INTRODUCTION TO RARE BOOK LIBRARIANSHIP:
REFERENCE BOOKS FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

University of Virginia

Rare Book School, 10-14 January 2000

Instructor: Daniel Traister

The single best guide to reference books for rare book and manuscript librarians, as for all librarians, remains the ALA Guide to Reference Books, now edited by Robert Balay (11th ed., 1996). Some issues of special collections reference are considered in passing by Traister in The Reference Librarian, no. 15 (Fall 1986), 89-107 (an essay that becomes increasingly out-of-date with each passing millennium). Generally, see also the relevant articles and reviews in RBML and C&RL.

Rare book, manuscript, and special collections libraries differ in many ways from one another. No brief list can suggest the range of available reference tools a single collection may require. All students should be familiar with the kinds of information that great general library catalogs can provide: the National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints and the printed catalogs of The British (Museum) Library, the Bibliothèque National, and The New York Public Library. Many specialized catalogs are also available from such libraries. The British Library catalog of C15 printed books and its short-title catalogs (e.g., C16 Italy, C16 France), NYPL's imprint or its private and special presses catalogs, and Harvard's catalogs of French and Italian C16 illustrated books (by Ruth Mortimer), illustrate -- and do not exhaust! -- this genre.

NOTE: One has a not unnatural tendency to imagine that online databases have made these old, printed tools out-of-date. Some day, that tendency will have been justified by events; but that day has not yet arrived.

Increasingly, however, the online databases (RLIN, OCLC's WorldCat) do contain information about older printed books. RLIN contains specialized files essential to work with older printed and manuscript sources. For instance, both the transmogrified Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, now the English Short Title Catalogue ("ESTC" in either case, and an online database of records for more than 300,000 English and English-language imprints of the C18, to which earlier records (1475-1700) are being added), and the Incunable Short Title Catalogue (ISTC, records for incunables, that is, C15 printed books), are accessible through RLIN. AMC, a manuscripts database, is accessible through RLIN; OCLC has apparently also mounted a version. NUCMC is dumping its records into AMC. Extensively indexed, AMC makes manuscript collections accessible to researchers in new ways.

Americana collections generally require Sabin, Evans, Bristol, Shipton-Mooney, Shaw-Shoemaker (and continuators), Alden-Landis's European Americana, and the catalogs of the John Carter Brown Library. Corollary to ESTC is the North American Imprints Project (NAIP), also accessible through RLIN's ESTC database. Wagner-Camp, Winans, and Wymberley de Renne Jones exemplify the variety of specialized bibliographies that Americana collections may need; McMurtrie has a number of bibliographies of early printing in various American states. Blanck's BAL, guided to completion by Winship, is a bibliographical guide to American literary publications.

Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue of English imprints, 1475-1640, now in a 3-vol. 2nd ed. (Katharine F. Pantzer, ed.), followed by Wing's STC, 1641-1700, its 2nd ed. now being supplanted by a 3rd, and ESTC together provide basic bibliographical control of English imprints through 1800. NSTC -- a C19 STC based on the holdings of a few large collections (BL, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, etc.) -- has begun to appear. Its appearance will be stately, its size large. Abbey, Rothschild, Hervey, Howard-Hill, and Block represent the variety of specialized bibliographies that collections with specialization in English topics may require.

Resources for European imprints are nearly boundless, but none offers the same level of control that English and American imprints now have. For incunables, students need to know Hain-Copinger, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, the BL catalog of C15 printed books, and Goff, minimally. Many reference tools for this subject are listed in the bibliography of Rudolf Hirsch, "Classics in the Vulgar Tongues . . . 1471-1520," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 81:3 (September 1987), 249-337. The BL's various short-title catalogs, mentioned above, Adams's catalog of C16 books in Cambridge libraries, the printed catalogs of The Hispanic Society of America, VD16, Cioranesco, Medina, and Palau, as well as various city bibliographies (e.g., Chrisman on Strasbourg or Renouard on Paris) or printer bibliographies (e.g., Renouard on Badius Ascensius, Schreiber on the Estiennes, or Pettas on the Florentine Giunti), as well as a host of more specialized bibliographies, are representative -- and may all prove helpful.

