Traditionally booksellers have recorded only provenances which add in some way to the interest
or value of a copy. Indeed Carter warned against overdoing provenance : “This
generally laudable attention paid to provenance … is occasionally pushed to a
length which, if not in itself slightly ridiculous, has of recent years begun
to be indiscriminate … A pedigree is not always distinguished just because it is
long” (John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, 7th edition, revised by Nicolas
Barker, 1994). This is Carter’s original text : surprisingly Nicolas Barker let
it pass unaltered. A rethink of book-trade practice in recording provenance is
long overdue.
I would like to propose that as much provenance information as possible should
be recorded in booksellers’ catalogues. There are three major reasons why I
think this is desirable : provenance information is valuable for book
historians who are, in one way or another, our customers; provenance helps to
establish the authenticity of the historical object; and finally, for security.
This last reason may be the most persuasive, because it really is obviously in
our best interests to know that a book has not been stolen, and a full
provenance is the best way of ensuring this.
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1. BOOK HISTORY
There seems little point in collecting and studying old books if one is not
interested in their history. As obvious as this statement seems, reading a few
book dealers’ catalogues and web listings will soon reveal that attention to the
history of the copies offered is patchy and inconsistent. Provenance is very
likely to be left anonymous, the cataloguer only recording the presence of a
signature, bookplate or library stamp, without the name of the owner or the
library concerned. The geographical origin of the binding is usually not noted
and marks of use are still often described as
defects rather than interesting features of the copy. This denies the book its
historical context. Who owned the book? What kind of person? Where did they
live? What kind of library was it in and so what kind of readers had access?
These are the basic questions about provenance. But one can also ask, Did a
former owner read or use the book? How did they respond to it?
Provenance has, in one sense, always been important in book collecting. The
association copy – owned by someone associated with the author – or one owned by
a famous person; a celebrated collector renowned for their taste; or the copy
from a great library. Booksellers naturally make the most of books with a ‘good
provenance’. It is when the former owner is unknown, or the book has been
discarded from a library, that most booksellers say as
little as possible, only warning the potential purchasers of something they
might find unattractive, such as library markings or underlining of the text.
This traditional approach is largely due to the rather obvious fact that books
are primarily bought for their texts, not as witnesses to the reception of these
texts. But this lack of interest in precise recording of provenance is strongly
re-enforced by two further factors : former owners often do not want to be
identified; and booksellers are wary of revealing their sources of supply and
hence their cost.
Despite these obvious difficulties, I believe that as book dealers our
responsibility for the preservation of the historical documents in which we deal
– printed books each with their own individual history – extends to the proper
recording of provenance. Otherwise historical information is lost and instead of
helping the collector and historian, we are making their task harder. We are
biting the hand that feeds us.
Before discussing the arguments from book history in more detail, I would like
to propose a broader definition of provenance than simply the record of former
owners of a copy of a book. A broader definition includes, ideally, all evidence
of sale, ownership and use. I say ideally because in reality many marks left by
owners are cryptic and hard to record, let alone interpret. Binding too is part
of a book’s provenance because it tells us something about the geographical
location and perhaps the wealth or status of the former owner. The broad
definition of Provenance is : the record of a book’s binding, vending, purchase,
ownership and use. This has sometimes been called the biography of the copy.
Academic libraries are major buyers of rare books and academic historians the
end users of the books, so it is worth asking : what academic pathways approach
the book as physical object? One such pathway approaches early printed books as
a continuum with manuscript books, blurring the distinction between them. In
manuscript studies the individuality of the copy is stressed and the techniques
of codicology are nowadays being fruitfully applied to early printed books, revealing
variations in production and use that have in the past been suppressed in the
search for their presumed uniformity. It is becoming clear that printed books –
of all periods – are by no means uniform, their texts variable as they left the
printing shop and diverging further as they are modified by readers. The text
itself may change in production and use; and its meaning may be modified by the
intervention of readers.
