The Private Library

Happy New Year from The Private Library

Victorian New Year's card from the Local History Collection of the Bolton Museum (UK)

The Secret History of Your Private Library

Like ebooks, printed books and manuscripts tell a story that was envisioned by a particular author. 

Like ebooks, printed books and manuscripts tell the story of their creation (a tale of ink and paper and printers, or ink and vellum and scriptoria, as opposed to a tale of computers and magnetic media):

Like ebooks, printed books and manuscripts also usually tell a different story each and every time an author's story is read.

  

Unlike ebooks, though, printed books and manuscripts tell an additional story.  It is a story that all too often falls on deaf ears.   The older the printed book or manuscript, the more complicated this story often is.  For it is a tale of travel through time and space, a story spun by every manuscript and printed book that has ever existed:

In the early morning of 16th July 1648, during the very last stages of the Thirty Years War, a Swedish force one hundred strong, commanded by the Imperial renegade Ernst Odowalsky, scaled the city wall of Prague’s Kleinseite or ‘Little Side’ (Cz. Malá Strana) on the west bank of the Moldau. Overpowering the unsuspecting guard, the Swedes made their way through the Strahov gate. Soon afterwards 3,000 men flocked into the Kleinseite under the command of Swedish General Hans Kristofer von Königsmarck. The castle and a number of aristocratic palaces, in which both the Emperor and the Austro-Bohemian nobility had amassed great quantities of valuables, were at the troops’ mercy and were systematically looted, following a detailed plan which Königsmarck and Odowalsky had drawn up together. The haul was immense. Apart from a host of invaluable art objects, the Imperial Treasury contained a number of valuable illustrated works and rare manuscripts. The inventory drawn up at the time mentions 100 an allerhand Kunstbüchern (‘a hundred art books of different kinds’), among them two world-famous manuscripts: Codex Gigas and Codex Argenteus (the Silver Bible, now in Carolina Rediviva, Uppsala). The Emperor’s library, mainly from the time of Rudolph II was also looted, as was the princely Ursini-Rosenberg collection of books, one of the very finest at that time, which had been transferred to the castle only the year before. The Praemonstratensian monastery of Strahov, the Jesuit College and several aristocratic palaces were ransacked as well.

The complicated story of the movements of the famed Codex Gigas through time and space is notable more for the magnificence of that particular manuscript (it is the world's largest known surviving manuscript)...

...than for the travails it underwent, travails that have been experienced by many lesser printed books and manuscripts over the centuries:

All the booty was quickly inventoried. The books were packed into 30 large chests. On Queen Christina’s instructions these were shipped down the Elbe to the Baltic coast during the autumn. Time was short, because in the Osnabrück peace talks it had been settled that all booty which had not been carried off when hostilities ended was to be returned. The peace treaty was signed in Münster in mid-October 1648. The booty was stored during the winter in the border fortress of Dömitz, Mecklenburg, and at the end of May 1649 it reached Stockholm by way of Wismar where the Queen waited impatiently. She had made plans to enlarge the royal castle to make room for the new treasures. Isaac Vossius, her librarian, was tasked with arranging the books captured in Prague. He finished the work in March 1651, having catalogued some of the books and all the manuscripts. His catalogue starts with Codex Gigas. Most of the books ended up in the royal castle library, but some became the private property of Swedish and foreign officers. Some were given to Christina’s favourites and some in lieu of salary to her librarians. Other books went to the Swedish university and grammar school libraries, and probably also to Dorpat (Tartu) University. 

The Queen eventually took the most valuable books and manuscripts with her when she left the country. The majority of those items are now in the Vatican Library. Much of the booty that remained in Sweden later perished in a number of fires while some was sold at book auctions in the eighteenth century. But a portion has survived and is now mainly in the Royal Library, Stockholm, in Uppsala and in Lund University Library....

The tales of these and similar such travails can be read by any book collector who is receptive to the evidence.  The story is told in the paper and other materials used to create printed books and manuscripts....

  

The story is told in the annotations that have been left upon the pages of printed books and manuscripts....

Nicolaus Copernicus. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Nuremberg: Ioh. Petreius, 1543.  Annotated by 16th- and early-17th-century German astronomers, Johann Hommel and Johannes Praetorius.  Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The story is told in the bindings and re-bindings that printed books and manuscripts have endured....

  

The story is told in censuses and the catalogs of libraries and book fairs and booksellers and auction houses....

  

Do you know the secret history of your private library?

The Curious Case of the Coffeehouse Mysteries and The Private Library

I was standing behind my espresso machine, facing a line out my door. The usual Village Blend regulars were here along with a swell of caffeine-deprived commuters grabbing a java hit before heading home. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, and in most respects the day felt like any other. Except it wasn’'t. This was the day the fires began. When the smoke finally cleared, the fatalities would number two, and they would not be accidents. The deaths would turn out to be murders and I, Clare Cosi, would be the one to prove it....

Cleo Coyle, Roast Mortem (2010)

Here at The Private Library we continue to be fascinated by the splintering of traditional genre fiction.  The process makes for some interesting publishing choices, and not a few unexpected successes.

  

As mysteries, for example, have undergone this process, the overall genre has splintered into sub-genres like the cosy and the police procedural; these sub-genres -- the cosy, for example -- have in turn splintered into sub-sub-genres like gardening and culinary mysteries; and sub-sub-genres -- the culinary mystery, for example -- have splintered even further into sub-sub-sub genres like the topic of today's post, Cleo Coyle's enormously successful coffeehouse mysteries:

  

Cleo Coyle is the pseudonym of author Alice Afonsi, who collaborates with her husband Marc Cerasini in penning the novels for this successful mystery franchise.  [This duo also is responsible for The Haunted Bookshop franchise under their Alice Kimberly pseudonym.]

  

By virtually any measure, Afonsi and Cerasini have made this sub-sub-sub genre their own.  The first title in the series, On What Grounds (2003) is now in its 15th printing.  Espresso Shot (2008) managed a starred review from Library Journal and was a national bestseller in both hardcover and paperback.

  

Holiday Grind (2009) included an extra-large bonus section of delicious holiday recipes as well as a glossary of coffeehouse terms, instructions on making espressos and lattes without an expensive machine, and tips and recipes for creating your own tasty coffeehouse syrups at home.

