On Cataloging 1.5: Paul Needham
16 February 2024: Our first special guest is extra special!
We are experimenting with bonus issues containing short interviews with people with strong opinions and special insights on our monthly topics.
This month, we are bringing you the thoughts of one of our personal heroes: Paul Needham, the emeritus Scheide Librarian at Princeton. We have both had the great pleasure of looking closely at rare books with Paul (in fact, one of Rhiannon’s treasured book world experiences is getting his and Eric White’s tour of their fabulous exhibition Gutenberg & After: Europe’s First Printers 1450-1470 at the Firestone Library back in the Before Times), and he seemed like the perfect person to kick off this series. In addition to his work as a curator and librarian at some of the most important libraries in America, Paul has also worked with the book departments of both major auction houses here in New York.
He is widely recognized as an authority on books and bibliography; the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Bibliographical Society’s Gold Medal, he has also delivered the Sandars Lectures at Cambridge (where he was the Sandars Reader), the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lecture in Bibliography at Penn, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. Of his groundbreaking study of the 1610 Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo Makes a Book, no less than G. Thomas Tanselle wrote that it “serves as a model of what descriptive and analytical bibliography at the highest level can accomplish … It demonstrates not only how analysis and description are intertwined but also how the two together contribute to intellectual history.”1 We’d argue that Paul’s amazing work is a testament to the power and value of looking closely at and describing books - cataloging in the broadest possible sense. We are very grateful to him for answering a few questions for us (and you).
Hi, Paul! It’s really a joy and honor to have you here as a guest on Half Sheets to the Wind. Let’s get stuck in. Can you talk about how you found books as a profession? I know we’re both interested to hear about how you “found” rare books, as it seems so many people’s origin stories in the profession are interesting!
PN: I had no knowledge of, interest in, or even conception of bibliographical thinking until the fall of 1968, the beginning of my fourth year of graduate studies, when I was in London, working on a dissertation about the Tudor humanist and Greek scholar Sir John Cheke. Two separate strands, both bringing my ignorance home to me, came together that fall, say in October. I have written about the first in my tribute to the late Gerard van Thienen, published in Quaerendo, 2006 (vol. 36). As I was looking in the British Museum Manuscript Reading Room at Tudor letters and documents, another graduate student, from Cambridge, mentioned watermarks to me, and pointed to where the volumes of Briquet sat on the reference shelves. Shortly after, in the North Room, I noticed behind the inquiries desk on the north wall the four-volume copy of the recently published “New” Briquet, edited by Allan Stevenson. Stevenson’s introductory essays were captivating. For the first time I began to see history not in “floating” words but in the physical artifacts bearing those words.
The second strand emerged about the same time. I was seated in the Round Room of the Library, at a desk roughly along the “4 o’clock spoke”, reading an English book of the 1540s, very possibly Martin Bucer’s Gratulation unto the Churche of Englande in the translation of Thomas Hoby (1549, 8º, STC 3963), transcribing some phrases that I wanted to cite. The book has no foliation or pagination, and I didn’t know how to indicate where the passage was, but I faintly recalled seeing in learned footnotes references to “signatures.” On the shelves nearby were various books on bibliography, all new to me, including Bowers’s Principles of Bibliographical Description and R. B. McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography. I probably got my immediate answer on how to identify pages by “signatures” from Arundell Esdaile, A Student’s Manual of Bibliography, but Bowers and McKerrow’s books were clearly of greater substance, whatever the substance might be.
One day I opened Bowers’s Principles of Bibliographical Description to the second chapter, concerned with defining edition, issue, and state, and thought at first that I had encountered a sort of mad man, drawing minute distinctions, with utter seriousness, on matters of utter triviality. I took out a notecard and began to copy a few of these lunatic sentences, thinking I might send them to my late friend John Troyer, a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard; we shared a taste in scholarly follies. As I copied, however, I gradually realized that Bowers followed a close chain of reasoning; that, even if I did not understand quite what motivated him, his was a mind of unusual power. And, by the time I finished reading in Bowers at this first encounter, I had at least learned one thing I hadn’t known before: what the term “first edition” meant or should mean. I had often heard those words in passing, say in detective novels where someone, very likely now dead, collected “first editions.” But I had never known what those words meant.
With these two strands joined, I was led on from one “book about books” to another, and almost all were entrancing: here was a community of scholars, not precisely academics, brimming with both knowledge and enthusiasm about matters that I suddenly wanted to learn (the diversion slowed for some months the completion of my dissertation). The academic historians I was familiar with rarely sounded as if they were having such a good time with their research. Stevenson’s Problem of the Missale speciale, recently published, stands first among these, but by browsing the Round Room’s shelves and following up footnotes I was soon led to A. W. Pollard, E. P. Goldschmidt, G. D. Hobson, John Carter, D. F. McKenzie, Michael Sadleir, and others. I probably encountered A. N. L. Munby about a year later. The specific topics did not matter; everything these scholars wrote opened new worlds. (Just after wrtiting this, by chance I found Tom Tanselle’s “A Bibliographer’s Creed” quoting R. B. McKerrow from 1913: “with almost every new book one takes up we are in new country unexplored and trackless.”) A significant part of the attraction was that all wrote well. By the end of the year 1968 it had become clear that “this” is what I wanted to do, somehow drawing a paycheck all the while. The latter requirement first became possible through the kindness of the late James E. Thorpe, then director of the Huntington Library.
RK: On a related note, who taught you to collate? This is something I’ve started asking people in the trade and sometimes I find surprising answers!