Another academic pathway is the study of the reception of texts. This can be
studied in the annotations or marks of an individual reader in responding to a
range of texts. If the library of such an owner has been dispersed, proper
recording can be especially valuable in identifying the books of a single
reader. They might be identified by a signature, or by a particular style of
binding or an individual system of shelf-marks. Such evidence might mean nothing
to the cataloguer, but everything to the historian trying to track down the
books owned by their subject. Annotations can also be studied by looking at as
many copies of a particular text as possible to build up a picture of the range
of readers and their responses to it. Here the simple fact that, say, an English
book turns up in a French binding could be significant, or a former owner might
have recorded the place and date of acquisition. Each copy thus, potentially,
contributes to an understanding of the distribution and reception of an edition.
Parallel to this path of reader response is the search for the reader. Here the
interest is in reconstructing the readership of a text. What kinds of people
read this text; with what intellectual equipment did they approach it; what
expectations did they have of it? Contributions to answering these questions
come from assembling the evidence of ownership and use.
Yet another academic pathway is the history of book ownership; of libraries; and
of the booktrade. All of these, to state the obvious, depend in part on
provenance evidence.
It might be argued that it is not the bookseller’s job to do the spade work for
academics. There are both altruistic and self-interested responses to this. The
altruistic response is that by recording what we can we are preserving
historical data which may otherwise be lost. This is especially true if we
record a provenance which is not marked in the book. This does not necessarily
mean publishing this information, which, as noted above, might be against wishes
of a former owner, or not in our commercial interests. But it could be made
available on request and wherever possible provided with the book when it is
sold. The argument from self-interest is simply that we may be able to sell more
books. A provenance that means nothing to us can be very exciting to a
specialist collector of library; books sell for a variety of reasons and we may
as well give our books every chance.
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2. AUTHENTICITY
The second reason for recording provenance is authenticity. In the fine art
world, provenance can be all that stands between a firm attribution to an artist
and an attribution to a workshop or school. With books, an unbroken provenance
is unlikely to be crucial in identifying the text, but it can be just as
important in authenticating illumination, hand-colouring, annotations or
bindings. In some cases too it can tell us if a copy has been restored or
sophisticated. In all these cases it is probably not the famous owners who will
be omitted from the record of provenance, but recent owners, including dealers
and auction houses, owners who are known, but not recorded. Just as with
paintings, all owners need to be recorded if provenance is to be of use in
establishing the authenticity of an object.
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3. SECURITY
The third and last reason for recording provenance is security. If one knows
where a book has been all its life, one knows it has not been stolen. The
corollary is that if dealers and their customers insisted on full provenance
information, and if furthermore books with deliberately obliterated marks of
provenance – clipped title-pages, erased library stamps, soaked-off bookplates –
were rejected, or at any rate devalued, there would be less incentive to theft.
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THE FUTURE : CHANGING THE CULTURE
Full provenance information for every book is unfortunately quite unrealistic.
Very few books in practice have a known and unbroken provenance and many books
have had marks of provenance removed for perfectly legitimate reasons. An
insistence on full provenance information has simply not been a part of the
culture of book-collecting for so many generations that most of the information
is already lost.
This culture is changing however. Scholars and collectors are more and more
interested in provenance, both in the narrow sense of a record of owners and the
broader sense of reception and use. The high prices at the top end of the market
have made much more detailed cataloguing commercial viable and the auction
houses in particular, and some dealers, are now recording provenance information
in much more detail. This change in culture will inevitably move down the scale
of values and will make properly described books more attractive to buyers while
it will be less worthwhile to ignore or suppress provenance information.
Furthermore, recording provenance has the potential to reduce fraud and theft.
This change of culture implies a change in our attitude to the historical
artefacts that we deal in. A responsible attitude means we should not treat them
only as commodities to be manipulated and re-presented at will. It means
respecting them as historical documents to which we owe a duty of care to
preserve; and to preserve the information that provides them with their
historical context. This is, after all, what makes them worth collecting and
studying.
A book is the physical form in which the text exists. On the one hand we want to
know how it left the publisher’s warehouse, or the bookseller’s shop so that
pristine copies are interesting for providing the clearest evidence of the final
intentions of the publisher, reflecting to a lesser or greater degree the
intentions of the author. Most copies are not pristine copies, however, and they
tell us in addition what happened next. They are historical documents, each one
a part of the history of the particular text that they embody. Each copy of an
edition is one part of the whole edition; each one documents in part the history
of the circulation and reception of that text. It is our duty to preserve;
record; and pass on these documents.
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