One wonders,though, where this process of genre splintering will end.  Is the next step beyond coffeehouse mysteries the non-fat, no-foam latte mystery...?

Novels, Keys and The Private Library

Real people often lurk behind the facade of fiction.  Authors hide them for a variety of reasons. 

If an author is poking fun at the foibles of his or her contemporaries, the author's deception may be necessary to avoid a lawsuit for libel, or -- if the author himself was involved in such foibles -- to avoid self-incrimination.  Hiding real persons behind a fictional facade also is useful when one's writing is perhaps more autobiographical than one would care to admit. 

Sometimes authors provide a key to help readers unravel their deceptions.  Any such "novel with a key" is generally termed a roman à clef.

As Melissa Boyde points out in a recent article about the rise of the roman à clef, the term usually is only applied to

fictional works in which actual people or events can be identified by a knowing reader, typically a member of a coterie. Seventeenth century writer and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) is attributed as the innovator of the genre creating it to disguise from the general reader the public figures whose political actions and ideas formed the basis of her fictional narratives.... 

The clef, or key, is generally regarded as the roman à clef’s distinguishing feature. It may be published with the novel or subsequently by the author or through diaries and correspondence. Although the key is not always published openly some indication of the scope of a roman à clef’s concerns is usually evident in devices such as an epigraph or naming of characters and/or places. The key provides a ‘technique of matching [which] … unlocks the historical secret otherwise hidden behind the veil of fictionalised characters’ ...  and thereby sets the roman à clef apart from novels which contain a fictionalised representation of a real-life character. The first roman à clef is generally considered to be de Scudéry’s second novel, Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus, published in ten volumes between 1649 and 1653. Speculation by readers that it was based on auto/biographical material no doubt contributed to its immense popularity and, perhaps to satisfy that curiosity, some years after the final volume of Cyrus a key was produced and published as an adjunct...  [Note to Proust devotees -- Proust was a piker!  Cyrus is far and away the longest French novel ever published ... some 400+ characters are introduced over the course of its 8000+ pages!]

As Boyde makes clear, the key to unraveling the real persons that are fictionalized in a roman à clef is frequently not obvious in modern versions of this type of novel.  But trying to figure out "who is who?" seems to be part of the appeal for many book collectors who specialize in this sort of novel:

  

Of course, sometimes a little help may be necessary....

  

Furniture and The Private Library

There are several senses in which a book collector is likely to encounter the term furniture when building a private library.  The sense with which most book collectors are likely to be familiar is that of bookshelves, chairs and other items relevant to storing and reading one's books.  (For the use of the term in typesetting, see our post of 27 September 2010.)

However, if one collects manuscripts or printed books produced from roughly the 8th-17th centuries, one is just as likely to encounter the term in reference to anything attached to the outside of a book in binding (clasps, bosses, cornerpieces, plaques, chains, staples, etc.) ... to protect the covers from abrasion and as decoration:

The image above, for example, depicts the early 16th century Panis quotidianus, de sanctis.  The so-called "Lily binder" has elaborately decorated the title's leather binding with a brass centerpiece, clasps, bosses and cornerpieces.  Formerly the property of the monks of Newminster, a Cistercian abbey in Northumberland (UK), the title now resides in the Special Collections division of the Univeristy of Glasgow.

The image below depicts a 15th century blind-tooled goatskin binding on a ca. 1483 printing of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei in the incunabula collection of Princeton University.  Note that the brass bosses, centerpiece and cornerpieces are the binding's primary decorative elements:

Such furniture is not always metal.  Plaques, for example, often were made of ivory.  In the elaborate example below, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ivory plaque is part of an 11th century jeweled silver binding formerly belonging to the Benedictine nunnery of Santa Cruz de los Serós, which was reputedly founded by Queen Felicia, wife of Sancho V Ramírez (r. 1063–94), king of Aragon and Navarre:

Such furniture is not entirely a thing of the 8th-17th centuries.  Deluxe bindings of the modern era also sometimes feature such furniture, witness the extraordinary example below.  The goatskin binding features jeweled metal cornerpieces on an 1825 printing of Office de la Quinzaine de Pacques....

Image © The British Library Board

Merry Christmas from The Private Library

The New York Sun, September 21, 1897.  The reply -- by The Sun's editor, Francis Pharcellus Church -- is "the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language."

The world's first truly iconic Santa, "Merry Old Santa Claus," from Harper's Weekly, January 1, 1881, p.8-9. by artist Thomas Nast

Fig-Leaf Editions and The Private Library

...Item six. There are thirty-one pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but only twenty-four stories. Mrs. Cavendish, weren’t you keeping an eye on this?’

‘We’ve been watching Canterbury Tales all week,’ said a woman dressed in the most fabulously outrageous clothes, ‘and every time we look away another story gets boojummed. Someone’s getting in there and erasing the story from within.’

‘Deane? Any idea who’s behind all this?’

Daphne Farquitt’s romantic lead stood up and consulted a list.

‘I think I can see a pattern beginning to emerge,’ he said. ‘ “The Merchant’s Wife” was the first to go, followed by “The Milliner’s Tale”, “The Pedlar’s Cock”, “The Cuckold’s Revenge”, “The Maiden’s Wonderful Arse” and, most recently, “The Contest of Farts”. “The Cook’s Tale” is already half gone—it looks as though whoever is doing this has a problem with the healthy vulgarity of Chaucerian texts.’

‘In that case,’ said the Bellman with a grave expression, ‘it looks like we have an active cell of Bowdlerisers at work again. “The Miller’s Tale” will be the next to go—I want twenty-four-hour surveillance and we should get someone on the inside....

Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book

Censorship takes many forms.  Biblioclasts, for example, have burned books for centuries:

Oft times, when critics of particular titles have had sufficient clout with publishers, they have been able to prevent offending titles from being published at all.  Failing that, attempts have been made to dissuade readers by threatening imprisonment, excommunication, or worse:

Even when they have been unable to prevent specific titles from being published, critics often have been able to get offending passages rewritten, or excised altogether.  Sometimes, this expurgation has occurred after a title already has been published.  For example: the copy of the famed Nuremberg Chronicle, below, from the University of Kansas Library, shows clear signs of post-publication tampering:

The exhibition description gives the reason for the excision:

One of the false stories that dies hard is the story about Pope Joan, the female pope who is alleged to have succeeded Leo IV in 855. Although we now know the story to be without foundation (it first appeared some 500 years after the supposed event) it was often printed in medieval times. Copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a striking illustrated history of the world printed in 1493, are often found with the relevant passages blacked out. In this copy, presented to the University of Kansas some years ago by Otto Vollbehr, the famous collector of incunabula, the passage is lined through, as is the portrait of Joan. In the margin a late sixteenth century hand identifies the story as apocryphal, adding the disbelief of the glossator.

The great Northern Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus, revered by bibliophiles as perhaps the greatest book collector of his age, frequently saw his works subjected to post-publication expurgation:

The above title, also from the University of Kansas Library exhibit, includes the following observation:

Most of {Erasmus'] works suffered expurgation throughout the sixteenth century. This copy of the Parabolae, Strassburg, 1525, has been expurgated in accordance with [an] order and the expurgator has so written on the title page. The Sotomayor Index of 1667 ... devotes 56 double-column folio pages to methods of expurgating Erasmus. [Antonio de Sotomayor, Royal Confessor and Archbishop of Damascus, was commissioned Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition in 1632.]

More frequently, though, expurgation occurs before publication.  Titles so affected are sometimes identified in bookseller and auction catalogs as fig-leaf editions.  More frequently, though, especially since "Thomas Bowdler's" publication of The Family Shakespeare in 1818, such titles are said to have been bowdlerized.

In fact, the 1807 First Edition of The Family Shakespeare was the work of Thomas's sister, Harriet. It was largely to protect Harriet's anonymity that Thomas's name appears on the more famous 1818 Second Edition of this work.  As Kathyrn Kane points out,

As an unmarried and supposedly inexperienced woman, she could never admit that she knew enough about matters sexual to have edited them out of The Family Shakespeare. It would have done irreparable damage to her reputation. But her brother, a man of letters and a diligent reformer, was an ideal candidate for the position. Perhaps Harriet also thought putting him into the literary limelight might help lift the depression he was suffering. It is also possible that Harriet had an eye to a second edition, which she wanted published in London to reach a wider market. A man could more easily manage such negotiations. Regardless of the reasons, by the beginning of the Regency, in 1811, Dr. Thomas Bowdler was considered by nearly everyone to be the editor of The Family Shakespeare.

Thomas, however, would not let his name appear without doing some of the editing himself:

He was actually a more careful and conscientious editor than his sister had been, doing his best to retain as much of the bard’s original text as possible. Thomas restored all the bits Harriet had cut because she considered them boring, he was less severe in his cuts of both the sexually suggestive passages and those which she had perceived to be sacrilegious. Yet he also cut passages she had left alone. However, he also added back all of the plays she had left out.

The Bowdlers were not the first to attempt to "sanitize" Shakespeare (previous such editions were labeled castrated editions).   Many authors before and after Shakespeare were subject to expurgation of offensive matter prior to publication.

In more modern times, for example, books like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, even when banned outright in many jurisdictions, often have been published in pirated fig-leaf editions.  The 1931 William Faro publication, left, is via Greenfield Books, which notes:

This edition is an expurgated form of the third manuscript of the famous novel. Controversial scenes have been excised and their absence is marked in the text by a row of asterisks. Because it was still considered obscene, it did not obtain a copyright and was banned in the USA. As a result, many pirated versions were produced. This particular edition pre-dates any authorized expurgated or American edition....

Lest one think expurgation is a thing of the distant past, it is not, as fans of the great science fiction author Robert Heinlein, for example, would be among the first to point out.  A simple search on the keyword "expurgated" at sites like ABEbooks and ViaLibri will reveal many more such examples.  Folks interested in collecting such books as a specialty may find the title below particularly useful (1969 First Edition, below left; 1992 reprint, below right)l:

  

Genre Fiction for the OTHER Holidays from The Private Library

Over a dozen major holidays are celebrated during the month of December, yet so pervasive is Christmas in Western culture that folks interested in collecting genre fiction devoted to other December holidays have their work cut out for them.

Read any good Advent-themed genre fiction recently?  What about Las Posadas-themed genre fiction? Soyaluna-themed genre fiction?

If not, is it because such holidays have not "gone secular" to the degree that Christmas has?

Genre fiction does exist for other December holidays, but most of it seems geared to the juvenile marketplace.  Is this because there are at least a few authors out there who don't want kids feeling bad that their holiday doesn't generate the widespread celebrations that Christmas does?

   

We're not talking small markets here.  The potential market for adult genre fiction geared to other December holidays appears to be quite large, but most of the focus seems to be resolutely on juvenile markets:

  

While one certainly is pleased to see that a major holiday like Chanuka attracts publishers interested in the juvenile market...

  

...where's the bibliomystery featuring the Jewish bookseller that accidentally gets ensared in the daring theft of a rare and valuable Torah while trying to prepare his youngest child for her first celebration of Chanuka? 

Are authors and publishers missing out on several potential major markets for adult genre fiction by well-nigh ignoring every December holiday but Christmas...?

Libraries as Publishers and The Private Library

We have noted in previous posts some of the advantages that accrue to book collectors who live near institutional libraries.  If such libraries permit public access to their stacks,

[n]ot only will you get a really good feel for what's been published..., you also will be exposed to a wide range of conditions, bindings, typographic styles, illustration styles, etc., that may well prove useful to you as you build your private library.  And the serendipity involved in this sort of concentrated browsing may very well expose you to collectible topics and/or authors that otherwise would have remained unknown to you.

Even if you do not live near such a library, though, institutional libraries still have much to offer book collectors, since many of these libraries have very active publishing programs. 

Many of these publishing programs have been around for quite some time.  The Library of Congress, for example, began publishing in 1801.  Many European libraries began publishing even earlier.  The University Library of Leiden, for instance, published the world's first catalog of institutional library holdings over two centuries earlier (1595):

Such catalogs (often published as bibliographies) have long provided book collectors with ready checklists of what to collect in their areas of interest...

