Theme
RK: Hello and welcome back! This month we’re taking On Cataloging. No topic too big! Jason, I feel like we talk about cataloging all the time, but in fact what we each mean by that term is a little different for you as a librarian and me as a bookseller. Some of the things you are doing when you catalogue are very mysterious to me (MARC? I don’t know that man). What are you doing when you catalogue?
JWD: It’s nice that we’re just on our second issue, and I already feel like we’re in the groove - and talking about what I think is one of the fundamental activities of librarians, and well, anyone involved with books - cataloging.1 For me, as a librarian (and I’d also call myself a bibliographer, which I suspect we’ll get into later), it is central to my professional work to connect users with the items in the collections I care for, and to simplify almost to being flippant - you can’t find something (and you don’t know you have it) if it isn’t described. That’s the fundamental purpose of cataloging - helping library users find and determine if an object is suitable to their needs. Charles A. Cutter said that “The convenience of the public is always to be set before the ease of the cataloger.”2 Cataloging takes the time of the librarian and saves the time of the user, which plays into Ranganathan’s fourth “law” of library science, drilled into me in school. Of course, both librarianship and cataloging are a practice, as is any profession, and over the past 14 years in the field, my concept of cataloging has changed, rather dramatically.
When I began as a cataloger, I was interested in following AACR2 as closely as possible. Efficiency and concision were my watchwords. Subject headings, access points, and classification were the focus. That’s the style of cataloging I learned in library school, and what I was taught by my mentors. Let me be clear - there’s nothing wrong with this approach to cataloging - it fulfills the fundamental need for discovery and retrieval. It’s also (in MARC) manipulated by machine, key for large datasets. However, as I’ve grown and learned and changed over the past 14 years as a librarian, and I am still concerned with discovery and retrieval, but describing the book as an object, and looking closely at material evidence. This work straddles both cataloging and bibliography - serving the needs of both our immediate users and the wider scholarly community.
The more productive view is certainly that the “new bibliography” is the province not only of the avowed bibliographer but also of the rare book cataloger, who in the course of his day-to-day activity has occasion to contribute to knowledge and to scholarship by his own discoveries or by making possible discoveries at the hands of others. It is for this reason above all, no doubt, that rare book cataloging should reflect and awareness and understanding of the book as a physical object and as an artifact with possible meaning beyond itself.3
Cataloging that conforms to library descriptive standards (in my case, DCRM(B), combined with MARC, and to the principles of bibliographical description are part of the scholarly record in that the activity of cataloging requires deep research on the part of the cataloger, and also it provides important copy-specific data for use not only by searchers of a local catalog, but also by bibliographers and scholars seeking information about the material specifics of a single copy. When I catalog a book, I transcribe titles and authors, and look at pagination and illustration, but I also endeavor to describe the physical object - assembly, binding, watermarks, provenance, &c, &c. While I am not creating a full bibliographical description à la Tanselle and Bowers, I am adding elements of descriptive bibliography, and an adapted description has become, of late, my preferred starting place to catalog a book. Further, in LHL’s case, because we digitize so many of our rare books, the combination of the catalog record and the digital surrogate serve, I would argue, to help users of those digital surrogates to build a mental model of the physical object.
RK: When I catalogue a book, it is primarily for the purpose of convincing someone to buy the book, by way of providing an accurate description of its material being, as well as its intellectual content and historic context, for their potential delectation. But I also think of it as an important record of the book as it changes hands. Someone later should be able to read my description and identify the book if they come across it, or at least use my description as evidence for that copy’s existence if it is not in an accessible collection. This chain of evidence is one of the benefits of the public nature of auction. But of course, working in auction, I usually have a very short time to do this (and usually a very small space to fit it into), which provides certain challenges.
But the person, long ago now, who actually taught me to catalogue books was the late, great scholar Richard Rouse. He and his wife Mary put together a wonderful teaching collection of medieval manuscripts, of which I had the pleasure of assisting with the cataloging while I was a graduate student at UCLA. Not only did he teach me to collate, but he was the first person to show me how to pay close physical attention to the materiality of books (something I was interested in but didn’t know much about at the time). I was getting paid by the hour, but he encouraged me to take as long as I needed to “get to know” each item.
