Cambridge Bibliographical Society
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Cambridge Bibliographical Society A DICTIONARY OF ORIENTAL COLLECTIONS IN CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Author(s): ANDREW DALBY Source: Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1988), pp. 248-280 Published by: Cambridge Bibliographical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41154659 Accessed: 29-02-2016 11:43 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge Bibliographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 78.33.29.102 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:43:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions A DICTIONARY OF ORIENTAL COLLECTIONS IN CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ANDREW DALBY This is a guide to sources of information on Oriental manuscripts and books (excluding Japanese) now in Cambridge University Library from the point of view of provenance and previous ownership. Its starting point was a list of collections compiled by Donald Crane; many colleagues have helped me including Charles Aylmer, Jill Butterworth, David Hall, Nigel Hancock, Clive Jamieson, Geoffrey Khan, Wilfrid Lockwood, Margaret Pamplin, Jim Pearson, Geoffrey Roper, and Godfrey Waller. I gathered material systematically during the five years that I worked in the Oriental Department, later the Department of Oriental and Other Languages, 1980-85. The guide was largely complete when I left, but in revising I have luckily been able to draw on the recently published histories by John Oates and David McKitterick. I have been especially grateful for the help and encouragement of Stefan Reif, the present Head of the Department. As it happens, all of his living predecessors are named above: and I ought to acknowledge the two most recent who are no longer living, E. J. Thomas and Susan Skilliter, for the particularly noteworthy contributions both can be seen to have made to the systematic recording of Orientalia at the Library. I have generally limited myself to collectors who owned at least 30 manuscripts, or at least some hundreds of fragments or printed books, which are now in the Library; and I have dealt only with collections in the languages of continental Asia and north Africa. It will be under- stood, therefore, that much material of relevance to Oriental studies is mentioned only incidentally or not at all. To give some examples: the papers of Israel Abrahams (1858-1924), F.C. Burkitt (1864-1935), Lord Crewe (1858-1945), Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883: see Co well below), A. C. Haddon (1855-1940), Professor G. Haloun (1898-1951), Lord Hardinge (1858-1944: see N. J. Hancock, Handlist of the Har dinge papers at the University Library, Cambridge, Cambridge 1968), James Hornell (d. 1949), Hermann Hupfeld (1796-1866: see Bensly below), Lord Mayo (1822-1872), Professor A. C. Moule (1873-1957), W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) and J. C. Trevor (1907-67) are largely in Western languages; so are the archives of Jardine Matheson & Co., covering approximately the years 1800-1900, and the ethnomusicological library 248 This content downloaded from 78.33.29.102 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:43:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of Dr L. E. Picken (b. 1909). The publications of the British and Foreign Bible Society, deposited from 1822 onwards, should not be overlooked, though overshadowed by the Bible Society's own very large library now deposited in Cambridge: for this see Guide to reader services no. ij: Bible Society s Library, Cambridge 1986, which includes a bibliography. The holdings of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Laundress Lane, are of great importance for the history and back- ground of British India: a catalogue by Mary Thatcher, Cambridge South Asian archive (London 1973) gives an idea of the Centre's wealth, but it has grown rapidly since 1973. 'Continental Asia' excludes Japan: the most important Japanese collections at the Library are those of W. G. Aston (1841-1911), Sir Ernest Satow (1843-1929), Baron Heinrich von Siebold (1852-1908) and Dr Picken. On the last see Music from the Tang court transcribed from the original, unpublished Sino-Japanese manu- scripts by L. Picken [and others], London etc. 1981-. The form of the alphabetical entries below is deliberately laconic: they are intended to guide those interested in the provenance of the Oriental collections to the detailed information that is to be found in manuscript or printed form. This practical aim has meant that collec- tions with complex origins and collections that have become scattered in the Library claim more space than others of equal size and importance. On two categories of very scattered material information is easily available to the enquirer and so is not given here at length. Letters sent by persons listed below, now to be found among their recipients' papers in the Western manuscript collections, are indexed in the Western manuscripts card catalogue. 