  

...as have more recent publications devoted to these libraries' various "treasures:"

 

One could, in fact, build a private library devoted solely to books published by institutional libraries.  So many so-called treasure books have been published, for example, that a fairly sizable collection of such books could be put together relatively easily and inexpensively.  Purists, of course, will want to make sure that all such titles were actually published by the institutional libraries themselves (which was not the case with Pearls of the Orient, above).

Alternatively, one could collect all of the books that have ever been published by a single institutional library such as the Library of Congress (images via Charles Agvent and Between the Covers Rare Books):

  

This could get quite expensive, though, since many large institutional libraries like LOC and The British Library have very extensive publishing programs (and many of the earliest titles published by such libraries are quite scarce and rarely available in the marketplace):

  

Alternatively, one could collect only specific types of books that have been published by institutional libraries -- books about particular artists, for example. (The title below was published by the State Library of New South Wales):

The histories of institutional libraries are popular with some book collectors.  The history below left was published as a Limited Edition in 1937 (image of the Viscount Eccles copy via George Ong); the history below right (same library) was published in 2002:

  

Collectors should keep in mind, as we have noted in previous posts, that many institutional libraries (and their respective Friends groups) also often publish collectible ephemera such as keepsakes....

Obfuscation, Bureaucratic and Academic, at The Private Library

Sometimes one is forced to consider the possibility that affairs are being conducted in a manner which, all things being considered and making all possible allowances is, not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps not entirely straightforward. -- Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes, Minister (Translation: "You're lying.")

Oh, Parent, at present deemed to be domiciled in the stratosphere, May Your name be established and maintained on the highest level of sacrosanctity, May You be allotted and obtain an area of control with appropriate areas of administration, May Your policy be fully executed on a geo-political basis as well as in the normal stratospherical sphere of influence.... --  Bruce Rogers, You Can Say That Again!: A Fun Approach to Sounding Better When You Open Your Mouth to Speak (Translation: "Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven....")

Bureaucratese, according to most dictionaries, is a style of language ... that uses jargon or euphemism to the detriment of broader understanding.  Such language often contains many non-essential words intended to imply more importance or intelligence than actually present.  While the examples above are fictional, real life examples abound:

Ways of exit access and the doors to exits to which they lead shall be so designed and arranged as to be clearly recognizable as such. Hangings or draperies shall not be placed over exit doors or otherwise so located as to conceal or obscure any exit. Mirrors shall not be placed on exit doors. Mirrors shall not be placed in or adjacent to any exit in such a manner as to confuse the direction of exit.  (Translation: "An exit door must be free of signs or decorations that obscure its visibility.")

Government officials in the United States have long been aware of the problem.  In 1998, President Clinton signed a Memorandum that directed the heads of Federal agencies and Executive departments to use plain language in all new documents ... that explain how to obtain a benefit or service or how to comply with a requirement you administer or enforce.  President Carter's 1978 Executive Orders, which had previously sought to simply the language of the Federal Government, had not had the intended effect, probably because President Reagan had had those Orders rescinded after he took over from Carter in 1981.  Efforts continue (most recently, in the guise of the Plain Writing Act of 2010).

 

With all due respect to bureaucrats, though, most are rank amateurs when it comes to the art of truly mind-numbing obfuscation.  For that, you need academics writing for other academics.  (Warning: Not for the faint of heart!  No one will be seated during the last sentence!  Hemingway fans will be turned away at the door!)

This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely  unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the  darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self). -- D. G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself (1996)

By comparison, the tidbit below is a paragon of academic clarity:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. -- Judith Butler, "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time," Diacritics (1997)

Many academics routinely excuse this sort of writing as necessary to convey nuances of meaning that are not available via simpler language.  Other academics dismiss such apologetics as little more than disciplinary gatekeeping (in several senses of the term discipline!).

Folks interested in building a private library devoted to such matters (we assume you have strong drink on hand) may want to add the classic titles below for starters:

  

Orwell's essay, which first appeared in the April 1946 issue of Horizon, has been reprinted many times and is a staple of introductory writing classes.  Flesch, best known for the 1955 classic Why Johnny Can't Read, was arguably America's foremost proponent of plain English.  His 1948 article, "A New Readabilty Yardstick," published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, was the basis for J. Peter Kincaid's work that led to the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests, now standard tests used to assess the readability of a wide range of English-language texts.  The title below left, for example, has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 2.9; the text below right has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5.5:

  

It may, or may not, be a source of comfort to know that George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 comes in at a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12.0, while President Obama's victory speech of 2008 comes in at 7.4 on the same test....

Book Reviews and The Private Library

One of the questions we most frequently encounter in our email here at The Private Library is, "why don't you do book reviews?"  This question is usually followed by something like "I know your focus is book collecting, but wouldn't reviews of individual books help me in that effort? 

The short answer to this is implicit in the follow-on question above: TPL does indeed try to stay focused on the forest (the whys and hows and ins and outs of book collecting generally), rather than on the trees (individual books).  There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of book review sites on the Internet, both websites and blogs.  There are not, however, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of sites devoted to helping folks who are new to book collecting, or who have a general interest in that topic. 

We try to give our readers sufficient information in our posts to search out book reviews themselves, should particular titles that we cover prove of interest.  We would caution all our readers, though, that book reviews, like movie reviews, are not always what they seem.  Free review copies of books, like free movie screenings and other special treatment accorded book and movie reviewers by publishers and studios, often leads to an unwillingness on the part of reviewers to treat books and movies as even-handedly as they should.  Fortunately, many of the best book and film reviewers shun the favored treatment and tell it like is, consequences be damned (there even are a number of reviewers who turn out consistently even-handed reviews despite the freebies.)

Sniff around ... the hyperbolic puffery that clogs the feeds on Twitter and FaceBook and like social media notwithstanding, there are reliable guides to individual books (and movies) out there....  (Tip 'o the hat to MaxFawcett.com for the image.)

Pastedowns, Turn-Ins & Doublures at The Private Library

Judging from the email we receive, some collectors continue to have trouble with the terms pastedown, turn-in and doublure, all of which reference the inside lining of a book's top and bottom covers.  Perhaps a few illustrations can make the distinctions a bit less problematical....

