane’s first assistant remains elusive, yet during his custodianship Sloane’s library catalogue developed substantially. Since scholarly interest has hitherto focused upon Sloane’s known assistants, exploration of the roles played by his anonymous helpers has been an important aim of the current research. In the absence of Sloane’s household accounts, and faced with a vast quantity of correspondence in which clues may or may not lurk, ascertaining the identity of the persons behind such hands is potentially a convoluted process. In order to assist in the process of identifying hands, possible sources from which Sloane might have found appropriately qualified assistants have been identified, a list of suitable candidates drawn up, and samples of their handwriting compared to hands in the catalogue. Since Sloane’s known employees often had connections to the Royal Society (discussed in each individual case below), the secretaries, librarians, foreign secretaries and other officers of the Society during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries constituted a likely source of employees for Sloane and new identifications have been made by this means. Nevertheless, several hands unfortunately remain unmatched and unidentified, including the first. Sloane’s first library assistant undertook vast amounts of work on the catalogue, completing the recto folios of volume II, then filling in the verso folios of volumes I and II, before commencing work on volume III, entering bibliographical information on both rectos and versos. The blank versos of volumes I and II were assigned roman numerals, running as a parallel page numbering system to the arabic numerals which Sloane had placed on the rectos. Volumes III-VIII however, have a single pagination in arabic numerals throughout. Intriguingly, Hand 1 included entries not only for books which Sloane owned, which therefore have a Sloane number, but also for other books which appear without a Sloane number. Nickson suggested that these items constituted desiderata lists, although she did not explore their provenance or the ways in which such lists reveal Sloane’s attitude to, and objectives in, the expansion of his collection. A number of items in the catalogue without Sloane numbers were marked with lower case letters a, b, m or o by Hand 1: these are clearly not part of a Sloane number (fig. 2). Whilst items marked ‘o’ and ‘b’ appear at intervals throughout the versos of volumes I and II, items marked ‘a’ appear only in one lengthy consecutive list, again on the versos of volume II,

37 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 265. 38 Hand 1’s work is visible in: Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 1-202, versos only; Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff.1-28, versos only, and 29-159 rectos and versos; and Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 10r-16v, 51r -203v. Wanley’s work: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff.16v-51r, his manuscript entries: Sloane MS. 3972B, ff. 475-522, 666-9, 716 (Sloane’s pagination). Hand 2: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 204r-216v and Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, ff. 1-58r.

13 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

whilst volumes marked ‘m’ appear in only one, shorter list, on the versos of volume II. 39 Examination of the interleaved pages of Lindenius Renovatus reveals that some of the entries copied on to these were similarly marked with letters ‘a’ ‘b’ or ‘m’, of which only some were then given Sloane numbers. These, it seemed, formed part of the same series as the desiderata lists in Sloane MS. 3972C. Examination of the characteristics shared by the volumes ascribed these letters revealed the following pattern:

‘a’: works of medicine, natural philosophy and travel written in Spanish or Portuguese only, alphabetically arranged by author’s first name. 40 ‘b’: works of medicine, natural philosophy and travel in a variety of continental European languages, predominantly French, but also including works in German and Italian. 41 ‘m’: list organized by author surname; books published 1667-1693 only. French and Italian works, mainly medical, some on other scientific topics. 42 ‘o’: largely works on travel in a range of European languages, all published prior to 1674; includes one manuscript. 43

What did these letters signify and how did Sloane become aware of the existence of the volumes in these lists? Beyond reflecting Sloane’s broad interest in medicine and related topics, these letters evidently did not relate either to subject groups or, with the exception of ‘a’, to language groups. Consideration of the Sloane numbers assigned to those items which were subsequently purchased revealed that the letters likewise did not relate to the books’ eventual shelving location. The striking lack of English vernacular works implies that these letters constituted a deliberate attempt to source foreign works in Sloane’s main areas of interest. That Sloane was interested in acquiring foreign works is clear from his correspondence: in 1700, for instance, one of Sloane’s correspondents, Jezreel Jones, clerk to the Royal Society, promised to seek out information on Spanish books for Sloane during his stay in Cadiz. 44 Beyond contact with correspondents abroad, however, bibliographies and catalogues of foreign libraries constituted obvious places for Sloane to seek out information about foreign works of interest. Discovering the bibliographies and catalogues from which these lists were drawn revealed the meaning of two of the letters, ‘a’ and ‘b’, though the other two remain elusive. As the ‘a’ list had the most defined common characteristic, in that all the books were in Spanish or Portuguese, it was the first for which a source was identified. At this point, many thanks are owed to the expertise of Barry Taylor, who immediately suggested Nicolas Antonio’s two volume Bibliotheca Hispana (Rome, 1672 and 1696) as a possible source from which Sloane might have acquired information about Spanish authors and their works. Antonio produced the most complete bibliography of Spanish vernacular writing and Latin works by Spaniards in the early modern period. 45 Examination of the British Library copy of the 1672 edition revealed that the work was filled with dots and lines in red crayon, which

39 ‘o’: BL Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 163-165 versos only, 180v, Sloane 3972C, ii, ff. 33v, 36v. ‘b’: Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 158v-9v; 165v-6v, 181v-185v, 191v-197v, 201v-204v; Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 9v, 14v-16v, 19v, 24v-32v. ‘a’: Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 79v-157v (versos only). ‘m’: BL Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 33v-36v (versos only). 40 Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 79v-157v (versos only). 41 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 158v-9v; 165v-6v, 181v-185v, 191v-197v, 201v-204v; Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 9v, 14v-16v, 24v-32v. 42 Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 33v, 36v. 43 Sloane MS. 3972C, I, ff. 158v, 162v-165v, 180v; Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 36v-59v (versos only). 44 15/16 March 1700, Jezreel Jones to Hans Sloane, Sloane MS. 4038, f. 144. 45 Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (Oxford, 1936), p. 44.

14 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 2. Hand 1: the first page of the Antonio desiderata list. Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 79v.

15 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

sometimes appeared together and sometimes separately. 46 Although not in themselves unique to Sloane, red crayon lines feature heavily in the earlier entries made in Sloane’s copy of Lindenius. Comparison with the ‘a’ list in Sloane MS. 3972C revealed that volumes marked with a red dot had been copied in the same order as they were listed by Antonio, whilst the details of unmarked works and those marked only with lines had not been transcribed. The only exceptions to this rule were Latin medical works, which had been copied into Lindenius. Sloane acquired the Bibliotheca Hispana in 1698, from William Sherard, an acquaintance of his then travelling on the continent. 47 Since the vast majority of red lines and dots appeared together and the dots rather than the lines determined whether an entry should be copied, it appears probable that these represent different stages in a selection process. First, an initial suggestion was made, possibly by Sloane’s current librarian, Hand 1. Subsequently, this was refined, possibly by someone else (perhaps Sloane), before finally being transcribed by Hand 1 into the catalogue. This practice stands in contrast to that evident in the auction catalogues examined by Mandelbrote in which the initial selection was made by Sloane, then cross referenced against the library catalogue and refined by his librarians. Had this been the practice in the desiderata lists, items marked with a line would have been rejected on the grounds that they were already in the library and would thus be locatable in the catalogue. Since they are not, the alternative explanation for the two-stage process suggested above seems more plausible, suggesting, in turn, that practices in Sloane’s library varied over time. The lower-case ‘a’ is apparently the initial of the surname of the author of the source bibliography. A source for the ‘b’ entries was identified when Michael Hunter noticed red crayon marks in the manuscript catalogue of the library of Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot, now Sloane MS. 85. 48 Bourdelot’s relations with Sloane are an interesting topic worthy of attention in their own right. In the Introduction to volume II of his Voyage to… Jamaica , Sloane recounted his contacts with Bourdelot and their shared hope to update Lindenius which was terminated by Bourdelot’s death in 1708. 49 This is borne out not only by the survival of MS. 85 among Sloane’s manuscripts but also by extant letters from Bourdelot and by related materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, including his ‘Notes sur la Bibliographie médicale’. 50 However, for the present purpose it is sufficient to note that upon investigation the marks in Sloane MS. 85 were found to be identical to those made in the Antonio bibliography. Furthermore, the practice of copying those entries marked with dots but not those marked only with red lines was evidently also employed in the process of copying entries from Bourdelot. In transcribing the entries, Hand 1 was generally very accurate, even copying numbers of pages from Bourdelot when these were given. However, whilst the format of entries in Bourdelot’s catalogue varied (author name could precede or follow title, for instance), Hand 1 transcribed information in a standardized form, consistently following an author-title format.