'Adversaria' (printed books with manuscript annotations) of persons listed below are to be found by consulting the class catalogues of class Adv., whose arrangement, though complex, encourages the personal approach as much as any other. The fact that I am no longer on the staff of the University Library and no longer able to devote time to Orientalist bibliography must be my excuse for a certain unevenness in the entries below. For some early 20th century donations and transfers I have found no lists. Probably they are there to be found. I am sure that concentrated study of almost any one of the collections noticed here will yield much more infor- mation on provenance. I fear I will have made errors (for which I alone take the blame). If this guide proves at least temporarily useful, its deficiencies will perhaps spur others to revise or replace it. In references to sources of further information, ULC class-marks are provided for manuscripts, for rare printed matter, and for published 249 This content downloaded from 78.33.29.102 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:43:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions books with manuscript annotations. Certain Library records have no class-marks. Of these the Donations Books from 1800 and lists of Collections Presented are kept in the Accessions Department. Unpub- lished catalogues and handlists of collections are in the relevant section of the Department of Oriental and Other Languages; copies of the more frequently used lists are also available in the Manuscripts Reading Room. Some obsolete class-catalogues are in the Department of Oriental and Other Languages; others are in the Library Archives, like most of the miscellaneous letters and papers to which I have referred. Walter Sibbald ADIE (17 August 1872-6 April 1956) M.A., Fellow of Trinity College 1896, who served in the Indian Civil Service as accountant-general, etc., from 1896 and retired in 1929, made a collection of manuscripts and lithographs in India. From these on 24 January 1924 the Library selected 38 Arabic and Persian manuscripts (Or. 1042-1079) and 4 Urdu lithographed books of about 1850 (S828.b.85.3; 836-51 .b.85.7; 836-51. b.80.22; 836-51. b.80.23, completed and decorated in manuscript). See A. M. Nizamu'd-Din, A classified list of the selected Adie mss and lithographed works ... [with notes by E. G. Browne. MS. Or. 1749]. Further manuscripts from the collection (Or. 1371-1374, Burmese and Sanskrit; Or. 1596-1635, Arabic and Persian; Or. 1748, fragments) were presented on 3 February 1943. James Drummond ANDERSON (11 November 1852-24 November 1920) M.A., Litt.D., was born in Calcutta where his father, an army doctor in India and Burma, was Inspector General of Hospitals. He served in the Indian Civil Service at Sylhet, Cachar and Chittagong between 1873 and 1900; at Cambridge he was University Lecturer in Bengali from 1907. See H. T. Francis: In memoriam. James Drummond Anderson, Cambridge 1921 [Cam. c. 921. 9]. Anderson's col- lection of printed books, mainly in or on Indian languages and especially those of Bengal and Assam, reached the Library by two routes. 78 volumes were presented by Mrs Anderson in 1922 and are listed in Cambridge University Reporter (20 June 1922) pp. 1175, 1179. The Donations Book further records '341 vols, 318 pts & 8 small items which were found in Orientalia unstamped & in some cases with no bookplates'. This latter collection, to which the Library Syndicate alluded in referring to Anderson's 'unobtrusive' generosity (ibid., p. 1172) was at first kept together in class And. The obsolete class- catalogue lists 669 volumes and the new class-marks to which they were dispersed. A group of letters addressed to Anderson is included in a collection of papers, Add. 7602, transferred from the Oriental Faculty on 6 February 1961. 250 This content downloaded from 78.33.29.102 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:43:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Arthur John ARBERRY (12 May 1905-2 October 1969), Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic from 1947, was compiler of the Second supplementary hand-list of the Mukammadan mnauscripts in the University <& Colleges oj Cambridge ' Cambridge 1952, and a translator and historian of Arabic literature. His autobiography is on pp.