Pastedowns are the half of a double-leaf endpaper firmly affixed to the inside of one of the boards of the case or cover, over the edges of the turn-in.  In the image below, the binder has made a mistake with the turn-in -- although the dark blue pastedown is OK, the decorative turn-in was mis-measured and a bit of the underlying board thus remains exposed:

Compare this to the turn-in and pastedown below (the pastedown is largely covered by a bookplate):

Both images depict the plain rainment in which the inside linings of hardbound books have for centuries been bound.  But not always....

As Etherington & Roberts point out, the pastedown can be ornamental ... very ornamental:

[the doublure is an] ornamental inside lining of a book cover, which takes the place of the regular pastedown and fly leaf. It is usually of leather or (watered) silk, generally with a leather hinge and is often very elaborately decorated. The typical doublure consists of a silk fly leaf and a leather board covering, but sometimes both board covering and fly leaf are of silk; rarely, both are of leather. In a strict sense, however, the term refers only to leather linings.

The doublure was known in Turkey at least as early as the 14th century, but the earliest known European doublures are a binding of about 1550 in the British Museum. Their use was revived in the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), but they were not used very extensively until about 1750, after which they became very popular. Doublures have been used continuously since that time—more so in France, where they have always been more popular than elsewhere....

The elaborately decorated leather doublure below is found on a 1667 copy of Le Nouveau Testament de Mons:

The white watered silk doublure below is from The Seventh Book Of Remembrance, which lists Canadian Service men and women whose death is attributable to military service since 1947, with the exception of those commemorated in the Korean War Book of Remembrance:

The binder, Richard Smart, goes into some detail on how the above binding (doublures included) was created, which you can read by clicking here....

Genre Fiction, Christmas and The Private Library

In last year's series of posts about Christmas, we deliberately did not delve into the copious quantities of Christmas-themed genre fiction that have been published over the past 150 or so years (since the "re-invention" of Christmas in the mid-19th century).  So we thought it might be worthwhile to spend at least one post rectifying that oversight.

Just about any genre a book collector might wish to focus upon is likely to have produced several bookshelves' worth of Christmas-themed fiction.  If, for example, you're a romantic at heart, you'll find that publishers have catered to every desire, from traditional domestic romance to steamy, don't-let-Grandma-catch-you-reading-this! stuff:

  

If westerns are more your style, there are Christmas-themed westerns that cover every preference from the juvenile to the adult:

  

SciFi fans will rejoice that Christmas survives the journey to other worlds and times...

  

...as will fans of the fantasy genre (all of whom follow Dickens' immortal lead):

  

Of all the Christmas-themed genre fiction that one can collect, though, none likely will require as much shelf space as Christmas mysteries.  There's just something about Christmas that seems to bring out the monster in some of us...

  

...though some of these monsters, as fans of the horror genre are well aware, are not always quite human:

  

Christmas could, if you let it, lead to a real pulp fiction sort of book collection....

  

3-D and The Private Library

Since at least the 13th century CE, book artisans (as well as artists in a great many other media) have wrestled with how best to convey dimensionality on a flat surface.

One of the earliest solutions to this vexing challenge was to use

[m]onochrome painting done entirely in tones of gray (or another neutral color) to depict objects in relief. The effect is achieved by combining dark pigment and an inert white, with touches of color sometimes added to create highlights....

In booksellers' and auction catalogs, the usual term for this effect is grisaille.  The example below is from the Hours of Philip of Burgundy, use of Paris, ca. 1450-60:

If portions of the image (flesh, background, etc.) are done in color and everything else in shades of gray, the usual term is semi-grisaille.  This Book of Hours for the Use of Rome, ca. 1500 (via Dr. Jörn Günther • Antiquariat) is typical in its use of the effect:

The neutral color is not always gray.  It could be brown (in which case, the usual term is brunaille).  An excellent example of this effect may be found in Peter Bruegel the Elder's 1565 painting Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery:

Brunaille, however, is much less frequently encountered than grisaille.  Rarer still is the employment of green as the neutral color, an effect known as verdaille.  The effect is seen here in Jean-Baptiste Pillement's 18th century painting, A Chinoiserie Procession of Figures Riding on Elephants with Temples Beyond:

Aside from manuscripts, books and oil paintings, another place that you're likely to encounter grisaille is in magazines.  The watercolor below, for example, was produced for a 1902 issue of Graphic by artist Fortunino Matania:

If you collect westerns, you may already know that Frederic Remington, arguably the best-known illustrator of the American West, produced a substantial number of his 3000+ known artworks en grisaille:

The search for the best way to depict dimensionality on a flat surface continues.  Books with 3-D glasses enclosed, anyone...?

  

The Private Library, at the Sign of the Quoin & Chase, St. Paul's Churchyard

High atop London's Ludgate Hill sits an architectural masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London:

For a religious site (the current cathedral is believed to be the fourth such erected on this site since 604 CE), St. Paul's may actually be more famous, at least to book collectors, for the secular activities that have been conducted in its vicinity for well over five centuries.  As William Roberts observed in The Book Hunter in London (1895),

[t]he bookselling and book-hunting annals of the district which starts with St. Paul's, and terminates at Charing Cross, might occupy a goodly-sized volume.... The chief interest of St. Paul's Churchyard as a book locality centres itself in the publishing rather than the second-hand bookselling phase. One of our earliest printer-publishers, Julian Notary, was 'dwellynge in powles chyrche yarde besyde ye weste dore by my lordes palyes' in 1515, his shop sign being the Three Kings. At the sign of the White Greyhound, in St. Paul's Churchyard, the first editions of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Rape of Lucrece' were published by John Harrison; at the Fleur de Luce and the Crown appeared the first edition of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor'; at the Green Dragon the first edition of the 'Merchant of Venice'; at the Fox the first edition of 'Richard II.'; whilst the first editions of 'Richard III.,' 'Troilus and Cressida,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Lear' all bear Churchyard imprints.  Not only were there very many booksellers' shops around the Yard, but at the latter part of the sixteenth century bookstalls started up, first at the west, and subsequently at the other doors of the cathedral....

This publishing history is recorded on the many title pages that were issued for publishers and booksellers operating in or near St. Paul's Churchyard, such as the title page for this ca. 1736 edition of Herman Moll's Atlas Minor (via the David Rumsey Map Collection)...