46 Nicolas Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana, sive Hispanorum qui usquam unquamve, sive Latinâ, sive populari, sive aliâ quavis linguâ scripto aliquid consignaverunt, notitia. His quæ præcesserunt locupletior et certior, brevia elogia, editorum atque ineditorum operum catalogum, duabus partibus continens, quarum hæc ... de his agit qui post annum secularem MD. usque ad præsentem diem floruere (Rome, 1672), BL, 616.n.8. 47 William Sherard to Sloane, 16 May 1698, Sloane MS. 4037, ff. 75-6, Sloane to Sherard, 2 Sept. 1698, Royal Society, MS. 251, no. 454; Sherard to Sloane, 20 Sept 1698, Sloane MS. 4037, ff. 123-4. I am grateful to Arnold Hunt for drawing this reference to my attention. 48 Catalogue of Bourdelot’s library, Sloane MS. 85. 49 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christophers, and Jamaica , 2 vols (London, 1707-25), ii, pp. iii-iv. 50 Sloane MS. 4037, ff. 89-90; MS. 4038, ff. 277-8; Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Latin 17851-6; see also 10368 and 16343-7 and Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Fonds Français 5098, f. 215.

16 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

In the catalogue, Hand 1 added an additional letter alongside each transcription from Bourdelot, denoting the language in which the work was written: G for German, F for French, S for Spanish and so on. This code is also present in the ‘m’ and ‘o’ entries. Since the Antonio list was entirely in Spanish, it was evidently deemed unnecessary to provide a language designation for these titles. Further, unlike the Antonio entries, which were written as a single list of entries in exactly the order of appearance in the catalogue, the Bourdelot list is split into several smaller lists. These are sometimes separated by several pages, and entries within these lists appear only partially in the order of the Bourdelot manuscript catalogue. The claim that Bourdelot’s catalogue does indeed provide the source for the ‘b’ books thus requires further justification. Table C shows the correlation between the pages on which the entries appear in Bourdelot’s catalogue and the pages of Sloane’s catalogue onto which they were copied as desiderata list ‘b’.

Table C

Sloane pagination Bourdelot pagination size CLII - CLIII 37-49 folio CLVIII-CLIX 9-15; 50-61 4o CLXXIV-CLXXVI 20-36; 85-90 mainly 12 o; some 8 o & 4 o CLXXVII - CLXXVIII 90-105 8o CLXXXIV-CLXXXIX 62-82; 165; 184-185; 190-209 4o CXCIII-CXCVII 105-160 8o, 12 o; followed by sequence of folio - 12 o CCVIII 281 folio CCXIII-CCXV 221-49 8o CCXVIII- CCXX 209-210; 282-4; 289-305 4o CCXXI-CCXXV 253-280; 285-7 8o, 12 o, 16 o

Bourdelot’s catalogue organized books primarily by broad subject area, such as chemistry, medicine, natural history and so on. Within this, books were sub-divided by size, ranging from folio down to 16 o. Hand 1 decided to regroup the Bourdelot material on principles of size alone: for example, on Sloane pages CLXXXIV-CLXXXIX, volumes from four separate groups of pages were copied together, thus bringing together four sets of books, all of them quartos. In combination with the possibility that Hand 1 took a role in the initial selection of books and in the marking up of the source bibliographies for the desiderata lists, this practice arguably demonstrates that Hand 1 had a more intellectually engaged role in the library than Nickson attributed to Sloane’s unknown amanuenses. 51 The fact that these desiderata lists were copied directly into Sloane’s catalogue is one of the most striking points about this early phase of the catalogue’s development. Rather than merely a record of books Sloane owned, it seems likely that Sloane MS. 3972C and Lindenius also functioned as memoranda of books to purchase and as reference works providing details of books which Sloane knew existed but which he had not yet acquired. Several further sections of the catalogue may have functioned in the same way as the letter- lists described above. One is a list of travel literature published between 1620 and 1690 and

51 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 265.

17 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions mainly in French, one side long and copied in Sloane’s hand, with variable and sometimes incomplete bibliographical details. 52 None received a Sloane number; nor were they entered into the index. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one entry, Jean Struy’s V oyage en Perse & Aux Indes (Amsterdam, 1681), was entered in the catalogue a second time when a copy was eventually purchased. 53 A further desiderata list was written out by Sloane’s later librarian, Thomas Stack (discussed in more detail below) on the final folio of volume IV, evidently previously left blank, and headed ‘Titles of Books Extracted from Palmer’s History of Printing’. 54 Sloane’s copy of this work has been identified; it is unannotated. 55 Whilst the items listed were dutifully provided with index entries, none were assigned Sloane numbers. The provenance of the copied desiderata lists as extracts from bibliographies and catalogues of other libraries indicates the great extent to which they should be seen in the context of Sloane’s broader practice of acquiring manuscript book lists and catalogues. 56 Some such lists were bound into Sloane MS. 3972C. For example, the final six folios of volume V consist of a list of broadly medical and scientific works, a number of which are marked with red crayon lines comparable to those in Bourdelot and Antonio. The pages are heavily damaged, and the fact that they were not included in the original pagination indicates that they were inserted into this volume at a later, unknown, point. 57 They may even have been inserted from elsewhere in Sloane’s papers once the catalogue had passed into the Museum’s hands. Volume III opens with a similarly inserted list of books written in the languages of, or otherwise related to, ‘the Indes’ (fig. 3). The vast majority of these works are marked with a red crayon dot; it is therefore possible that, since all of these works were considered desirable, it was deemed more efficient simply to bind the desiderata list into the catalogue than to copy it out in its entirety. This list was definitely bound into the catalogue when it was in Sloane’s hands since these folios are included in the Sloane pagination. In addition to using bibliographies to create desiderata lists of books, Sloane would also occasionally construct lists of objects based on what he had read in a particular book. For instance, on reading Pedro Fernandez de Navarrete’s Tratados historicos, politicos, Ethicos y Religiosos de la Monarchia de China (Madrid, 1676), Sloane drew up a list of objects which appeared in the work. 58 The rationale behind the list is unclear but these objects evidently excited Sloane’s curiosity, and it appears likely that he would have been interested in seeing or acquiring these intriguing items. Navarrete’s work seems to have been particularly striking for Sloane since, in addition to the list of objects, he cited the work in a note he made on the verso of the ‘Indes’ book list: ‘Books of physick, natural history or voyages published since 1678. Navarette of China &c.’. 59 Without further context the meaning of the memorandum is unclear; but this nevertheless provides evidence about Sloane’s book collecting objectives.

52 Sloane MS. 3792C, iii, f. 13r. 53 Sloane MS. 3792C, iii, ff. 13r, 55r. 54 Sloane MS. 3792C, iv, f. 205v. 55 Samuel Palmer, The General History of Printing (London, 1732), BL, 619.l.11. 56 A few examples amongst many include: ‘Catalogue of a medical library’, Sloane MS. 267; Catalogue of the Library of Pedro à Castro, BL Sloane MS. 2997, ff. 1-36; Catalogue of Works of Travel and Geography, Sloane MS. 3994; Daniel Foot, ‘Catalogue of the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge’, Sloane MS. 78, ff. 133-49. 57 Sloane MS. 3972C, v, f. 292v; Sloane MS. 3972C, vi, f. 1r. The last Sloane pagination number assigned in vol. v is 1967; the first in vol. vi is 1971. Whilst one folio has evidently been lost this shows that the six unfoliated pages do not fit in the sequence and must therefore be a subsequent insertion. 58 Sloane MS. 4019, f. 143. The book itself is catalogued in Sloane 3972C, iii, f. 146v, Sloane number H 106. 59 Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 9v.

18 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 3. Indes book list. Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 1r.