He wrote an essay called “Why Teach with Medieval Manuscripts” that I have a lovely letterpress copy of, printed by Patrick Reach in 2012. He discusses the thinking behind both his collecting and teaching, including a discussion of Julian Brown, who was (his?) professor of paleography at King’s College, London:
…as an undergraduate, [Brown] attended the classes of a great classical and Celtic archaeologist, who would hand him a photograph and say, “Now, tell me what you see.” Julian declared, “my whole life, not just my work, has been enlarged by the attempts that I then made, to tell him what I saw.” To learn how to look, and then to formulate conclusions about what one has seen, what it means, and to relate this intelligibly to others, requires not merely talent but disciplined training.
JWD: And I think it’s in this activity - looking closely at books to be able to share them with others - where we (me, a librarian, and you RK, a bookseller) have a big area of overlap, and where we both nod at what Tom Tanselle wrote:
No one knows better than descriptive bibliographers the power of objects to suggest the past; and no one is more aware of the evanescence of things, of the destructiveness of time, than bibliographers who confront cracked and faded bindings, torn and stained leaves, or incomplete and disheveled copies of once-splendid books. Yet through such relics we build up our visions of the past; and the recorded details of those relics - however manifold, however minute, however technical - contribute to the richness and comprehensiveness of our conception of the lives and ideas that have preceded our own. If we are interested in the human past, and the role it plays in the present, descriptive bibliography tells a story that we have to understand.4
RK: When items come for consignment and end up on my desk, sometimes they have sold before or been really well described by their former owners—but other times they are basically unknown quantities. And sometimes they aren’t quite what they seem! People sometimes ask me things like “do you have to look at every page of a book you catalogue?” (yes) or “do you read all the books you catalogue?” (no). It’s a different way of engaging with a book than most people have ever experienced, I think. I mean, sometimes I do read parts of the book. In archaeology, they talk about “speaking objects,” which are artifacts that have little inscriptions on them that are telling you something about how to look at the object. Books are a very peculiar type of speaking object; they often have several stories to tell, and not just the explicit one that’s in the text.
When I was first learning how to do auction cataloging of printed books, and I’m remembering in particular a tricky group of rebound incunabula, all of which seemed to have SOMETHING wrong with them, my colleague (and now boss) Christina Geiger’s advice to me when I got stuck was to “ask the book.” I think about this all the time! The book often holds many of the answers to its own questions. I think also of Umberto Eco: “books are not made to be believed, but to be subject to inquiry.”5
Books that come to me are sometimes incomplete, or have been repaired and restored in various non-obvious ways. Sometimes they have false imprints or are even contemporary forgeries, trying to look like something other than what they are. And while, of course, one wants to get it right for the sake of it—at my job, if I miss something big, I can lose money (and also upset my clients). So my physical descriptions are there to provide the mental model of the book, but also to measure it up against the “ideal copy.”6 And, often, explain any things that have happened to it in the course of its life: sequences of repairs, cancelled leaves, supplied leaves, bindings and rebindings. It really does remind me of archaeology sometimes, which was actually my earliest academic training.
JWD: A bibliographic record in a library catalog (as I’ve alluded to above) does several things - first, it gives it a shelf mark to aid retrieval, second it gives access points - author and title (and imprint too I guess), it gives a one line physical description (enough to give a user a general sense of if it is what will serve their needs), and it also assigns subject headings to describe the intellectual content of the book - it’s “aboutness.” I (and other rare book catalogers and curators) seek to add a far more in depth physical description - adding format and collation, describing illustrative methods, noting errata, describing bindings, provenance, and more. Like I said above, I hope the records I make can help the user build a mental model of the book, and to discern its completeness or features in comparison to an “ideal” copy. So, I suppose, Rhiannon, that we’re both trying to “sell” a book to someone, albeit in different contexts!
RK: I have detailed thoughts on this idea of selling, in reference to Augustine’s De magistro, which I will save for a later newsletter. I for one am so grateful to libraries which provide really fulsome copy-specific information about their holdings (and to projects like MEI which are so valuable for study of early books). Some books are not well described in the “standard” references, but it is vital to have good descriptions of other copies to understand the one I’m trying to catalogue. Because, while every copy of a printed book is unique, they are also all part of the bigger edition, and ideally should be considered in light of that. The information about provenance and collectors that can be revealed this way is also incredibly useful.