...the even earlier (1724) title page for John Nott's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary, Or, The Accomplish’d Housewives Companion...

...and numerous later title pages, such as those depicted below:

 

Interestingly enough, the importance of these secular activities is recognized in the latest history of the cathedral itself, St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004 (awarded the 2004 William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History).  As James Raven notes in his excellent article for this book, "St. Paul's Precinct and the Book Trade to c. 1800,"

[f]rom at least the early fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the precinct of St. Paul's was synonymous with the book trade.  Long before the introduction of printing [in Britain] in the final third of the fifteenth century, the different yards and building ranges adjoining the cathedral -- and at times the cathedral cloisters and nave -- had housed suppliers of vellum, paper, writing materials and books.  As manuscript production and exchange tracked the varied evolution of cathedral and monastic centres across Britain, the streets around St. Paul's became a particular focus for scriveners, limners and stationers, and with their book traditions well established, continued in the age of print as the premier site of book publishing in Britain.  By 1800 St. Paul's Churchyard -- together with Paternoster Row to the immediate north -- comprised one of the greatest publishing centres in Europe.  From here, booksellers despatched books, magazines and other print to the country towns of England but also to the colonies in North America, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Australia and the Far East.  Fire and constant rebuilding [most notably the Great Fire of 1666] transformed the physical appearance of the shops and stalls of the precinct, but the rituals of the book trade, many based on proud traditions and on memories of defiance and martyrdom, continued to be played out in the vicinity of the cathedral.  No history of St. Paul's is complete without an account of the publishing and bookselling cocoon that was the churchyard and row....

The numerous fires that have plagued St. Paul's Churchyard over the centuries have left us with few reliable records of how this area may actually  have looked at different times in its history.  Notwithstanding which, a few notable attempts have been made to ferret out such information for very specific periods (see title above right).

We suspect that the image below, an early 20th century depiction of the 16th century cathedral and its surrounding area (now known as Old St. Paul's), is rather fanciful, given that surviving descriptions of the area over the centuries suggest a far darker, more cramped and more chaotic jumble of publishers, booksellers and associated activities....

Festive Foods and The Private Library

In our previous series of posts about collecting the literature of food and drink, we noted that the literature is so vast that the topic overwhelms most book collectors.  About the only way the average book collector can cope with this vastness is by focusing, as tightly as possible, on one or two extremely specific aspects of the larger topic.  The tighter the focus, the more likely it is that one's time, budget, etc., will be equal to the task.

The large number of holidays that are celebrated around the world during the month of December present an excellent opportunity to build just such a focused collection.  One can collect books about food and drink appropriate to a specific holiday during this period, or to several holidays during this period.

One could, for example, collect only books about food and drink specific to Chanuka...

  

...or only books about food and drink appropriate to Kwanzaa...

  

...but the 800-pound gorilla of such collections is. obviously, the vast literature associated with the food and drink of Christmas:

  

So vast is the literature associated with the food and drink of Christmas that most book collectors find that it is not enough to focus only on this one holiday -- they must focus further or only one specific type of food or drink associated with the holiday.  Cookies, for example...

 

...or food and drink appropriate to a vegetarian Christmas...

  

...or only books specific to Christmas food and drink that have been penned by a favorite chef:

  

Did we mention all the books that have been printed about Christmas cakes...?

 

And we haven't even scratched the surface!  Happy Holidays...!

Activity Books and The Private Library

Many book collectors are quite fastidious about what they add to their bookshelves.  They only collect pristine texts that are housed in pristine bookbindings that are housed in pristine dustjackets.  They will not even consider books that are, in their view, "defaced" by things like bookplates or annotations, even if the bookplates or annotations are much more valuable, from a book history standpoint, than the titles themselves.

Little wonder, then, that one of the most conspicuous successes in publishing history rarely appear on such shelves.  We are speaking of activity books.

These often ephemeral titles are defined as books designed to engage the user in a pursuit other than (or in addition to) reading, for example, an instruction manual for science or craft projects, or a volume containing puzzles or word games:

  

Such books are published for both adults and children, and the topics to which they are devoted say much about the cultures within which they are published:

  

Consider what book historians might discover about text receptivity, the editorial and marketing decisions of book publishers, and the subjects that a culture deems to be important, all from intense study of an extensive collection of activity books.  How have the topics covered by such books changed over the decades?  Are some subjects covered more consistently and thoroughly than others?  Have some subjects always been taboo for the publishers of such books?

  

Let's be even more specific.  One of the most widely and continuously published types of activity books has been the crossword book.  How has publication of these types of books changed over the decades?  What does the publication of such books say about the evolution of the languages in which such books are published?  What does the publication of such books say about cultural definitions of thorny concepts like  "intelligence?"  Does the publishing history of such books suggest that publishers, at least, perceive different levels or types of intelligence to which such books might be marketed?

  

Of course, for such books to be really useful to future book historians it would be helpful if the activity books in one's collection contained numerous examples of reader engagement with such texts:

Therein, of course, lies the rub: very few folks who actually engage with such texts ever save them.  Such items are ephemeral -- most folks use them and discard them.

But if future book historians are to have anything to work with, it seems unlikely that they will get much help in this area from institutional libraries -- we are unaware of any libraries that consistently make the acquisition of such books a priority, especially activity books that encourage the reader to mark the books in some fashion.  Seems to be a very much overlooked niche for the enterprising book collector....

  

How Did That Foliage Get into My Manuscripts? at The Private Library

Book collectors who peruse enough auction and dealer catalogs will occasionally encounter terms that are more usually encountered in catalogs devoted to agriculture or horticulture.  Acanthus, for example.

Stylized representations of Acanthus spinosus have for centuries been a popular adornment for all types of manuscripts, as can be seen in this 15th century example from a French translation of Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei held by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek...

...and in this 15th century example from the Livre des merveilles held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Note that the coloration in both instances is not exactly what one usually finds in the natural world.  As ODLIS observes, this plant was

used in Antiquity to ornament Corinthian capitals and later as a decorative motif in medieval art, especially in the borders and initial letters of illuminated manuscripts where it usually appears painted in unrealistic colors (red, yellow, blue, purple), often in combination with small images of flowers, birds, insects, and animals.

