Scribleriana Transferred:Mostly Retrospective James E. May The Scriblerian has covered rare book and manuscript materials acquired, sold, or offered for nearly four decades. The first volume covered Lois G. Morrison's collection (in part focused on Eustace Budgell) that went to San Antonio College. The spring 1973 issue reported that the National Library of Australia bought the collection of the late David Nichol Smith and that the University of Kansas acquired the fabulous Richmond P. and Marjorie N. Bond Collection of roughly a thousand items, loaded with original issues of the Tatler and Spectator and of newspapers like the London Gazette (5.2:122). Even earlier the Scriblerian had initiated the "Scribleriana Transferred" column, apparently [End Page 89] so named by Robert P. Maccubbin, back in Vol. 4.1, when he offered "Unique Scribleriana Transferred 1969-1970." Maccubbin produced at least four more survey articles, typically focused on the previous year's market, reaching to 1974-1975 in the spring 1976 issue. Then Steve Parks, Yale's Osborn Librarian, took over, with "Unique Scribleriana Transferred 1976" in Autumn 1977 (10.1:58-59), and contributed four more columns (Autumn 1978, 1979, and 1980, and the Spring 1981). A. C. Elias, Jr., thereafter produced the survey from Autumn 1981 to Spring 1986, writing about five pages per survey, slightly more than his predecessors. Then from Autumn 1987 to Spring 1989 the column was written by Theodore Hofmann of Quaritch. After a short hiatus, I filled in for my distinguished predecessors, and have written the column since Autumn 1991, identifying resources and trying to relay the expertise of antiquarian specialists to academic scholars. To insure that I lasted longer than Hofmann, the triumvirate had the charming Peter Tasch manage me, and, by the time Peter retired from the coeditorship, Roy and Blake Gerard continued the column, though insisting on such changes as a format shaped by bulleted items. I followed the example of my predecessors and got much help in the 1990s from Arch Elias. Back when I tried to do a first-rate job, the task was full of frustration because too few of the unique or very rare items in auction or in dealer catalogues could be included—and there were other frustrations, like sellers' refusing to say where something went, and the inevitable typos within so much dense and abbreviated data. While dealers would often rather not have buyers and prices disclosed, the antiquarians have generally been cooperative. The rare books market has changed considerably over four decades. The supply of Restoration and eighteenth-century materials flowing into the market has been reduced. There were more great-house libraries of old families going for sale at the start of the period. As Neville Figgis, dean of Irish antiquarians, told me: Now all is changed utterly—if there is a country-house sale, it is unlikely to include the accumulation of centuries, but rather the possessions of some property developer who has lived there for the past twenty or thirty years, and never owned a book in his life. Recently I have only met with one Swift-inscribed volume (a seriously important item, which you would love to write about, owned by someone whose pedigree I won't mention, and who had no appreciation of it whatsoever, but who decided to hold onto it, when I offered megabucks! It will doubtless appear at Sotheby's sometime). Where we used to have incunables, now pre-1700 publications have become quite uncommon, and the ratio of calf-bound books to cloth, low. Although the internet has brought the holdings of more antiquarian dealer into plain sight, there seem to be fewer rare books by two measures: first, many books that I find in catalogues from around 1990 are not now on the market, and the dealers' own impression is that fewer editions are available. Alan Grant of Grant & Shaw recollects that, when he worked at Blackwell's in the 1980s, "Pope, Swift, et al. were far more common and more than somewhat cheaper, even if demand has decreased a little since then." John Price, another antiquarian bookseller, concurs about the scarcity of books: There are fewer books around to buy or...