19 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

A second work singled out in Sloane’s catalogue is Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Voyages, Navigations and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598). Unusually, the catalogue entry for this book not only lists bibliographical data but also includes a transcription of the contents of the book, which comprised a variety of eyewitness accounts of voyages and travels. The list was probably sourced elsewhere and then bound into the catalogue (fig. 4). This is evident from a number of factors, first, foliation. Both the roman and arabic foliations are present: these were added in a different ink to the main text of the list. Furthermore, in addition to the foliation added when it was bound in Sloane MS. 3972C, the list bears folio numbers which relate to an earlier binding elsewhere. 60 Only one side of each folio, usually the recto but occasionally the verso, was filled and the blank sheets were later used for unrelated catalogue entries by Hand 1 and Stack. The hand which transcribed this list is highly distinctive and does not appear elsewhere in the catalogues. Works cited by Hakluyt and included in this list have been added to the index independently from Hakluyt’s book itself. 61 The contents list of Hakluyt could have been inserted as an aide- memoire to enable Sloane to locate particular accounts within the work. Since entries were deliberately indexed it is highly unlikely that the list was simply found elsewhere and inserted opportunistically: this was a considered decision which created work for Sloane’s library assistants. The entry for Awnsham and John Churchill’s A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), similarly cites and indexes individual travel accounts within it. 62 These entries were made by Thomas Stack, filling a blank section left by Humphrey Wanley, and, as with Hakluyt, it is likely that this was an aide-memoire not a desiderata list. Wanley’s (and Stack’s) work is discussed in more detail below. Frustratingly, neither Sloane’s copy of Navarrete nor his copy of Hakluyt has yet been identified. The fact that they are not to be found in the British Library collections may, however, be due to the fact that they were heavily annotated or bore signs of wear and tear through heavy use. It is probable that both were in the British Museum in 1787. One copy of the Museum catalogue from that year is marked with the room, press and shelf numbers assigned to books; items originating in Sloane’s collection were housed in rooms 1 to 9. A copy of Hakluyt was in room 5 and a copy of Navarrete in room 7: it is highly probable that these were Sloane’s. 63 Between 1769 and 1832, the British Museum disposed of books of which it held duplicates in a series of sales; in such cases the cleaner copy tended to be retained by the library and the marked version sold. 64 At least two copies of Hakluyt were auctioned, one in 1788 and the other in 1805, when a copy of Navarrete also went under the

60 Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, ff. 159r-192r. 61 See, for instance, ‘The Voyage of Thomas Banister & Geffrey Ducket agents for the Muscovy Company into Persia the fifth time anno 1569’, bibliographic details: Sloane MS. 3792C, ii, f. 160r; index entry: Sloane MS. 3792D, i, f. 40r. 62 Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 51r. For the index entry for John Monck’s Voyage to Hudson’s Strait see Sloane MS. 3972D, ii, f. 61r; for Navarrete’s Voyage to China see Sloane MS. 3972D, ii, f. 74r. Stack also cross-referenced three further pages where the details of other volumes in the series could be located. All three places listed the contents of the volume, but of these only two were indexed: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 113v (individual entries unindexed); Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 125r (individual entries indexed); Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, ff. 51r-52r (individual entries indexed). 63 I am grateful to John Goldfinch for bringing this to my attention and for his help in locating items in the catalogue. Librorum Impressorum qui in Museo Britannico Adservantur Catalogus (London, 1787), BL, L.R.419.bb.3 (no page numbers are given, work organized by author surname). 64 F. J. Hill, ‘The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books’ in P. R. Harris (ed.), The Library of the British Museum (London, 1991), p. 2; T. A. Birrell, ‘The BM Duplicate Sales 1769-1832 and Their Significance for the Early Collections’, in Mandelbrote and Taylor (eds.), Libraries within the Library , pp. 244-57.

20 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 4. Hakluyt contents list, opening page. Sloane MS. 3972C, ii, f. 159r.

21 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

salesman’s hammer. 65 Sloane’s copy of the Churchill Collection of Voyages and Travels is, however, in the British Library; this volume contains extracts from Navarrete’s work. 66 A third example, Theodore de Bry’s Historia Americae Sive Novi Orbis (Frankfurt, 1634), is more problematic. Two copies of the contents of this work survive in the catalogue, one immediately after the other. The copy which is bound into the catalogue second is the earlier. It was written by Sloane on only the rectos, hands were drawn next to certain entries, and the Sloane numbers D 79 to 81 fit into the patterns of surrounding entries. 67 Immediately after these entries, Sloane detailed de Bry’s India Orientalis , in an unspecified edition, covering three volumes given Sloane numbers D 82-D 83, apparently at the same time as his Historia Americae list. However, Sloane’s entries have been scored through, the pages on which they appear are much more heavily damaged than other parts of volume I, and the bibliographic detail is minimal, appearing in a mixture of English and Latin. In contrast, the copy of the catalogue entry bound directly before Sloane’s is written by Thomas Stack using both rectos and versos and providing significantly more details of works, with entries transcribed entirely in Latin. 68 Further, Stack catalogued five books to Sloane’s three, including D 78 and D 81*. Apparently, D 79 had been split into two separate volumes by the time Stack came to make his revised entry: accordingly one was given Sloane number D 78 and the item previously assigned the number D 78, a folio volume containing four works including a dictionary, was given the new number D 142. 69 D 81* was de Bry’s Historiae Antipodum (1633-4) presumably included by Stack as a relevant later addition. 70 Stack’s new pages were probably originally intended to replace Sloane’s original in the catalogue, since they were assigned the same folio numbers as that borne by Sloane’s original entry, and the folio immediately following it. However, as we have seen, Sloane’s original folios were rebound alongside Stack’s work, and, according to the index entry for de Bry, no alternative catalogue entry was made for his Historiae Antipodum .71 To return to the desiderata lists, with the exception of the list of books drawn up by Stack from Palmer’s History of Printing , the desiderata lists all date from the period of Hand 1’s employment. This gives the impression that it was during the late 1690s and 1710s when Sloane’s library catalogue most frequently performed additional functions to recording

65 A Catalogue of the Duplicate Books Coins and Medals of the British Museum sold…by order of the Trustees (London, 1788) p. 142; A Catalogue of the Very Valuable Duplicate Books of the British Musuem (London, 1805), pp. 20, 22. No British Museum duplicates of this work are recorded in Anthony Payne’s census of copies: Anthony Payne, Richard Hakluyt and his Books (London, 1997). 66 Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill (eds.), A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first printed from original manuscripts. Others translated out of foreign languages, and now first publish’d in English. To which are added some few that have formerly appear’d in English, but do now ... deserve to be reprinted. With a general preface [attributed to John Locke], giving an account of the progress of navigation ... The whole illustrated with a great number of useful maps, and cuts, etc. [With ‘The Catalogue and Character of most Books of Travels’ by Edmund Halley.] (London, 1704), BL, L.R.297.b.13. 67 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 120r. 68 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, ff. 118r-119v. 69 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 117r. Part of this volume has been located: Antonio de Lexbrixa, Dictionarium ... Præter Joannis Lopez Serrani ... labores, ex Ciceronis lexicis, et historicis, multa ... addita, index insuper ... in quo opposita, emendataque quotidiani sermonis barbaries, opera M. Joannis Alvarez Sagredo. Accesserunt ... vocabula quæ a M. Fr. Petro Ortiz de Luiando antea ad calcem fuerunt addita, in proprias sedes ... reducta ... Aliaque ... vocabula ... quæ addit ... Guilielmus Ocahasa, hoc signum demonstrat ... Hac postrema editione omnia recognita, etc. (Diccionario de Romance en Latin.) (Madrid, 1686), BL, 625.k.5. 70 This volume has been located: Theodore de Bry, Historiae Antipodum, sive Novi Orbis ... pars nona, continens ... descriptionem duarum navigationum Hollandicarum ... Omnia hactenus confuse ... edita, nunc ... sublatis ... mendis ... decenter & ordine accurata: studio & operâ Io. L. Gottofridi (Frankfurt, 1633), BL, 566.l.9.(1.). 71 Sloane MS. 3972D, f. 81r.

22 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions acquisitions and serving as a finding aid. During this period, it also served to record data both for reference purposes, and, potentially, as a guide to future acquisition policy. These features were unique to this period. In addition to transcribing these desiderata lists, Hand 1 also appears to have streamlined and simplified processes within the library. From c. 1699 alchemical date and cost codes were no longer inscribed on volumes. It is tempting to interpret this as a sign that Sloane’s involvement in the library was being scaled back and new practices were being developed by his new librarian. Whilst the two-stage process of compiling bibliographies on which to base the desiderata lists indicates that Sloane retained an important role in selecting material for the library, Hand 1 appears to have been given substantial responsibility in managing and cataloguing the collection for almost a decade. For three years of this period, however, 1701-4, Hand 1 was joined in work on Sloane’s library by a second assistant: Humfrey Wanley.