It is the fleshiness of the leaves that sets acanthus ornamentation apart from another very popular type of manuscript foliation, rinceaux, seen below in the 15th century Burnet Psalter held by University of Aberdeen Library...

...and in the 15th century Belles Heures of Jean de Berry held by The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

As can be readily seen, rinceaux is composed of an intricately branching pattern of thin "string" foliage, more spiky in appearance and usually less colorful than acanthus.

Both types of foliage appear in some manuscripts, such as this example from a Book of Hours held by The Morgan Library:

Of course, such foliation appears not only in medieval manuscripts.  When William Morris revitalized the private press movement at the end of the 19th century, for example, acanthus and other types of foliation were a major decorative motif that he worked into titles such as the Kelmscott Chaucer...

...as well as into his numerous tapestries, wallpapers and stained glass:

Book collectors interested in pursuing the subject of floral and similar motifs in medieval manuscript illumination may find titles such as those depicted below especially useful:

  

Many more such titles exist for specific periods and countries:

 

Ready Reckoners and The Private Library

How many ounces are in a quart?  Is a liter larger than a quart?  If a liter costs ten Euros, how much is that in Swiss francs?   If you don't spend those ten Euros, what will they be worth in ten years if you deposit them in a bank at 3% simple interest?  If you exchange your ten Euros for gold, what weight should you expect in return if the gold is 18k?  If the gold is 24kt?

The modern world routinely turns to electronic and online calculators of various types when faced with such questions.  But in the days before calculators, such questions were routinely handled by a wide and diverse array of printed books known as ready reckoners:

As Bruce Williams and Roger Johnson observe in a recent article, ready reckoners were

...printed books of tables of pre-calculated results of all kinds of multiplication useful for commerce, principally price per unit times units or price per pound weight times pound weight but also for calculating wages and interest.

All aids for commerce had to combine high precision, speed, and accuracy with the ability to handle non-decimal measures and currencies, and be cheap enough to be bought for every day use by clerks and shop assistants.

...Ready Reckoners were far more important in terms of volume sales than all the mechanical devices put together, and ... this was because Ready Reckoners out-performed [early mechanical] devices on all the key factors in the buying decision: ... price, number of significant figures, accuracy, ability to handle non-decimal multiplications, time to learn how [to] use ...and time per calculation....

As these authors note, the earliest ready reckoners were simply tables of frequently used arithematical calculations consulted by merchants during the course of their sales -- e.g., how many pence equal a pound, or how much X yards of cloth cost at a price of Y per yard:

  

But  over time, ready reckoners were developed that contained tables of calculations that were much more specific.  This was because ,as Williams & Johnson point out,

...before having a list of sums of money to add on an invoice ...  or in creating columns of Debits and Credits, a price had to be multiplied by a quantity to get the amount of a transaction. Consider what is involved in a typical single transaction [like selling manufactured steel parts such as] a square of steel plate, a length of steel joist and a circle of steel plate. First the area of the pieces of plate had to be worked out, and from this the weight could be derived. The weight of the joist was looked up in a table per linear foot. All these weights then had to be multiplied by the price per ton to give the line value. Consequently ...one invoice involved eight multiplications, all non decimal times non decimal, averaging two to three per invoice line. The total weight was later reconciled with the weigh ticket for the total ... load. Note that Item 2 involves not one multiplication but the squaring of a number, its multiplication by π, with the result being divided by 4. In addition, although the length is shown in ft and inches, this would have to be converted into inches....

Such complex calculations were routine for sales of items like lumber:

  

Ready reckoners are often collected in stand-alone fashion, although they are just as often collected as part of private libraries devoted to mathematics and/or computing.  Having been printed for over three centuries, the range of what's available in the marketpalce, often quite inexpensively, is enormous....

  

"A Good Hand" and The Private Library

There was a time, not so long ago, when "a good hand" was as important to one's success in business as honesty and a firm handshake.  In fact, so important was penmanship to certain types of commercial success that it was taught as a skill to adults centuries before it became a commonplace of instruction in public schools.

Printed copybooks -- which adult students used to imitate the pen strokes of so-called writing masters -- are known as early as the 16th century (thanks to the advent of copperplate engraving).  The Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University has a well-regarded collection of many of these books, which they have featured in not a few posts to their excellent blog.  One such is this ca. 1670 title published by Louis Senault:

Another such is this even earlier (1609) manual published by Jan van den Velde I:

Actually, as the good folks at Princeton point out,

[f]rom the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, two types of writing books predominated in Europe: the writing manual to offer instruction in how to make, space, and join letters as well as how to choose paper, cut quills, and make ink; and the copybook with engraved plates of writing models to be copied.

The volume noted above is both.

Such early books are both rare and expensive.  Collectors interested in adding penmanship titles to their bookshelves are much more likely to focus on the many copybooks that were produced during the late 19th-early 20th century.  Among the best known and most collectible of these are those produced by Platt Rogers Spencer...

...Austin Norman Palmer...

...and C. P. Zaner:

A number of excellent histories and bibliographies of this subject are readily available in the marketplace, such as these...

  

...and these:

  

Folks interested in exploring this topic in greater detail will want to visit the website of IAMPETH (The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting).  This site offers collectors opportunities to peruse some very rare copybooks in their entirety....

In Search of the Perfect Bookbinding at The Private Library

In many respects, the times in which we live are a Golden Age for book collectors.  Obscure tomes that once would have required diligent searches over a period of several years can now be found in just a few seconds with the click of one's mouse.  Likewise, resources that once would have been beyond the pale of all but well-heeled collectors in major metropolitan areas are now within the ready grasp of just about anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

Finding a really good bookbinder, for example, once required a major investment of time, if not money.  One would traipse to bookbinding exhibitions to get some sense of current artists and trends; would traipse to binders' workshops to initiate contact with such binders and/or their representatives (unless one placed faith in one's ability to do this by mail); and so on.  How much more easily are such matters dealt with today!

While there of course is no substitute for examining a bookbinder's work in person,  the Internet is sufficiently awash in online exhibitions of such work that much of the traipsing of yore can now be done in one's pajamas in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.  Just login...