PN: In one sense I learned collation in 1968 from the “titans” already mentioned: McKerrow, Bowers, and of course also Walter Greg. Their system contains many prescriptions of how to record, formally, all sorts of irregularities of collation. But in another sense I did not fully grasp what collation is until the early 1980s when I read and thought about Henry Bradshaw’s earlier and much simpler statements on collation. I wrote about this in an appendix to the 1988 pamphlet The Bradshaw Method. My view is that collation (of a codex) consists of unambiguously identifying its physical structure: essentially, of identifying which leaves are conjugate across the spine with which other leaves; and, if there are single leaves, where they fit into this fundamental structure. Any formula or even verbal narration which provides this information is interchangeable and thus is adequate; any which does not, e.g. by indicating the structure of a particular quire as, say, b¹¹, is inadequate. By the way, format and collation are independent of each other.
JWD: One of the things I’ve been dying to ask you is this: what do you look at when you first look at a book? I recall you intently looking at our incunables at Linda Hall, and I know you’re doing close looking, but I didn’t want to ask in the moment and interrupt you. What exactly do you do when you examine a new to you copy of a book?
PN: Probably the first thing I note is the leaf dimensions, in millimeters or centimeters to a tenth (I prefer the latter, but they come to the same thing). Second (assuming the book is printed on paper) I verify its format, that is, the proportion of its single leaves to the full sheets of paper which went into its construction.
JWD: Paul, you and Rhiannon (by example) inspired me to use a notebook to record data when I first spend time with a book I am describing. Can you share what you record, and maybe a scan of a typical page from your notebook?
PN: From 1985 onward, I began to record notes in notebooks from the example set by Henry Bradshaw; before that, I usually made notes on individual leaves, which have a tendency to get lost unless put in clearly labelled folders. Notebooks are the vademecum. From the example of Allan Stevenson’s notes, I try to record on every leaf the date and the library where I am working. The notebooks have been of all sizes and qualities; for many years I used W. H. Smith (or, if the shop appeared first, Ryman) exercise books; then I upgraded to the more elegant Clarefontaine 29.7 x 21 cm notebooks; my most recent notebooks have been Japanese notebooks of retro design, 25.2 x 17.9 cm. Best practice might be to write only on rectos, but I can never keep to that.
JWD: You’re the one that exhorted the usefulness of the Schaedler Precision Rule to me last year, and you were not wrong to praise them. Can you talk about why it’s so good, and why folks should use it?
And a followup question - what’s in your cataloging/descriptive bibliography toolkit, other than the Precision Rule?
PN: Janet Ing Freeman first told me about Schaedler Precision Rules, designed by Taro Yamashita: they are flexible and transparent, and very precisely marked so that even half-millimeters can be judged. They are, or rather were, sold in pairs, with various other markings, such as of typographic points and picas, and agate lines. They must have been heavily used by graphic and print designers when layouts were still done on paper, but computerization has made them obsolete. Their website now states, “Schaedler Precision Rules ended operations in late 2023. We thank all our loyal customers worldwide and hope you continue to enjoy your Schaedler Precision Rules for decades to come.”
Jason, you ask what else is in my “toolkit”. Its sole other component, besides notebook, pencil and eraser, is in essentially everyone’s toolkit: a digital (phone) camera. The ability to take good quality reference photos, at least within enlightened rare book rooms, has revolutionized notetaking. For years I also carried around a 10-power loupe, but found that I rarely used it; and that when I did, I rarely got information I wanted to record.
RK: My first exposure to your work was all the places in ISTC where your attributions are listed, many of them (I think?) are from the Doheny sale. I’m so curious about your experience working on cataloging for that and other sales, and your feelings about auction cataloging as a specific “genre” of cataloging.
PN: I believe the first Doheny sale, Christie’s New York, 22 October 1987, marked a milestone in cataloguing of incunables. Felix de Marez Oyens and I thought carefully about what we wanted to record, uniformly, for each lot in the sale. This included identification of paper sizes, format, accurate collations, and leaf dimensions. We also tried to record all provenances, so far as we knew them. Felix worked out the system of incorporating textual contents within the collational formula. I may be wrong, but I believe this was a first. I modified his system slightly in cataloguing George Abrams’s incunables, sold Sotheby’s London, 16 November 1989. The other incunable auction catalogue I take some pride in is the intense team project of the Donaueschingen collection, sold Sotheby’s London, 1 July 1994. This was an historical collection formed primarily from monastic collections of southwest Germany, and the catalogue tried—while, of course, encouraging bidders—to record information, particularly of provenances and bindings, that would otherwise have been lost. Its provenance index is in the form I think most useful, with evidences of provenance brought together and digested in the index rather than scattered among the individual lots. A significant portion of the collection was sold by private treaty to Baden-Württemberg, divided between the state libraries of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, and all these books are briefly described in an appendix, with records of leaf size, binding, and provenance; and are indexed together with the lots sold at auction.
RK: Thank you so much, Paul! I have a feeling this might contribute to the ongoing shortage of Schaedler Precision rules. I think it is the case that both Jason and I share the feeling that we have one of the most fun communities of colleagues—who are also so often generous with their time and expertise.
JWD: I can only second Rhiannon here, this was an absolute joy, Paul! Thanks for being game to talk with us in this fledgling newsletter, and sharing your histories and ideas and thoughts for us and our readers.
Speaking of - readers - our next issue will hit your inboxes on March 5th, and we’re focusing on the man, the astronomer, the kinda mystic, and our No. 1 early modern astronomer - Johannes Kepler. I think Rhiannon already has something like “a prince among men” in the teaser, so it’s going to be a Kepler love fest. Spoiler alert - he was not available for an interview. See you all on March 5th, and keep in touch till then. Thanks again, Paul!
G. Thomas Tanselle, Descriptive Bibliography. Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2020, p. 35.
What marvelous timing! I have been reading Megan Rosenbloom's book Dark Archives and she interviews Needham to discuss anthropodermic books (a term he does not love, apparently.) What a great interview!