Instead of subject headings, at Christie’s our descriptions include a prose note on the book, which discusses its importance and historical context as well as some of its more salient material features. I think, especially for early books, this is an important way to teach potential buyers why things are important, and give them different entry points into a book. Every book might be collected for any number of reasons—it’s also my job to draw those out for my clients. Of course, some people just know already exactly what they want, and everything about it. But in terms of encouraging new collectors and drawing attention to lesser-appreciated items, I think the note is really important. And fun to write! It’s a special pleasure when I get big projects like the Columbus Letter or Vesalius, and I get to write a whole essay. For a lot of the books I catalogue, even the old chestnuts, I feel like there is a lot to say that hasn’t yet been said.
This is How We Do It
JWD: I don’t know a more engaging part of my job than when I make the time to sit down with a book I haven’t looked at closely - a new acquisition or a book I am re-cataloging. I have a station all assembled for books I am using or cataloging:
Rhiannon, I was very much inspired by the notebook you showed on instagram a bit back of the books you’ve cataloged (as well as Paul Needham’s notebooks), and so a MAJOR change for me in the past couple of months has been that my first interactions with the book don’t involve a computer at all, but involve me and a pencil and a notebook (and ruler, and so on) sitting looking closely at a book. I have a little checklist of the things I put in my notebook, which generally follows the fields in a MARC record, but incorporates elements of Bowers/Tanselle. I am grateful that I start with this now, as I can’t get distracted by emails or Teams messages, I can just focus exclusively on the book itself.7
I start with the title page and imprint, then check pagination/foliation and confirm illustrative method. I then look at format and collate the book, which can include me asking the book “what the hell?” at several points if things go sideways. Collating is almost always the most time intensive task, and I follow (as I was taught by Jamie Cumby) the concept that you share the collation for an ideal copy, then note if the copy in hand is “imperfect”. Bibliographical references follow next, followed by acquisition information, provenance notes, a binding description (with a measurement!), then leaf and type page dimensions, then general notes. Here’s a scan of a recent description I did, good luck reading my writing:
If we want to get really specific, I use red Clairefontaine notebooks and a mechanical pencil, with one of those great Staedtler Mars Plastic Erasers (because I will make mistakes, usually when collating) nearby. I also like to have our internal acquisition documentation close at hand, since we check bibliographical references in that process. I also keep a stash of acid free strips to mark signatures, if need be, and a cloth tape measure with millimeters on it. I also use the book snake one of my first colleagues made for me (with snakes on it!), and a Schaedler Precision Rule, which is KEY for measuring type page and leaf dimensions. So accurate, and so easy to use:
So that’s the how, that information is then used to create a DCRM(B) record in MARC, which in turn creates a record for the object in our public online catalog.
RK: I feel the same way about cataloging. When I can’t look at another email or excel spreadsheet, I can catalogue a book. My first boss at Christie’s advised me to turn off email while I catalogued! Because of that, I’ve been taking notes by hand for a long time; I can’t remember when I started the notebook system, although I know I was inspired to keep everything in one place and use a more standardized format by Sylvie Merian, who I once had the pleasure of watching catalogue an Armenian manuscript. I had a period of using an engineers pad, but I would end up with just a pile of sheets that I couldn’t organize and which got lost easily as I moved between locations.
Super-sharp Blackwings are my cataloging pencil of choice. I currently use an Appointed notebook with graph paper, although I also really like Mnemosyne’s notebooks. The important thing to me is that the paper is quad-ruled and it has a spiral binding so it sits flat easily. I take down the collation, and note illustrations, faults, and general impressions. Like you, I start with the title page (if there is one) and the format—something I’ve been particularly interested in lately. I’ve noticed a lot of older bibliographic references tend to get this wrong, especially for things like 12mos. Sabin seems to have just guessed based on size a lot of the time. I spend a lot of time staring at the diagrams in Gaskell! It’s worth getting right.
I don’t usually have time to get into the super granular details of things like watermarks unless it is an important issue point (for instance, in something like the Second Folio) or I am trying to date a binding. But as I collate the book, I keep an eye out for suspicious (or intriguing) features—anything that might raise the need to look a little closer. This is where my favorite bibliophile concept comes in: Fingerspitzengefühl. That “finger tip feeling.” Does the paper feel right? Does the binding SMELL right? Is there a subtle change that might indicate supplied or facsimile leaves, or some form of bibliophile meddling? The state of the binding can also get you on alert. If something is in a pristine contemporary binding, I might feel a bit safer. If it’s in a Riviere binding, I know to look out for funny business.