One especially noteworthy online exhibition of contemporary bookbinding is the 100th Anniversary Exhibition of the Guild of Book Workers, which was held in 2006.  As Besty Palmer Eldridge notes in her President's Remarks for this exhibition,

[a]lthough the Guild’s major focus has been on bookbinding, it appreciates and promotes all of the related book arts as well: hand papermaking and decorating, printing, calligraphy and illumination, and the conservation, preservation, and restoration of older book materials. Initially, the emphasis was on the traditional techniques and skills associated with fine binding. Design binding remains a strong interest in the membership and excellent examples appear in this current exhibition. More recently a strong interest has developed in artist’s books. This broader interpretation and definition of the book has attracted a whole new group of devotees. It too is well represented in this exhibition.

Below, three of our personal favorites from this exhibition....

Melinda Padgett's binding of Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop is suggestive of that book's concern with the imposition of Christianity over the Southwestern Pueblo Indian culture.  Padgett uses motifs adapted from Acoma pottery designs, and a spine that resembles the spines traditionally found on Bibles, to help effect this suggestiveness.

Anna Embre's Byzantine bookbinding model is an attractive example of one of the many traditions that modern bookbinders draw upon for inspiration.  Here Embre has used brown goat skin over cedar boards to realize her model, which she complemented with blind tooling, brass clasps and raised sewn endbands.

Roberta Lavadour's binding of Fat Chance may raise an eyebrow or two among traditionalists, but it speaks directly to its subject:

Found diet pamphlets sewn all along on handmade leather belts that run through the center of the boards, with painted text block edges and French double headbands. Covered in three-quarter leather (goat) with Fabriano Roma fore edge covers and found measuring tape. Belt closures have standard holes, as well as extra holes hand punched to accommodate the added girth of the book. Everything about the book is purposely overscaled. The resulting book speaks to the futility of the quick fix while allowing us to relate to the person who bought so many of these pamphlets, each one of which initially held great hope.

A great exhibition, whatever one's tastes in bookbinding....

Smell This! at The Private Library

Book collectors who came of age during the 1970s and '80s, or who had children or grandchildren come of age during that era, probably recall purchasing not a few scratch n' sniff stickers.  These often were given out by teachers as rewards for classroom work and the like, and they eventually became so popular that they were traded between children in much the same manner as baseball cards:

As explained by HowStuffWorks,

[t]he basic idea behind scratch-and-sniff [was] to take [an] aroma-generating chemical and encapsulate it in gelatin or plastic spheres that are incredibly small -- on the order of a few microns in diameter. When you scratch the sticker, you rupture some of these spheres and release the smell. The smell is essentially held in millions of tiny bottles, and you break a few of the bottles every time you scratch the sticker. The tiny bottles preserve the fragrance for years....

The type of paper that got impregnated with these tiny spheres made a big difference in how long a sticker might be expected to retain its smell.  The matte papers that were used in the early years of the process retained the impregnated smells much longer than the glossy papers that were used later.  Like coins and stamps, many of the stickers produced during this era are now highly collectible items in their own right.

The technology used for these stickers eventually came to be utilized elsewhere, most notably in advertising.  Advertising inserts for perfume companies and the like remain a major use of this technology even today.  Another major use of this technology will be found, as any parent knows, in children's books:

  

The first such books appeared in the early 1970s, and there have been a steady stream of such books ever since.  Many of these books introdiuce children to some of the more enticing aromas they are likely to encounter in the world around them:

But not all such books are as pleasant.  Oxford University Press, for example, published an especially collectible nine-volume set of such books in 1997-98 known collectively as Smelly Old History:

  

The problem with all such books is that they do not all manage to accurately capture particular types of scents.  How accurately, for example, can impregnated strips of paper really capture the smell of Victorian London, as described by contemporary observers such as Henry Mayhew (here describing London's notorious Jacob's Island):

[t]he water was covered with scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it floated large masses of rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges were swollen carcases of dead animals, ready to burst with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores were heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphoretted smell from which told you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster-shells were like pieces of slate from their coating of filth and mud. In some parts the fluid was as red as blood from the colouring matter that poured into it from the reeking leather dressers’ close by....

Assuming a mere piece of paper impregnated with mcirocapsules of fragrance could capture such a scene, would you want the book on your bookshelves...?!

Fascicles vs. Parts at The Private Library

Because dealer catalogs and auction catalogs usually do not include a glossary, it is quite easy for book collectors -- especially novice book collectors -- to become a bit confused when different terms are used to describe what appear to be "the same thing."  Dealers and auction houses, for example, frequently use the terms fascicles and parts somewhat interchangeably to describe volumes that originally were published piecemeal. 

The terms, however, are not precisely equivalent, because the intent of the publisher is different in each case. 

Parts were especially popular in the 19th century, when they were issued primarily for the purpose of reducing up-front costs to subscribers.  This enabled publishers and their authors to reach a much wider potential audience.  Such an audience invariably included many readers who could not afford a novel (with its higher attendant publishing costs), but could afford an installment of a novel (many fewer pages to print, much cheaper paper covers, usually bound with advertisements to further reduce publishing costs):

Parts were issued as stand-alone publications.  For that reason, parts were published in sequence.  There was no intent on the part of the publisher that the parts eventually be bound together (although many such parts eventually were bound together by wealthier subscribers, a fact that authors such as Dickens took into account when planning their installments),

Although fascicles also were sometimes published as a cost-saving measure, that was not, and is not, the usual reason for publication.  Fascicles are published when a title requires research, illustration, etc., that is expected to extend over a considerable period of time:

Fascicles might or might not be "complete" relative to the larger work which they comprise.  Accordingly, sequence of publication is rarely the major concern.  It is more important that once a particular bit of research, illustration or whatever is completed, that it be published, and so on, until all the research, illustration, etc., is complete.  Only then is organization imposed upon the whole by binding the fascicles into one or more volumes.

In short, parts are intended as permanent divisions of a title, while fascicles are intended as temporary divisions of a title. 

As with many other bibliographic distinctions, this distinction is not always as clear-cut as the above might suggest.  In addition to bound parts, for example, one also sometimes encounters fascicles that are stand-alone units in one sense, but part of a larger whole in another sense.  One sees this, for instance, when collections are published that span many different institutions -- e.g., Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum....