Book reviews

Catalogueof booksprinted in the XVth centurynow in the British Museum. Part X: Spain, Portugal. London, the Trustees of the British Museum, 1971, f°, lxxv, 92 pp., 20 Pl., fac., ISBN 0714101141, £ 8.-.

'BMCX: SPAIN,1' OR T U GA AL' REVIEWING- ARTICLE

The student of fifteenth-century sources for the history of the Iberian peninsula will test BMC X against the rich fund of knowledge which we already have of the early years of printing there: Hacblcrl and Vindel2 for the incunabula period proper, and Norton3 for the following twenty years, 1500-20, though he is also indispensable for the last decades of the fifteenth century. Those readers of Quaerendospecialized in the field to which this journal is devoted, however, will certainly, if they are bibliographers, have come across 'Spain' in Appendix I published by Curt F. Biihler in I949 in Standardso f BibliographicalDescription.4 Furthermore, they can permit themselves a different, more restricted approach to a catalogue such as BMC X. In the history of printing, the relations and connections between the Low Countries and the area dealt with in BMC X occupy no more than a modest place :5indeed, a conspicuously modest place. In view of the history of trading between the two regions, and the political events of the end of the fifteenth century, one might have expected the situation to be otherwise. (Indeed, it is possible that the situation was otherwise, but we shall not know until library research in Spain and Portugal has told us more about the book trade based on Antwerp and Louvain.) Such an aspect of a wider question, however, requires a great deal of detail before any kind of synthesis can become meaningful. Here, moreover, it must be approached in the con- text of the whole of western Europe, and research into early printing is not yet sufficiently equipped for such a purpose. But however this may be, the bibliographer/incunabulist is certain first of all to judge BMC X against the background of the tradition and evolution of the largest and most important catalogue of incunabula in the world, a chapter in the history of bibliography which opened in 1908 and will close only when the study of incunabula has become a dead science. The development of the principles underlying the study and description of incunabula 'now in the British Museum' - that is, 'now in the British Library' - since in vol.I A. W. Pollard introduced analytical bibliography when researching individual copies, has been governed by the Proctor order which was chosen for the classification of the collection. If an alphabetical arrangement in a catalogue admits of autonomous treatment of the copies to be described (whether or not they are representative of an edition), as soon as the starting-point becomes 67 presseswithin a place of printing, and towns within a higher organic context, the consequence is that preliminary research must be carried out within the framework of the history of books and printing. Thus we are faced with the remarkable fact that those parts of the catalogueof the largest collection of all which have so far appeared are based on a structure which is in essence that of a bibliography, a 'Panzer', while Hain and the Gesamtkatalogder Wiegendrucke -that is, the great bibliographies -are structurally catalogues as long as they are not confronted to a greater or lesser degree with their true objective by a 'Burger' (by which, of course, no criticism is implied of the Kommission fur den Gesamtkatalog). In the room used by the specialized bibliographers in the British Museum - the name of which, 'the Arched Room', has become for their colleagues in the outside world a synonym for partic- ular expertise - this circumstance has led to increasing integration of the cataloguing work itself and research for the introductions on book and printing history and, not least, for the short but factual introductions which precede the cataloguing of copies from individual presses. These introductions have as it were progressed from being summaries of results to becoming the foundations upon which rest, for the user of the catalogue, the descriptions and, increasingly, the often extensive notes on individual editions, from which the descriptions themselves take their usefulness and often their fundamental significance for the incunabulist. A further conse- quence of this is that in such cases as that of BMC X, although the collection is in no way representative of what left the presses in the countries concerned during the relevant period, the catalogue can and must be regarded as an independent contribution to bibliography and book and printing history. Those who are not obliged to consult BMC X for any specific purpose but are nonetheless interested in the wider aspects of the history of books and culture in general should still open this book simply in order to read it. Having opened it, however, they must not allow themselves to be frightened off either by the traditional large format (even though, alas, it is not calculated to assist in the reading of introductions in particular) or by the equally traditional layout and the to-ing and fro-ing consequent upon it. The trouble taken is certain to be rewarded in full. The characteristic of BMC X which this reveals, namely its independence as a publication despite the limitations inevitably imposed upon any catalogue, is made even more apparent by the references to other works which the reader (and user) will find in it. Here too, we see the evolution of cataloguing towards increased emphasis on and visibility of completed biblio- graphical research among the small circle of catalogue-makers. There are, of course, many possibilitiesbetween the reticence of a Hain and the communicativeness of a Panzer. In successive volumes of BMC the accent has clearly shifted towards the latter, that is, towards the biblio- graphical viewpoint. In the context of this review, and hence in the context of the work done in the British Mu- seum, we must also remember a number of separate publications emanating from those who collaborated on the new volume. In this way we may gain some impression of the vast amount of preliminary work which was carried out, the importance of which for the final realization of the great catalogue might otherwise all too easily remain unrecognized. In the first place there is the discussion of the important problem of the beginning of printing in Barcelona by George D. Painter in Gutenberg-jahrbuch1962 (as early as 1932 Dr. Victor Scholderer had written in The Library on 'The earliest books printed at Barcelona'; reprinted in 1966 in his Fifty Essays). Then there is Dr. Dennis E. Rhodes's article on 'The first use of Greek type in Spain' in Gutenberg-jahrbuch196o, and in Gutenberg-jahrbuch1963 the same author's definitive re-ascription of a previously supposedly Spanish incunable to Naples. George D. Painter is likely to be particularly associated with BMC X, for he has not only written the General Introduction but is also a co-signatory to the Introduction to the Presses, where he follows L. A. Sheppard, who bore most of the responsibility for the descriptions in this volume;