Fortunate Survivors: Maps and Map Fragments in the Bagford Collection Tom Harper Described quite correctly as ‘maps and fragments’,1 for the contents of a composite volume in the British Library known as Harl.5935 a more thorough evaluation is long overdue. These include printed maps from books dating from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as cuttings from maps, engravings of scientific instruments, and at least three separately issued maps which are not known to exist elsewhere. The volume into which they have been attached is one of 129 scrapbooks of prints put together by the antiquary and book dealer John Bagford (1650-1716), an interesting character best known for accumulating parts of books rather than whole ones. Bagford was especially interested in title-pages and printing samples. These comprise the bulk of the collection, and it is upon them that attention has previously been focused. In the first comprehensive catalogue of the collection, for example, maps may eventually be found amongst proposals, colophons and adverts in a section entitled ‘some items of interest other than title-pages’.2 Clearly, as only five volumes of the collection are known to contain more than one map, it is understandable why they have been overlooked.3 A description of the volume in the ‘Rough List of the Contents of the Bagford Collection’ of 1902 gives special mention to Edward Wright’s 1599 two-sheet world map ‘of extraordinary rarity’, a sentiment also expressed by William Younger Fletcher in his biography of Bagford that same year.4 Equally scarce but previously unmentioned material includes a fragment of a map of the Holy Land, a single sheet of Jacob van Deventer’s wall map of Friesland and another from a version of Gaspar Vopel’s map of Europe, all from the sixteenth century, and these are placed amongst other maps which reflect in some way Bagford’s antiquarian interests. This is an intriguing but eccentric group of prints which has been principally overlooked since its incorporation into the British Museum collection. The present article will examine a number of them in detail, looking also at Bagford’s possible motives for acquiring them and why he might have thought them interesting. To begin with, it will be beneficial to chart the history of the Bagford collection from its acquisition by Edward Harley and accession to the British Museum to the present day. Bagford’s profession and interests complemented each other.5 As a prominent London book dealer active from around 1686, he helped to build some of the great collections including the libraries of Sir Hans Sloane and Edward Harley. Through this he became acquainted with the major antiquarian figures of the time such as Harley’s librarian 1 Melvin Wolf (ed.), Catalogue and Indexes to the Title-Pages of English Printed Books Preserved in the British Library’s Bagford Collection (London, 1974), p. 495. 2 Ibid. 3 The five volumes containing more than one map are Harl.5935, 5956, 5957, 5972 and 5995. 4 A.W. Pollard, ‘A Rough List of the Contents of the Bagford Collection’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vii (London, 1902-4), p. 28, reprinted in Wolf (ed.), Catalogues and Indexes, p. xxi, and William Younger Fletcher, English Book Collectors (London, 1902), p. 136. 5 Milton McC. Gatch, ‘John Bagford, Bookseller and Antiquary’, British Library Journal, xii (1986), pp. 150-71, brings together Bagford’s various interests. 1 eBLJ 2010, Article 1 Fortunate Survivors: Maps and Map Fragments in the Bagford Collection Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), and Richard Waller (c. 1660- 1715), with the latter of whom Bagford attempted to resurrect the Society of Antiquaries.6 Correspondence between Bagford and these figures reveals a man immersed in the historical issues of the day, and this is emphasized further in the journals of Hearne and Wanley, and in Bagford’s own published and unpublished work.7 It was in pursuit of an ambitious but ultimately unrealized scheme to write a history of printing that the book dealer turned collector, amassing some 4,600 printing samples and gathering them in volumes for use as primary source material for his grand work. It is in this context that the Bagford Collection should be understood, for in terms of its contents and purpose it is a very different collection to those Bagford helped to build. Perceptions of it have altered over time. Earlier biographers, for example, found it hard to reconcile Bagford’s love of books with his seeming disregard for them in removing bits he found interesting,8 despite the fact that the practice, especially with regard to maps, has never really gone away. In fact, the composite nature of the collection, and Bagford’s scholarly motivations for compiling it, implies a stronger affinity with leaf books and certain extra-illustrated volumes than the gatherings of traditional bibliophiles.9 Bagford’s collection enables us not only to study