Humfrey Wanley 72

Prior to his employment with Sloane, Wanley had worked at the Bodleian; throughout his time with Sloane he also served other masters, apologizing to Sloane on several occasions for his slow or delayed progress with Sloane’s library due to his commitments to other bibliophiles. 73 Most significant amongst these men was Robert Harley, with whom Wanley eventually obtained secure employment from 1708 onwards. As emphasized by Peter Heyworth in his ODNB biography of Wanley, his association with Sloane was relatively fleeting and unimportant in his overall career. 74 Nevertheless, Wanley’s exceptionally neat and highly distinctive hand (fig. 5) renders his contribution to Sloane’s library catalogue instantly recognizable, although he transcribed a mere forty-five folios of bibliographic data for printed books, in addition to just over twenty folios of entries relating to manuscripts. 75 Pages which bear evidence of Wanley’s cataloguing of manuscripts were largely removed from Sloane MS. 3972C in 1758 and can now be located in the catalogue of Sloane’s manuscripts which resulted from this removal of pages, Sloane MS. 3792B. 76 During his relatively brief period transcribing printed material, Wanley introduced three new classmarks: E, G and w. The printed books which he catalogued were assigned exclusively to these letters and, as Nickson observed, Wanley also began to record the numbers of manuscripts in roman, rather than arabic, numerals. 77 The relative lack of work by Wanley on cataloguing printed items is probably explained by the fact that his main activities were elsewhere in the library; foremost amongst such ventures was his work on Sloane’s manuscripts, his identification of duplicate printed material and his arrangements for the transfer of such items to the Bodleian. 78 Arguably, Wanley’s subsequent career as librarian to the Harleys led Nickson to overstate his importance in Sloane’s library. Her observation that ‘Wanley was allowed to take over all the cataloguing tasks in the library and he was probably influential in the selection of books and manuscripts as well’ is undoubtedly accurate. 79 However, as we have seen, the same can be said of Hand 1, and of Sloane’s subsequent assistants. The degree of autonomy in day-

72 Wanley’s work: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 16v-51r, and, for his manuscript entries, Sloane MS. 3972B, ff. 475-522, 666-9, 716 (Sloane’s pagination) . 73 7 April 1707, Wanley to Sloane, Sloane MS. 4038, f. 151; 12 October 1701, Wanley to Sloane, Sloane MS. 4038, f. 252. 74 Peter Heyworth, ‘Wanley, Humfrey (1672–1726)’, ODNB . 75 Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 16v-51r; Sloane MS. 3972B, ff. 475-522, 666-9, 716 (Sloane’s pagination). 76 Sloane MS. 3972B, ff. 475-522, 666-9, 716 (Sloane’s pagination). 77 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 265. 78 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, pp. 265-6. 79 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 265.

23 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 5. Wanley. Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 19r.

24 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions to-day library business which Wanley enjoyed was apparently the rule rather than the exception. Many of Sloane’s other library assistants have a more significant presence in the extant catalogues than Wanley, either in terms of quantity of work, length of service, or innovative practice. Wanley’s catalogue entries for Sloane’s manuscripts are interspersed amongst folios containing bibliographic data transcribed by Hand 1. Consideration of the publication dates of works immediately following Wanley’s entries suggests that his last work for Sloane was undertaken in 1704. Hand 1 remained with Sloane for a further three years after Wanley’s departure, since the final dated publication entered in that hand is dated 1706.

Hand 2 80

Following Hand 1’s departure c. 1706, Sloane employed a second anonymous assistant, Hand 2, who remained with Sloane until 1709 (fig. 6). As with previous librarians, Hand 2 was responsible for transcribing bibliographical data into the catalogue. There is no evidence that he had any responsibility beyond shelving and cataloguing new acquisitions. Whilst Sloane’s assistants undertook the bulk of the cataloguing work, Sloane continued personally to catalogue certain categories of material. Broadly speaking, he tended to reserve his attention for more unusual items, a decision which may reflect either personal interest or a concern to ensure that these items were entered correctly. During the 1700s three new categories of number were introduced: prints, designated ‘Pr’ in 1705; charters and rolls in 1706; and miniatures (heavily illustrated works), the ‘Min’ class, in 1708. 81 These entries, along with those of the ‘horti sicci’, are largely in Sloane’s own hand. 82 As Peter Murray Jones recognized, the extent to which Sloane delegated the task of cataloguing his library was highly unusual in the context of the other catalogues of his collection. Jones suggested that this may have been ‘because Sloane could not rely on a secretary to describe objects in the same way as he might transcribe the authors and titles of books’. 83 This provides a similarly plausible explanation for the division of labour within the library catalogue.

Phase 3: Hand 3, 1709-1715 84

In 1712 the manner in which Sloane numbers were assigned changed dramatically. This important development is worth examining. As we have seen, when Sloane commenced the catalogue in 1692, all of the lower case letters, with the exception of ‘w’, were in use (further exceptions were ‘j’ as a synonym for ‘i’, and ‘v’ as a synonym for ‘u’). Subsequently, ‘l’ and ‘m’ were expanded to include just under 2,000 and just over 1,000 volumes respectively, and from 1700-1707 over 800 recently acquired books were placed in the newly begun ‘w’ classmark. From 1712-1732, however, new quarto acquisitions were usually assigned a ‘c’ Sloane number, although ‘N’ also remained in use. Acquisitions in octavo size and smaller were ascribed an ‘a’ or ‘R’ Sloane number. An overview of when particular classmarks were first used is provided by tables E and F, below. This change was overseen by Hand 3 (fig. 7). The interiors of Sloane’s former residences have been much altered and, since no precise contemporary descriptions survive, details of the physical layout of Sloane’s collections

80 Hand 2’s work: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 204r-216v and Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, ff.1-58r 81 For ‘Min’ items: Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, f. 15r; for ‘Pr’ items: Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 191v-195r; Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 268. 82 For example, Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, ff. 15r-19r. 83 Peter Murray Jones, ‘A Preliminary Check-List of Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues’, BLJ , xiv (1988), p. 40. 84 See Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, ff. 61r-205r; Sloane MS. 3972C, v, ff. 1r-82r.

25 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 6. Hand 2. Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 204r.

26 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 7. Hand 3. Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, f. 78r.

27 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions remain unclear. Nickson’s suggestion that the initial use of all the letters of the alphabet related to cases or shelves marked with these letters appears probable. However, it appears as though suddenly, in 1712, two very large areas became available to shelve relatively small books, since classmarks ‘a’ and ‘c’, for quarto and smaller books respectively, expanded greatly. Reference to Sloane’s personal life again provides a compelling, albeit inevitably speculative, explanation for these developments in his collection storage. In 1712 Sloane purchased the manor house at Chelsea, but it was not until 1742 that he relocated his collections and took up permanent residence there. In contrast to earlier claims that Sloane neglected Chelsea until he moved there, G. R. de Beer’s biography of Sloane shows that he demonstrated substantial interest in Chelsea during the 1710s, 20s and 30s, devoting ‘a great deal of his time and attention to his country house’. 85 In addition to this clear interest in the property, circumstantial evidence implies that Sloane’s household and domestic life, as distinct from his practice or collection, was at least partially based in Chelsea from 1712 onwards. First, it should be noted that Sloane clearly held upward social aspirations: in obtaining a ‘country’ house and keeping a residence in London as ‘a kind of pied a terre’, Sloane was emulating, in all likelihood consciously and deliberately, established noble practice. 86 This is not to argue for an absolute division of activities between the properties: Sloane’s family clearly continued to use the Bloomsbury Square house alongside the Chelsea one since the only two extant letters to Sloane’s wife, Elizabeth, one without date and the other written in 1723, were addressed to her there. 87 Concrete examples of Chelsea as the property of choice for family life survive from the 1720s onwards. Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer, discussed in more detail below, was not only Sloane’s librarian but the son of a close friend and, as such, a member of Sloane’s household. The fact he died in Chelsea in 1729 implies that by this point the ‘private’ aspects of Sloane’s life were firmly based in Chelsea, confirmation of which at a later date is perhaps found in the fact that Sloane’s sister was resident in the property by 1736. 88 It is likely that some books were also located in Chelsea, but that these were used for leisure purposes rather than constituting part of the collection. Since there is no firm evidence on the subject, which books might have been kept in Chelsea will remain a matter for speculation. Although Sloane’s collections were not relocated to Chelsea until 1742, the purchase nevertheless had an immediate impact on their organization, since expanding collections require space, and in 1712 Sloane acquired a great deal more space than had hitherto been available to him. It appears likely that as a result some domestic activities, and their associated objects, were relocated to Chelsea. Accordingly, rooms would have become available at Bloomsbury. It appears probable that two of these were assigned the letters ‘a’ and ‘c’, and until c. 1732 they were filled with newly acquired volumes provided with an ‘a’ or ‘c’ Sloane number. Newly acquired folio volumes were assigned ‘A’: it is plausible that a third large space or room was provided with shelves for these large volumes, although until the early 1720s, ‘H’ also remained in use: the shift in location for housing folios may therefore date from that period.

85 Randall Davies, The Greatest House at Chelsey: An Account of Sir Thomas’ More’s House at Chelsea, Built in 1520, to its Demolition by its Last Owner, Sir Hans Sloane, in 1739 (London, 1914); G. R. De Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (Oxford, 1953), p. 60. 86 Lawrence Stone ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century’ in B. C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter (Manchester, 1980), pp. 167- 212, at p. 174. 87 M. Plowden to Lady Sloane, [7 October] 1723, Sloane MS. 4047, f. 65v; M. Plowden to Lady Sloane, 17 June [1723?], Sloane MS. 4067, f. 88r. 88 E. St John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and His Circle (London, 1954), p. 204.

