Book Reviews / Quærendo 37 (2007) 332-340 325

Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Library. BMC Part XI: England, ed. Lotte Hellinga (’t Goy-Houten, Hes & De Graaf, ,  ×  cm, x +  pp., illus., isbn     , € ,).

In , five years after he had left the Bodleian Library to go to the British Museum and five years before he got Lost in the Alps, Robert Proctor published An index to the early printed books in the British Museum from the invention of printing to the year MD, with notes of those in the Bodleian Library. On his own he had mastered two of the world’s major incunable collections. Proctor arranged the incunables in chronological order, from the beginning of printing in countries, which meant first Germany, fol- lowed by Italy to end with England (though also adding a few countries with a very modest production: Denmark, Sweden, Portugal and Montenegro). Th e arrangement, per country, followed by town, printer and chronology, is generally known as ‘Proctor order’, except in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Th e Hague, where it is ‘Holtrop order’, because it was Holtrop who already employed this arrangement for placing books on the shelves of the incunable cases and for his incunable catalogue of . Part I, con- taining the largest collection of incunables printed in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) thus became the first collection catalogue arranged according to scholarly principles. (Proctor, Index p. : ‘[the arrangement of the Index] is that sanc- tioned by the highest modern authorities in this branch of bibliography, J.W. Holtrop and Henry Bradshaw.’) Th e collection of books printed outside the Low Countries in Th e Hague can at best be called medium-sized, and they were but poorly treated by Holtrop in part II. His interest and abilities were reserved for the printed works from the Netherlands, as evidenced by the Monuments typographiques des Pays-Bas au quinzième siècle, which appeared in instalments from  to . At the beginning of the th century plans were made for a bibliography containing all incunables of the world (the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, Berlin), but accord- ing to A.W. Pollard of the British Museum in a letter to Konrad Burger (quoted by John Goldfinch in Gutenberg Jahrbuch , p. ) it proved impossible to raise money in Great Britain for a European project. At most funds could be made available for the BM’s own incunable catalogue, but Proctor had no appetite for such an under- taking. He knew his strength, which did not lie in elaborate descriptions of incunables, but mainly rested on a fabulous capacity for recognizing types and by this means attri- bute books to printers. Not hindered by the year  or by his superiors, because most of the work was done in his own time, he began his typographical arrangement of the group of printed works until , a category related to the incunables. (Earlier Holtrop had stretched the ‘post incunables’ even further, to the year , but there were not as many as in the British Museum). In , more than a hundred years after Proctor’s Index, all six parts of A catalogue of books printed in the fifteenth century now in the Bodleian Library (, editions, , copies) were published at once, not in Proctor order but after the Hain/ GW presentation, arranged alphabetically according to author or anonymous title,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006907X256354 326 Book Reviews / Quærendo 37 (2007) 332-340 with particular attention to texts and text parts, provenance and other copy-specific characteristics and with indices. It is a monumental catalogue, in its extensive informa- tion about incunable texts it can be compared with the incunable catalogue of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and also with the incomplete GW and the still unfinished incunable catalogues of two other very large and important collections: Paris BN and Vienna ÖNB. An incunabulist operating in the Holtrop-Bradshaw-Proctor-Hellinga tradition cannot help but notice that the ‘Index of printers and publishers’ is in alphabetical name order and gives only bare Bod-inc. numbers – a negation of Proctor order. Th ere is not even a List of countries, towns and printers. What should have been included of course is either an Index arranged chronologically according to country, town and printer, giving not a sequence of Bod-inc. numbers, but instead short author/title references on a single line, as in IBE and IBP though not Goff, or the variant system: alphabetically arranged per printer, with an added Index of places and printers, as for instance in BSB-Ink and IDL. Bod-inc.’s ‘brief index form’ is therefore not quite as conventional as is claimed on p. lxxxvii. Proctor in his Index was more accommodating to Hain adepts in his author’s index. Th e British Museum used a different approach: in  the first part appeared of the Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Museum, not start- ing with Mainz, the first city where movable type was used in the th century, but hors concours, with the blockbooks. Th e catalogue’s emphasis was on typographical identification and treatment per printer. Although the BM does not have the largest collection of incunables in the world, it is unsurpassed in range, which made it possi- ble to provide a well-founded survey of th-century book production. Th e siglum BMC plus part number is used for all parts, although the imprints on the title-pages of parts XI, XII and XIII no longer feature the British Museum but the British Library. Nobody in the BM, including Victor Scholderer, could fathom how long this momentous project would take. A few months after Proctor’s disappearance (at the age of ), Scholderer was appointed to the BM and soon became the assistant and replace- ment of Pollard in the incunable cataloguing project, the printed parts of which would appear with interruptions due to the international situation. In - the rest of Germany followed (BMC II-III), in  the first part of Italy: Subiaco and Rome (BMC IV). Due to the war circumstances, the Index to this part was prepared in advance by the Dutch codicologist and incunabulist Bonaventura Kruitwagen OFM, and published by Martinus Nijhoff in Th e Hague. Th e remaining volumes for Italy, BMC V-VII, were not published until -, with an Index for the entire country. As had happened in the Great War, the incunable collection was moved from London to the National Library in Aberystwyth, Wales, in the Second World War. Scholderer went with the collection to Wales, where he described the French incunables for BMC VIII, which appeared after his retirement in  (reviewed by W. Post, former incu- nabula curator, Th e Hague KB, in: Het Boek,  (-), pp. -).