Some of these are not exactly things I would put in a description. But they can lead me to more concrete details worthy of inclusion. We have a style guide, but it is very much subject to personal judgment and situational adaptation. Some things don’t fit easily into a template.
Current Events
JWD - well, for the first time in my career, I’ll be attending the CODEX symposium and fair in Oakland. (nb - I am here now as this sends!) I’ll escape what has turned into a bitterly cold winter in Kansas City to the relative warmth of the bay area - I’ll arrive February 3rd, and depart the 7th. If you’re out there and will be near Oakland, I’d love to be social! I’ve never been to CODEX, but since we’ve started collecting science related artists’ books at LHL, it seems the right time to go. Some good artists/presses I love exhibit there - Russell Maret, Two Ponds Press (AKA Ken and Liv), Gaylord Schanilec, Sarah Horowitz, and others I am sure I’ve missed. Excited to experience a new facet of the book world, and yes, I’ll bring my hat to California.
RK - I’m jealous! February is a great month in California. After my rather insane January, and frankly rather insane last 12 months, I am looking forward to a quiet period. We had a very successful sale of printed and manuscript Americana, which I missed due to Covid, and then once I was back in action it was Bibliography Week, then another auction—concluding with the very thrilling sale of the annotated Vesalius to V’s own alma mater, KU-Leuven. We love a happy ending. Someone once told me that every book you catalogue to sell stays forever in your “library of the mind.” I’ll certainly treasure that one always. If you missed the fun, I had a great conversation about it with Ben Miller at the Curious Objects Podcast.
Let’s Get Personal
RK: I am snuggling in for a few months of, what else, cataloging for the next season. This includes early books from the collection of the astronomer Jay Pasachoff, featuring a lot of Kepler!! I will get to catalogue my first ever copy of the Mysterium cosmographicum. I participated in an insurance appraisal of this collection a few years ago, on which I got to meet Jay and share a pastrami sandwich with him.
I’m also hoping to devote a bit of time to personal projects for the first time in a while, including finishing the very delinquent review I owe PBSA and pursuing some further research into Lucy Eugenia Osborne, as well as my newest bookwoman heroine, the Lathrop Harper cataloguer Emma Miriam Lone. I think a visit to Lathrop Harper’s papers at the NY-Historical Society is in my future. If any readers know much about her, please contact me!!
JWD: well, I am about to move places and I am really all caught up in that. I’ve been working with Emma Hill on a Flamsteed project (more soon), and spinning up the next year of After Hours. Never a dull moment it seems!
Conclusion
We’re excited to share that we’ll have a bonus issue in a couple of weeks, still on the theme of cataloging. That next issue will be an interview with Paul Needham, who likely needs no introduction, about how he catalogs books, his process, and the tools he uses. Needless to say, we’re pretty dang excited about this, and we can tell you, Paul knows a thing or two! Stay tuned, that issue should send about the 16th of February!
So, clearly, I am taking the American spelling, and Rhiannon, I think you’re taking the British spelling. We’re at least representing both sides of that situation. (RK: perils of working for a British company!!)
Charles A. Cutter, et al. 1904. Rules for a Dictionary Catalog. Washington [D.C.]: G.P.O., 1904, p. 5.
Cataloging and Classification, John E. Alden, in Rare Book Collections: Some Theoretical and Practical Suggestions for Use by Librarians and Students, edited by H. Richard Archer. Chicago: ALA, 1965, p. 67.
G. Thomas Tanselle. Descriptive Bibliography. Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2020, p. 28.
Also, we’ll do an issue just on des bib, we promise!
Well, William of Baskerville says this to Adso in The Name of the Rose. But I think Eco, as a book collector and scholar, would have definitely agreed here.
It’s Platonism all the way down, baby.
I should also note that for me, choice of music is key as well while I work on a book. Marin Marais is a recent favorite, as is Joan Benson’s incredible collection album. Scarlatti and Bach and sometimes Vivaldi too.
Jason, hope you're having fun at the CODEX conference! I just watched "The Book Makers" documentary film a few weeks ago, which was the first time I'd heard about it. Interesting news that Jay Pasachoff's collection is being prepared for sale. He taught astronomy at my undergraduate college -- many cool stories about him -- but I assume this means that the rare books he had left on deposit in Chapin Library at Williams will no longer be there? And his first edition De revolutionibus will also be on the auction block for (sob!) slightly more than my pocket money budget?