28 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Such changes to the shelving system were roughly contemporaneous with a second significant development, namely, the start of the two-volume index which is extant alongside the catalogue today. Nickson believed the index to have been commenced by Sloane and that it was ‘probably begun fairly soon after 1693’. 89 However, close comparison of the hands which entered bibliographic data for an item in the catalogue to the hand which produced the corresponding index entry tells a different story. Items which were catalogued by Sloane, Hand 1, Hand 2 and Wanley had their index entries written by a different person, Hand 3. 90 Further evidence that Hand 3 commenced the index is provided by the fact that it was Hand 3 who wrote the capital letters which head each alphabetical section of the volume. The entry for J. A. Gleichus in the index (fig. 8) may be compared with the corresponding catalogue entry, completed by Wanley (fig. 5). Nevertheless, it remains likely that such a large collection, with its hefty accompanying catalogue, would have had an index prior to c. 1710-12; it may be that Hand 3 copied out a previous index, leaving a greater quantity of space for further expansion, filling only the rectos and leaving the versos blank. The layout of the entries on the recto folios supports this conjecture. Hand 3 initially entered names and titles consistently about an inch apart, leaving ample room for information to be added between headings, thus implying that these were copied from an existing alphabetical list rather than being entered in an ad hoc order based on where items appeared in the catalogue.

Phase 4: Hand 4, 1715-19; Alban Thomas, 1719-22 91

The next phase opens with another unidentified hand, Hand 4. Initially, Hand 4 used a distinctive catalogue layout, inserting red margins to the left and right of each page (fig. 9). Sloane numbers were entered by the left margin, author name and volume title in the central column, and place and date of publication to the right. Whilst information continued to be laid out in three columns throughout the period when this amanuensis was employed by Sloane, Hand 4 abandoned the practice of drawing the red margins in 1718, about a year before (s)he ceased to work for Sloane. 92 During this period, Sloane’s household changed greatly with the marriages of his daughters in 1717 and 1719. This does not seem to have coincided with changes to the collection’s organization or arrangement, except that in 1719, a new series entitled ‘oriental manuscripts’ was begun and relevant items were provided with a new type of Sloane number, beginning MS Or, and, as noted above, ‘A’ became the only Sloane number ascribed to new folio purchases from the early 1720s. 93 Nevertheless, an intriguing possibility as to the identity of Hand 4 is raised by the fact that Hand 4’s contribution to the catalogue ceased in the same year that Sloane’s daughter Sarah married George Stanley. No samples of Sarah’s hand are known to survive, so this possibility can only remain speculative. Following Hand 4’s departure, Alban Thomas came to work as Sloane’s librarian (see fig. 10). Thomas is one of the newly identified hands in the catalogue, therefore some biographical information and an outline of his connection to Sloane is required. Welsh by birth, in 1713 Thomas was appointed assistant secretary of the Royal Society. Not only had Wanley also held this post, but it was also often combined with the position of the Society’s

89 Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, p. 56. 90 Sloane: entry for Jean Riolan, Sloane MS. 3792C, i, f. 1r, index at 3792D, f. 147r. Hand 1: entry for William Leybourn, Complete Surveyor (London, 1674), Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 83v, index Sloane MS. 3972D, ii, f. 13r. Hand 2: entry for Messengi, Sloane MS. 3792C, iv, f. 854, Sloane 3792D, f. 54. Wanley’s entry for William Waller, Sloane MS. 3792C, iii, f. 422, and the index entry at Sloane MS. 3792D, ii, f. 54r. 91 Hand 4’s work: Sloane MS. 3972C, v, ff. 82r-168r. Alban Thomas: Sloane 3972C, v, ff. 195r-236v. 92 Sloane MS. 3972C, v, f. 110r. For the 1718 date see Sloane MS. 3792C, v, f. 108v. 93 Sloane MS. 3972C, v, f. 171v (f. 171r: an item published in 1719 catalogued).

29 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 8. Index. Note the entry for J. A. Gleichus and see Wanley’s catalogue entry for this item in fig. 5. Sloane MS. 3972D, i, f. 208r.

30 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 9. Hand 4. Sloane MS. 3972C, v, f. 85r.

31 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 10. Alban Thomas. Sloane MS. 3972C, v, f. 218r.*

32 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

librarian, salaried for two days per week. 94 In this capacity, Thomas obtained experience of cataloguing a major acquisition: the bequest of Francis Aston. 95 In 1719 Thomas obtained his MD from Aberdeen and he thereafter practised in London. In 1722-3, Thomas apparently departed London under a cloud, suspected of Jacobite political sympathies. 96 A nineteenth-century antiquarian account of Thomas’s life includes the claim that he practised ‘under the auspices of the celebrated Sir Hans Sloane’ although no reference for this was given and the claim thus remains as yet frustratingly unverified. 97 Nevertheless, there is evidence that the two enjoyed a warm relationship and that Thomas sought advice from Sloane. Two letters from Thomas to Sloane survive, both dated 1738. In both, Thomas consulted the older and more experienced physician on professional matters, and signed himself ‘your old sincere friend and most obliged humble servant’. 98 The dates of Thomas’s residence in London as a practising physician, namely 1719-23, thus fit very neatly with the period when one hitherto unidentified hand was busily making catalogue entries for Sloane. Comparing this section of the catalogue to the two extant letters to Sloane in Thomas’s hand reveals a very strong match. For all his shared intellectual interests with Sloane, however, Thomas did not undertake any particularly innovative work on his library catalogue.

Phase 5: Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer: 1722-29 99

Johann Gaspar Scheuchzer arrived in London in 1723 and remained with Sloane as his librarian until his death on 10 April 1729. 100 Like his employer, Scheuchzer’s interests ranged widely across medicine, the sciences more broadly, and travel. 101 Scheuchzer’s most impressive achievement was undoubtedly his translation of Engelbert Kaempfer’s History of Japan (London, 1727). 102 Such independent intellectual projects did not, however, prevent him serving as an able librarian to Sloane: indeed, the fact that Scheuchzer’s hand can be found in the catalogues for other parts of Sloane’s collection, such as the fossil catalogue, indicates that his responsibilities were wider ranging than some of his predecessors and encompassed many areas of the collection. 103 Scheuchzer’s main innovation in terms of Sloane’s library relates to his reorganization of Sloane’s manuscript collections by size. 104 Both new acquisitions and existing volumes were provided with new numbers, with ‘A’ for folios, ‘B’ for quartos and ‘C’ for octavos and smaller. Likewise, Scheuchzer took responsibility for reorganizing the ‘Min’ classmark. 105 Other than these innovations, however, no substantial changes to the

94 Marie Boas Hall, The Library and Archives of the Royal Society, 1660-1990 (London, 1992), p. 4. 95 Ibid., p. 7. 96 John Edward and R. T. Jenkins et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940 (London, 1959), p. 937. 97 Samuel Rush Meyrick, The History and Antiquities of the County of Cardigan (London, 1810), p. 293. 98 Alban Thomas to Sloane, 13 November 1738, Sloane MS. 4077, f. 265; Alban Thomas to Sloane, 30 November 1738, Sloane MS. 4077, f. 268. 99 Sloane MS. 3972C, v, ff. 237r-289r; Sloane MS. 3972C, vi, throughout; Sloane MS. 3972C, vii, ff. 1r-152r. 100 Arthur MacGregor, ‘The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane’, in MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary , p. 26; Andrea Rusnock, ‘Scheuchzer, John Gaspar (1702–1729)’, ODNB. 101 Rusnock, op. cit. 102 Yu-Ying Brown, ‘Japanese Books and Manuscripts: Sloane’s Library and the Making of the History of Japan’, in MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane , pp. 278-90. See also Detlef Haberland, Engelbert Kaempfer 1651-1716: A Biography , trans. Peter C. Hogg (London, 1996). 103 Catalogue of Fossils II, NHM, 50.h.6, versos. 104 Nickson, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, pp. 266 and 275 n.33. 105 Sloane MS. 3792C, iv, f. 238r.