prints which have not survived elsewhere, but to evaluate changing attitudes towards prints, books and collecting. These changing attitudes are appreciable through an analysis of the history of the collection after Bagford’s death in 1716. Most of the material was purchased by Edward Harley,10 and it was as part of Harley’s collection of manuscripts that most of it reached the British Museum upon its foundation in 1753, to be housed in the Department of Manuscripts. There is, of course, a certain irony in a collection of specifically printed material being stored in a place reserved for non-printed items, and it was only in 1890 that the printed material was moved to the Department of Printed Books as part of an exchange between the two departments.11 This delay has much to do with inertia and inflexibility on the part of the British Museum, but it also suggests a particular impression of the Bagford Collection as somehow problematic, ill-suited or at worst irrelevant to the institution. It was, after all, made up largely of title-pages of books which the Museum either already owned or would subsequently purchase. But it was not completely without interest, for in 1814 some 1000 prints, and in 1900 a further 256 prints were transferred to a third party, the Department of Prints and Drawings.12 The folio volume bears testament to these episodes. It has been given the shelfmark Harl.5935, indicating its former ownership by Harley. It contains 125 folios numbered in ink, the watermarks of which suggest a date c. 1707,13 contemporary with Bagford and 6 Theodore Harmsen, Bagford, John (1650/51-1716) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edition, 2008). 7 Correspondence is contained in Harl. MS. 4966. Harmsen, Oxford DNB; Gatch, pp. 165-8; Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble, D. E. Rannie and H. E. Salter (Oxford, 1885-1921); C. E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright (eds.) The Diary of Humfrey Wanley: 1715-1726 (London, 1966). 8 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; Containing some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of the Fatal Disease (London, 1809), pp. 12-14. Summaries of Bagford’s critics are provided in Gatch, p. 150, and Arthur Freeman, ‘Everyman and Others, part 1: Some Fragments of Early English Printing, and their Preservers’, The Library, 7th Series, ix (2008), p. 267. 9 Christopher de Hamel, ‘The Leaf Book’, in Christopher de Hamel and Joel Silver, Disbound and Dispersed: The Leaf Book Considered (Chicago, 2005), pp. 6-23; Freeman, p. 284. 10 Part of the collection was also bought by Sir Hans Sloane. See Margaret Nickson, ‘Bagford and Sloane’, British Library Journal, ix (1983), p. 51, and C. E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani (London, 1972), p. 59. 11 36 of the 129 volumes are manuscript. The exchange is dealt with in Fontes Harleiani, Appendix II. 12 Wolf (ed.), Catalogues and Indexes, p. ix; Antony Griffiths and Reginald Williams, The Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: User’s Guide (London, 1987), p. 80. 13 Cf. E. Heawood, Monumenta Chartae Papyraceae Historiam Illustrantia: vol. i. Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hilversum, 1950), no. 3765 (pl. 506). 2 eBLJ 2010, Article 1 Fortunate Survivors: Maps and Map Fragments in the Bagford Collection consistent with the dates of the constituent maps and prints, the latest being 1704. A note dated 1814 written on a front endpaper and signed by Henry Ellis and William Alexander14 states that one print has been removed to ‘the portfolios of the Print Room’. This statement is confusing, since eighty-seven pages bear evidence of having had prints attached to them, some still retaining the glued corners of these absent works. Establishing any Museum staff involvement in these removals is complicated by the fact that a further fifteen pages have prints stuck over the remnants of other prints, and we should acknowledge that Bagford would himself most probably have removed and attached prints from the volume. However, evidence for at least one undocumented alteration by the Museum concerns a print which bears one of the earliest British Museum stamps on its verso.15 As the print is glued on all four corners it could only have been stamped when it was not attached to the volume, indicating that it must have been attached, or else removed and reattached, after 1753. We may be sure, at any rate, that the contents of the volume have not been drastically altered since 1837, when it was certified to contain only one more than its current ninety- five items by Sir Frederic Madden. Madden became Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts in that same year, and one of his final tasks before his appointment would have involved the numbering of each print and fragment and marking as blank the pages displaying the remnants of removed prints.16 He certifies his work on folio 124v, dating it 1 January 1837.