Konrad Haebler’s Album of Incunabula in Moscow Libraries

Abstract

The paper discloses the unusual treatment of duplicates and defective copies, characteristic of European libraries at the time when Haebler’s works were created and published (beginning of 20th century) and stresses the necessity of correct bibliographic treatment of the valuable printed materials in modern libraries. The paper also presents the famous album of West-European incunabula (Der westeuropäische Wiegendruck in Original-Typenbeispielen), compiled by Konrad Haebler in 1928, two copies of which are held in Moscow at the Russian State Library and the State Public Historical Library of Russia.This fundamental work in the history of typography by the prominent German expert on incunabula, one of the inventors of the Proctor-Haebler method in bibliography and founder of the world incunabula catalogue Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, is analyzed in the aspect of the specific early 20th-century bibliographic principles underlying the composition of the album and the way the original old prints are presented in it. The album consists of a collection of 15th-century original fragments enclosed in a 20th-century overall structure (text booklet, case and set of labeled passe-partouts).This unusual composition can present classification problems in some modern public libraries, when the album is recorded as a whole, whereas the separate incunabula fragments are not catalogued. Moreover, a comparative study of several copies of the album available for analysis on- and offline, carried out in the study, proved that their sample collections were composed of different authentic incunabula leaves, thus making each album unique.