David McKitterick. The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840.

Abstract

In 1732, Johann Vogt’s influential rare book manual, Catalogus historico-criticus librorum rariorum, was published in Hamburg, offering readers and collectors not only a sense of bibliographic possibilities but also a means of conceptualizing rarity within the market for secondhand books. Vogt helped articulate basic principles still familiar to students of book history today: rarity need not be equated with scarcity; rarity and economic value are two separate indicators; and rarity and “quality” are best held apart as separate determinations. Vogt’s book, republished in multiple editions over the course of the eighteenth century, sits squarely within a constellation of similar guides—the result of important changes in how collectors came to understand the millions of older books already in existence. Such guides, of course, also exerted their own agency in shaping this evolving category of “rare books.”This formation of “canons of knowledge, of reading, of taste or of value” distilled from the circulation of four centuries of book production is the story that David McKitterick assiduously recounts. While it will, I suspect, be useful to seasoned scholars of historical bibliography, as an art historian, I hope it reaches a much wider audience. For anyone who has ever spent time interacting with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books in a rare book room (or aspires to do so), this is required reading. Engagingly written and wide-ranging in scope, this study might best be understood, most broadly, as an account of the cultural and intellectual transformations that swept across early modern Europe. McKitterick’s success lies in constructing a narrative that attends to a rich confluence of historical factors: prominent individuals (from booksellers to collectors), to the material conditions of actual books (particularly in relation to the rising appreciation in the early eighteenth century for typographical sophistication), to analogous cultural institutions (from the Grand Tour to the rise of the art market and old master collections), to the emergence of a bibliographical literature, to the disruptions and upheavals of the late eighteenth century, and finally to ideals of patrimony and cultural inheritance. While Britain (especially England) tends to anchor his project, the story is nonetheless impressively international (or at least continental), and indeed the study makes a compelling case for the inherently interconnected, even collaborative character of the secondhand book market, particularly from the seventeenth century forward.The reception of incunabula—the term’s familiarity owing to Cornelius van Beughem’s Incunabula typographiae (Amsterdam, 1688)—factors into the story, though much less heroically than nineteenth-century librarians who institutionalized the category might have expected. While acknowledging the clear scholarly benefits of this privileged designation for understanding fifteenth-century publishing, McKitterick nonetheless characterizes it as a “manifestly artificial [category]... when considering how the book trade and reading developed during the early sixteenth century.” And while he most certainly is interested in the physicality of books, an orientation that others—Michael Maittaire in the eighteenth century and Kristian Jensen more recently—have traced back to fifteenth-century publications and their reception history, McKitterick is more interested in books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how collectors’ experiences of contemporary books affected their engagement with older ones.The “invention” of the book’s title is, as explained in chapter 1, intended to evoke the word’s Latin origins, connotations of “finding” or “discovery,” as well as the possibility of “framing.” This shade of meaning is perhaps at odds with McKitterick’s entirely convincing claim that “the invention of rare printed books was no sudden discovery [but]... a prolonged affair, proceeding at different speeds in different subjects and different literatures.” On the other hand, the Renaissance conception of inventio might usefully evoke another historiographical connection. In The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Vasari—in articulating his own framing device—posits a crucial distinction between objects from the past that are simply old and objects that are ancient. The distinction is akin to the problem of rarity. How, when confronted, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with so many possible secondhand books, did a buyer discern the rare book from the stacks of merely old ones?If grounded in a protracted, developmental model largely occurring between 1660 and 1800, McKitterick’s conception of how rarity came to be constructed and defined within the book market plays out as an emphatically modern impulse—however dedicated the hold on these objects from the past. The book’s twenty chapters are arranged chronologically, with the march running from taste to systems, from curiosities to measurement, from private libraries to public institutions. Though brief, some of the book’s most interesting suggestions relate to early modern anxieties, the review journal as a response to the growing avalanche of print, and the growing sophistication of the used book market as corresponding to new, mass-produced commodities.McKitterick’s temporal sensibilities ultimately point, however, not to the nineteenth century as triumphant but to the twenty-first century as a period of questionable resolve. He introduces his misgivings in the prologue, and builds the case implicitly throughout much of the book, asserting that “librarians... are both guardians of memory and agents of change.” The national libraries of the nineteenth century were themselves the result of decades of development, and hopes had run high that the Harley Collection would remain intact for the British nation in the 1740s, in part because of Oxford’s failure to obtain the library of Isaac Vossius in 1689; fifty years later, it still felt like a significant loss. In the face of limited and declining resources, McKitterick is especially unsettled by digitization initiatives as the basis for solutions, suggesting that we are only creating new, deleterious forms of rarity. It is this heartfelt sense of immediacy and relevancy that animates the narrative. In describing the eighteenth century, he judges that “rarity became a concept also having to do with inheritance. Hence, it implied responsibility for the future. What had survived from the past existed for present enjoyment; but it had also to be passed on to coming generations.” It feels less like a historical summation and more like a call to action. Rare books, he argues, deserve better.