33 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions system of assigning Sloane numbers to volumes occurred during the period of Scheuchzer’s employment. Even the death of Sloane’s wife in 1724 entailed no reorganization of the collection space. In combination with the lack of impact of the marriages of Sloane’s daughters, and the significance of the year 1712 for the organization of Sloane numbers, this appears to provide yet more support for the view that from 1712 onwards Bloomsbury Square was used as a professional and collecting space whilst Chelsea became the locus for domestic life. Prior to his death Scheuchzer was engaged in a thoroughgoing procedure of checking the books. This is evident from a note by his successor as librarian, Cromwell Mortimer (discussed below), dated 26 October 1729, on the verso page opposite the entry for k 49, Bernard Palissy’s Discours admirables de la Nature des Eaux et Fontaines (Paris, 1580), in which Mortimer states: ‘here I began after Dr Scheuchzer to examin [sic] the books’. 106 Further evidence of Scheuchzer’s active engagement with existing collection items, as well as new arrivals, can be found in his notes elaborating on catalogue entries and in notes made by Stack after Scheuchzer’s death, including references to indexes completed by his predecessor. 107 Scheuchzer’s careful and thorough approach to Sloane’s catalogues makes it possible to date the latter volumes of the catalogue with greater accuracy than earlier volumes, since he inscribed both volumes VI and VII with the day on which he commenced work (fig. 11), a practice continued by Mortimer in volume VIII. Nickson had contended that the current division of Sloane MS. 3792C into eight volumes was of ‘recent’ origin although she cited no evidence for this claim. 108 In fact, the start dates inscribed on VI, VII, and VIII clearly demonstrate that these items retain their original format. The fact that a single set of foliation of arabic numerals commenced at the start of volume III strongly implies that both it and its immediate forerunner, volume II, have also retained their original format. Volumes I and IV end with blank folios, sometimes later filled by Stack, or with notes consistent with the end of a volume, implying in turn that volumes II and V always commenced at their current point. 109 Overall, it appears highly probable that the current division into eight volumes reflects the original state of the catalogue, though their binding dates from 1964.

Phase 6: Cromwell Mortimer and Thomas Stack: 1729-1741

Cromwell Mortimer and Thomas Stack worked together on Sloane’s catalogues of both books and objects from shortly after Scheuchzer’s death in 1729 until the early 1740s. Both men transcribed a substantial number of bibliographic entries and made numerous additions to existing catalogue entries. Such notes on works already entered bear witness to their involvement in processes of checking and reorganizing Sloane’s books, whilst the presence of their handwriting (see figs 12 and 13) in catalogues of objects indicates a broader supervision of Sloane’s collections. 110 Of the two men, Cromwell Mortimer appears to have been the more prominent both in his own time and in the eyes of subsequent historians earning, unlike Stack, an entry in the ODNB .111 Mortimer’s hand appears immediately after the final entries by Scheuchzer,

106 Sloane MS. 3792C, i, f. 48v. 107 For a typical correction by Scheuchzer: Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 102r. A number of Stack’s notes can be found at Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, ff. 191v-195r. 108 Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, p. 53. 109 Sloane MS. 3792C, i, ff. 207-9; Sloane MS. 3792C, iv, f. 205v. 110 Stack: NHM, Catalogue of Minerals, vol. iii A, f. 171; Mortimer: NHM, Catalogue of Minerals, vol. iii A, f. 203. 111 W. P. Courtney, ‘Mortimer, Cromwell (c. 1693–1752)’, rev. Michael Bevan, ODNB .

34 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 11. Scheuchzer: note the date on which the volume was commenced. Sloane MS. 3972C, vii, f. 1r.

35 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 12. Mortimer: note the date on which the volume was commenced. Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 1r.

36 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 13. Stack. Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 136r.

37 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions and it is evident from his note of October 1729, cited above, that one of his first duties was the continuation of Scheuchzer’s programme of book checking. Excluding entries which could have been made to fill in blank space, Stack’s hand commences 230 folios after Mortimer’s, indicating that Stack began work for Sloane later than Mortimer, c. 1733. 112 Their collaboration extended to projects beyond Sloane’s library, including their work for the Royal Society, such as a scheme of 1739 to publish its registers. 113 Since less is known about Stack’s life than some of Sloane’s more famous assistants, including his colleague Mortimer, it is helpful to commence with some brief biographical details. As ‘a Physitian well known to many members of this Society for his skill in Anatomy, Chemistry and Natural History’ Stack was elected FRS on 26 January 1737: Sloane and Mortimer were the first two names on his nomination. 114 Stack left Sloane’s employment in 1741; he subsequently held the position of Foreign Secretary to the Royal Society between 1748 and 1751. 115 In terms of library reorganization, Stack appears to have been more active than Mortimer, and from c. 1730 onwards he masterminded a major rearrangement of the books. Heavily illustrated books assigned a ‘Min’ classmark were re-entered as a group in the catalogue, a process completed by 28 January 1738. 116 A variety of new classmarks were introduced, including ‘fg’, ‘ef’, ‘gh’ and ‘gf’. Whilst these were sometimes ascribed to new acquisitions, in several instances books which had already received a Sloane number were moved and therefore provided with a new number; ‘gf’ constituting the exception since it was applied only to books which were being moved not to new purchases. Stack also introduced the Sloane number ‘Pr Or’ for printed items of oriental origin, possibly intended as a counterpart to the more established ‘MS. Or’. Many of these items had initially been catalogued by Scheuchzer, presumably in the course of his work on Japanese items obtained from Kaempfer’s collection, but Stack’s hand can be seen in the ‘Pr Or’ numbers assigned to such volumes over their original Sloane number. 117 Apart from the geographically or linguistically inspired organization behind ‘Pr Or’, Stack’s reorganization was mainly concerned with greater specificity in terms of size and, it appears, the quality of a volume’s binding. Whilst ‘a’ books had long been octavos and smaller, and ‘c’ books quartos, Stack introduced greater precision in how books were arranged. Henceforth, volumes of the ‘largest imperiall’ octavo size were to be shelfmarked ‘ef’, ‘common size well bound’ volumes as ‘fg’ and ‘well bound’ volumes ‘gh’. Numerous volumes formerly marked ‘a’ were reassigned to one of these numbers alongside a range of new acquisitions. Stack’s reorganization also entailed the expansion of existing classmarks, ‘J’, now used for ‘Imperial Quartos’, and ‘L’, for standard sized quartos. Other letters which were expanded during this period having been out of commission for some time previously included lower-case ‘l’, ‘o’, ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘u’, ‘w’ and ‘y’ and upper-case ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘R’. This precise ordering may have been motivated by a need to economize on space, or an attempt to create an ordered appearance within the library. The desire for an orderly library certainly motivated Sloane’s contemporaries, such as Samuel Pepys, whose library was similarly

112 Mortimer’s first entry: Sloane MS. 3972C, vii, f. 152; Stack’s first non-note entry: Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 75r. This is the point where Stack’s hand is seen consistently entering data: prior to this his hand appears making notes rather than large numbers of entries. 113 Marie Boas Hall, The Library and Archive of the Royal Society , 1660-1990, p. 8. 114 Certificate of Election and Candidature for Thomas Stack, 27 October 1737, London, Royal Society Archive [RS], EC1737/13. 115 Hall, Records of the Royal Society , p. 343. 116 Sloane MS. 3972C, i, f. 1r. 117 For example, Sloane MS. 3792C, vi, ff. 46v, 47v. For the main catalogue of Pr Or items see Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 79.

38 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

organized primarily on principles of size. 118 Shelf space would also have been affected by Stack’s reorganization of back numbers of serials so that they were shelved together, an effort which can potentially also be interpreted as an attempt to impose greater order on the book collection. 119 It appears likely that it was during this reorganization that Stack commenced the practice of inscribing ‘Bibliothecae Sloanianae’ on volumes. As table D reveals, books bearing this inscription are drawn from relatively few letter categories, and many of them have more than one Sloane number. In the majority of cases, the second number ascribed began with ‘L’, ‘J’, or ‘A’, some of the categories which Stack was most active in rearranging as a means, as we have seen, of imposing a more precise size categorization.

Table D: Books inscribed ‘Bibliothecae Sloanianae’ entered on the Sloane Printed Books Database 120

letter Number inscribed Number of which New letters ‘Bibliothecae changed numbers assigned or Sloanianae’ previous letters c 56 48 L, J, c, g, F d11L g11L m2 1 J r10- y10- z11L

A 135 95 J B8 6 H, A C1 1 A E2 2 A, L F1 1 c H 17 5 A, B, Q, Min J 21 11 c, m, A, N L 35 20 c, n, z N3 3 Min, L, J P11A Q1 1 H

118 K. Loveman, ‘Books and Sociability: The Case of Samuel Pepys’s Library’, Review of English Studies , lxi (2010), pp. 214-33, at pp. 227-30. See also Robert Latham et al. (eds.), Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1978-2004). 119 See, for instance, Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, ff. 166rv; 169v-170v. 120 http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sloane/AdvancedSearch.aspx; search undertaken 30 November 2010.

39 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Reorganization and checking was therefore an important aspect of the work of Sloane’s librarians in the 1720s and 1730s, but it is unclear whether this was a continuous process or an annual event, and whether books were checked in shelf-order or in order of appearance in the catalogue. Several papers dated 1740 indicate that a large amount of checking activity was undertaken in that year. On 5 May 1740 Stack produced a list of ‘Books set right’, a phrase implying the reshelving or replacing of books which were not in their proper location. 121 Two days later, on 7 May, Stack made a further list, this time detailing ‘Doubts remaining after the ReExamination’, including manuscripts which had been entered more than once in the catalogue. 122 Other, sadly undated, documents provide more details of the checking process. One undated list of books, including entries such as ‘R 169 is right should be R 179’, indicates that Stack was checking the accuracy of catalogue entries in addition to verifying the location of books. 123 The detail with which individual volumes were traced and located during checks of the library is revealed by a note next to the entry for a manuscript by one Ursini, entitled ‘Numismata’, which records the loan of the volume to the Earl of Pembroke, who in turn passed the volume to the Bishop of Ely, ‘in whose library it ought to be’. 124 Since there is no date on the note it is not possible to ascertain to which Bishop of Ely the manuscript was lent, but John Moore (1646-1714, Bishop of Ely from 1707) appears a likely candidate. 125 Moore had contact with Sloane, had a reputation for employing dubious methods to acquire books and had a policy of lending out his material – some of which was not returned. 126 The practice of lending books points to broader issues surrounding the function of Sloane’s library and his policy of access to it. A list of the books lent to ‘Several Persons’ during the period 1729-31 shows that loans were made on a regular, albeit infrequent, basis, to both men and women. 127 Despite their careful approach to checking the library, Stack and Mortimer were evidently willing to incorporate sheets with a provenance beyond Sloane’s library into the catalogue. Three large sheets at the end of volume VII list single sheet items of largely political subject matter, organized by title, dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with the latest given publication date of 1722. 128 It is evident that these were bound into the catalogue as Mortimer was transcribing bibliographic data on the surrounding pages since their foliation and original Sloane numbers (A 964, A 965 and A 966) are all in Mortimer’s hand and fit with the sequence of Sloane numbers being

121 ‘Books Set Right’, 5 May 1740, Sloane MS. 4019, f. 187v 122 ‘Doubts remaining’, 7 May 1740, Sloane MS. 4019, f. 188v. 123 Sloane MS. 4019 f. 184r. 124 Sloane MS. 3792C, ii, f. 136r. The manuscript in question has not been identified. It has not entered the collection of Diocesan Manuscripts at Cambridge University Library (see Dorothy M. Owen, Ely Records: A Handlist of the Bishop and Archdeacon of Ely (Chichester, 1971). Moore’s library was purchased by George I, who donated it to Cambridge University Library. If the manuscript were in Moore’s library at that point, it would be identifiable in early catalogues of CUL manuscripts, such as Charles Hardwick and Henry Richards Luard (eds.), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 5 vols (Cambridge, 1895). It is likely that this manuscript was a work owned or written by the collector Fulvio Orsini, the Latin form of whose name was Fulvius Ursinus. Sloane also owned a copy of Orsini’s Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditor ex antiquis lapidibus et nomismatib (Rome, 1570), BL 551.e.6(3). A heavily illustrated printed work, this was initially given the Sloane number H 238, changed to Pr Sloane numbers when the series was introduced. The manuscript lent by Sloane, however, remains as yet unidentified. I would like to thank Barry Taylor for his help in identifying Orsini. 125 Peter Meadows, ‘Moore, John (1646–1714)’, ODNB. 126 David McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Library , vol. ii (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 74, 67-9, 80. 127 ‘Account of Books lent to Several Persons’, Sloane MS. 4019, f. 201. 128 Sloane MS. 3972C, vii, ff. 231-233, 238, 241.

40 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions employed at that point in the volume. However, the main text of these items is written in a hand which does not appear elsewhere in the catalogue. It is highly probable, therefore, that these sheets originated outside the library. More speculatively, it is likely that they arrived at the library with the items which they served as index to, possibly bought en bloc as an existing collection of ephemera, at which point Stack and Mortimer removed these finding aids from the collection which they served in favour of integrating them into the main catalogue. The latest dated items catalogued by both Stack and Mortimer were published in 1741. 129 The two men probably left Sloane’s employment at about the same time since their hands cease to appear in the catalogue within a few folios of each other. 130 That 1741 was the year of both Stack’s and Mortimer’s departure is corroborated by a claim made by their successor, James Empson in 1753, that he had had the care of Sloane’s collections for twelve years. 131 By this reckoning, Empson joined Sloane in 1741. Although apparently no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the library or collections, Mortimer retained his connection with Sloane until at least 1748, when he was present at the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Sloane’s collections in Chelsea. 132 In view of their long service with Sloane and their lively independent intellectual ambitions, the departure of the indefatigable duo from Sloane’s service would have meant that a great deal of knowledge and command of the library and collections would have been lost. Why they left Sloane’s employment is unclear. It may be that his stroke in 1742 and the collection’s consequent relocation to Chelsea rendered employment with Sloane less attractive. In any event, it is unsurprising that their departure heralded a more static phase in the Sloane library, when acquisition and development gradually ground to a halt.

Phase 7: James Empson: 1741-52

Sloane was actively involved in the relocation of his collections to Chelsea, despite his declining health. 133 Since no new Sloane numbers were assigned to books at this stage, the implication appears to be that their order remained roughly unchanged. However, the often quoted remark of the British Museum Trustees that in 1755 the books in Chelsea were ‘disposed in a Very Irregular Manner, with little regard either to the Subjects or even Size of them’ suggests that Stack’s careful segregation of imperial octavo from octavo and poorly bound from well bound books had been undone by this date. Whether or not the books fell into a state of disarray once they arrived in Chelsea, it is certainly possible that they were not arranged as neatly there as they had been hitherto. Sloane’s final entries in the catalogue (as shown in fig. 14) were apparently made in 1741 or 1742, following those by Mortimer and preceding those in Empson’s hand. 134 This may indicate a period when Sloane lacked a library assistant and attempted to undertake cataloguing himself. Empson’s role appears to have been a less active one than that of many of his predecessors. There is no evidence, for example, that he undertook large scale checking of the collection. Such a reduction in activity is hardly surprising considering that Mortimer and Stack had worked together, whereas Empson had sole charge of Sloane’s collection: working alone, he could accomplish less. Empson made no major innovations in how Sloane’s books were catalogued or arranged, continuing to enter bibliographic data in the pattern set by his predecessors (fig. 15).

129 Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, ff. 318r, 324r. 130 Stack’s final entry: Sloane MS. 3972C, f. 324r ; Mortimer’s final entry: Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 343r. 131 MacGregor, ‘The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane’, p. 26. 132 Ibid., p. 35. 133 Ibid., p. 28. 134 Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 344r.

41 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 14. Sloane’s hand in later life: the last entries he catalogued himself. Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 344r.

42 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Fig. 15. Empson. Sloane MS. 3972C, viii, f. 384r.

43 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

The extent to which the process of book acquisition slowed from 1742 until Sloane’s eventual death in 1752 is neatly illustrated by the time periods covered by the extant volumes. Whilst volumes VI and VII each covered approximately five years of acquisitions and rearrangement, volume VIII, commenced on 4 August 1731, sufficed for the twenty-one years until Sloane’s death. Within volume VIII, the first 344 folios were complete by 1741, and only fifty-one were used in the final ten years of Sloane’s life. Despite his lack of innovation, Empson evidently gained Sloane’s confidence as a curator since he was appointed a trustee of Sloane’s collection in his will. In this role, he was provided with an annual salary of £100 to care for the collection until a permanent home was found. 135 Empson therefore oversaw the collection’s transition from Sloane’s private cabinet of curiosities to become the nucleus for the British Museum.

Afterlife of the catalogues

As a working document with a practical purpose in locating books, the utility of Sloane’s catalogues would have declined dramatically once Sloane’s books were removed from their shelves in Chelsea and relocated. Like Sloane’s books themselves, the history of the catalogue within the British Museum and thereafter the British Library is not fully documented: what follows is therefore a partly speculative, albeit probable, account of their post-Sloane fate. It is clear that Sloane’s catalogues initially remained with his collections following his death, and that they accompanied them to the British Museum. In 1755 the Trustees of the British Museum decided to separate Sloane’s manuscripts from his printed books. 136 It was probably the separation of printed from manuscript volumes which prompted the Trustees to order in 1758 that the folios containing manuscript entries should be removed from Sloane’s library catalogue and rebound in a new volume, creating what is now Sloane MS. 3972B. Evidently, the Trustees’ initial intention was for entries related to printed books on the removed pages to be copied, either back into the main catalogue or into a separate volume. 137 However, no evidence of such a list survives: entries were certainly not copied back into the main printed books catalogue. 138 Separated from the manuscripts, Sloane’s printed books were reshelved by subject, within which size order was observed. 139 This may explain why the intention to copy the details of printed items catalogued amongst the manuscripts never reached fruition. As we have seen, during Sloane’s lifetime, his library was not organized by subject. Therefore, even if Sloane’s printed books had been shelved according to their existing pressmarks on their arrival at the Museum, this subject-based reorganization would have rendered any catalogue of existing press or shelfmarks useless. By contrast, the newly created catalogue of manuscripts retained its usefulness, as evidenced by the annotations that it bears made by subsequent Museum staff; we can therefore assume it continued to be used. The ordering of Sloane’s collection would have been further altered when items were removed from the Museum for the duplicate sales between 1769 and 1832 and it seems probable that any remaining sense of Sloane’s books as a collection would have been lost

135 MacGregor, ‘The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane’, p. 26. 136 F. J. Hill, ‘The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books’, p. 4. 137 Catalogue of Sloane Manuscripts, Sloane MS. 3972B, ff. 68v, 141r. 138 Their index entries were not updated by deleting the old page reference and inserting a second entry in the catalogue. Furthermore, no additional lists were inserted at the back of the catalogue or on remaining blank folios. 139 Hill, ‘The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books’, p. 4.

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during the major rearrangement of the books between 1790 and 1805. 140 It is possible that Sloane’s printed book catalogue was housed in the Department of Printed Books rather than of Manuscripts since it was not included in E. L. J. Scott’s 1904 index to the Sloane manuscripts. If the printed books catalogue had been amongst the Sloane manuscripts in the Department of Manuscripts at that date it would presumably have been included. However, it was not: the entry for Sloane MS. 3972 refers to two volumes of a catalogue of manuscripts only. These were probably what is now Sloane MS. 3972B, the manuscript list based on pages removed from Sloane’s original catalogue, and Sloane MS. 3972A, a later list of the Sloane manuscripts. 141 In 1888, each volume of the catalogue was refoliated. The fact that this process was undertaken at the same time for each volume implies that at this point all eight volumes remained together and retained their collective identity. 142 By the early 1940s, however, this was no longer the case. In an article of 1941 J. S. Finch cites three volumes of Sloane catalogues housed at Sloane MS. 3972, two of which, A and B, related to manuscripts, whilst C was a one-volume catalogue of printed books. 143 Finch’s citation of the highest ‘R’ Sloane number it contains, R 427, and of G 395, the Series Chronologica Imperatorum Romanorum , (1655) enables it to be identified as what we now know is volume III of Sloane’s catalogue. 144 The current binding of all eight volumes of Sloane MS. 3972C dates from 1964. By this date, therefore, volumes I-II and IV-VIII had been reidentified and reunited with volume III. Whilst Sloane MS. 3972C has regained its cohesion and place amongst the Sloane manuscripts, however, Lindenius Renovatus remains separate: although heavily annotated and interleaved, it remains categorized as a printed book and is shelved separately from the other parts of Sloane’s other book and manuscript catalogue.

Conclusions

By examining developments in Sloane’s library and collections in relation to events in his life, a number of new facets of the organization and development of Sloane’s library catalogues have been brought to light. The date at which the catalogue was commenced has been revised from 1693 to 1692, whilst the extant index volumes have been more substantially redated from 1693 to c. 1712. More broadly, the development of Sloane’s collections and their catalogues has been linked more closely to developments in Sloane’s life and career. Whilst known amanuenses have long been acknowledged as important in Sloane’s library, this article has shown that the as yet unidentified assistants who helped in the library were similarly significant. Nevertheless, much remains to be learned about Sloane’s library catalogues. Whilst the function and significance of the desiderata lists in the catalogue has been elucidated, the bibliographical sources for two desiderata lists, ‘o’ and ‘m’, remain as yet unidentified. Uncovering the identities of the remaining four stubbornly anonymous amanuenses is another particularly desirable avenue for research. A potential clue as to the identity of one of these men is found in a note made by Stack when checking the books in the 1740s, which includes the entry ‘R 387 Tryon mistook for R 827 – 898’. 145 R 387 was the Sloane code for

140 Ibid., p. 5. 141 For more on Sloane MS. 3972A see Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, pp. 55-6. 142 See the notes on the final, often unfoliated, sheets in each volume. 143 J. S. Finch, ‘Sir Hans Sloane’s Printed Books’, The Library , 4th ser., xxii (1941), pp. 69-72, at p. 70. 144 Finch, op. cit., pp. 70-1. Nickson, in error, claims that Finch was working from volumes I and II of the catalogue. It is possible this misunderstanding arose from the existence of a photostat copy of volume III in the British Library staff reference collection. This divided into two volumes marked only ‘Sloane Catalogue of Printed Books I’ and ‘Sloane Catalogue of Printed Books II’ on the spine. Nickson, ‘Hans Sloane’, p. 60. 145 Sloane MS. 4019, f. 184r.

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Johann Albert Fabricius, Acta, Epistolae Apocalypses aliaque Scripta Apostolis Falso Inscripta Sive codicis Apocryphi Novi Testamenti , the second volume of Codex apocryphus Novi Testamenti (Hamburg, 1703). It seems plausible from this that ‘Tryon’ was a library assistant engaged in checking the books. The entry for R 387 was made by Hand 1, and entries for R 827-898 by Hand 2; ‘Tryon’ could therefore plausibly be Hand 2, 3, or 4. 146 The British Library manuscripts collection contains samples of the hands of four individuals surnamed ‘Tryon’ active c. 1650-1750: none of these matches any of the hands in the Sloane catalogue. 147 Of the two Tryons notable enough to achieve an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, the hand sample of one, William Tryon, did not match: the other, Thomas, died in 1703, and since his life dates would therefore only render him a possible candidate for Hand 1, it is unlikely the note could refer to him. 148 Neither the Royal Society archive nor the manuscript collections of the Welcome Library contain papers relating to a ‘Tryon’ which fall within the correct chronological range, and no-one of this name held office as Secretary, Foreign Secretary or Assistant Secretary at the Royal Society, the holders of which posts, as we have seen, frequently moonlighted for Sloane. For now, therefore, ‘Tryon’ remains elusive. Whilst on one level the catalogue functioned as a record of books which Sloane owned and served as a finding aid, at various stages it also adopted more complex purposes, such as recording books Sloane sought to acquire in particular areas of interest. Despite such changing functions, from its inception in 1692 until Sloane’s death in 1752, the catalogue of his library remained a working tool. Produced over sixty years, with contributions by eleven individuals, in addition to pages bound in from other sources, it records several distinct stages and projects. As such, its complexity and richness as a multi-authored insight into one of the great early modern libraries deserves greater recognition.

146 Sloane MS. 3972C, iii, f. 179v; Sloane MS. 3972C, iv, ff. 9v-11v. 147 For Samuel Tryon, JP of Collyweston: BL, Add. MS. 29565, ff. 288, 359, 535. Samuel Tryon was known to Sloane, who produced a certificate of his health: Sloane MS. 4078, f. 379. 148 Paul David Nelson, ‘Tryon, William (1729–1788)’, ODNB ; Virginia Smith, ‘Tryon, Thomas (1634-1703)’, ODNB . Sloane did, however, own a number of the latter’s works, including: Thomas Tryon, Pythagoras his Mystick Philosophy reviv’d; or, The Mystery of Dreams unfolded ... To which is added, A discourse of the causes, ... and cure of phrensie, etc. (London, 1691), BL, 719.c.28; Thomas Tryon, The Knowledge of a Man’s Self the surest guide to the true worship of God, and good government of the mind and body; ... or the second part of the Way to Long Life, Health and Happiness (London, 1703), BL, 855.d.12. To date, nine more have been identified by the Sloane printed books project and are entered on its database: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sloane/.

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48 eBLJ 2011, Article 16 The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organisation, and Functions

Table G: The size of books assigned to each Sloane number

A Folio a8o B Folio b8o C Folio c4o D Folio d4o E Folio e4o F4o f8o G4o g8o H Folio h8o I- i4o J4o j- K- k 8o L4o l8o M- m 4o & smaller N4o n8o O- o 8o P Folio p8o Q Folio q4o & smaller R8o & smaller r4o S- s 8o T- t 8o U- u 8o V- v - W- w 8o X- x 8o Y- y 8o Z- z 4o

49 eBLJ 2011, Article 16