Special subjects require special catalogs. Resources in the bibliography of, say, science and medicine, are numerous. Various printed catalogs of the National Library of Medicine, for example, provide much information for imprints through the C18; Norman, et al., have edited a Grolier 100 of "high spots" in the history of medicine. The Grolier Club catalog of Harrison Horblit's history of science collection is another high-spot guide to this broader field. See also Bern Dibner's Heralds of Science and the 7-vol. Sotheby sale catalog of Robert B. Honeyman's collection. The Hoover Collection of Mining and Metallurgy of the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges publishes a guide to holdings in this narrow field; Smith's Rara Mathematica offers a guide to pre-1601 mathematics; the catalog of the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection (University of Pennsylvania) is a guide to the literature in the history of chemistry. These are a tiny fraction of the guides available for the sciences alone.

Bernard Breslauer and Roland Folter published a guide to the literature of bibliography itself comparable to the Horblit catalog in science (it too is a Grolier Club publication). Breslauer's guide to the literature of bookbinding appeared in 1987 from Columbia's Book Arts Press (inquire of Terry Belanger as to current availability). Jesuit relations are studied bibliographically in a catalog published by The James Ford Bell Library (University of Minnesota). A bibliography of Jesuit publications in all fields exists (de Backer-Sommervogel). The bibliographical guides to Jewish publications in all fields are legion; Bibles have many bibliographies, the one published by The British and Foreign Bible Society (Darlow and Moule) being, perhaps, the most generally useful despite its origins in a single collection. Private presses are frequently studied (e.g., Gaskell on Foulis and Baskerville; Mardersteig [and Schmoller] on the Officina Bodoni; Peterson on Kelmscott). A good basic guide to private press output and bibliographies is the NYPL catalog of private and special presses mentioned above. Author catalogs are numerous in all languages.

It is impossible to suggest the near-inexhaustibility of such materials: the dog, the horse, even fish -- goodness, even the rivers they swim (or used to swim) in, e.g., the Clyde, the Thames -- have all elicited bibliographical treatment of the vast literatures they have provoked. An institution collecting, say, molecular genetics will lack much of an "antiquarian" literature and bibliographies will be found in the current literature indices themselves. A decent respect for the specific needs of subjects should be a common guide. Old or non-English-language catalogs should not be ignored. Many books are old. Most books are not in English. Some people may know how to read them.

Exhibition catalogs can be useful. The classic is probably Printing and the Mind of Man, now in a 2nd ed. Others are both less expensive than that one and also potentially informative in many different areas of interest. See, e.g., Dale Roylance, European Graphic Arts, Princeton, 1986; or Legacies of Genius, Philadelphia, 1988. For the past several years, RBML has included lists of exhibition catalogues nominated for awards to such publications presented biannually by RBMS. Increasingly, institutions are mounting exhibitions on the web; they are not always easy to locate, although web-based directories can be helpful guides to finding them.

Dealers' catalogs and auction catalogs can provide a wealth of information; they can, for more recent periods, be partially accessed through BPI, ABPC, or BAR, with which it is useful to be familiar in any event.

Manuscript reference tools are a vexing issue. They deserve fuller treatment than a brief handout can provide. NUCMC, AMC, and a few specialized guides -- manuscripts at the Huntington, for example, or the innumerable guides to early manuscripts (Yale's, Princeton's, or Penn's, for instance) -- are all worth knowing. In general, however, the uniqueness of the materials and vastness of the field make manuscripts extremely difficult to access effectively or efficiently.

One additional method of improving reference techniques is rarely discussed: "oral" -- or, perhaps, "eyeball" -- reference. No special collection--NOT ONE--is self-sufficient even within its own area of specialization. Adequate reference in any special collection requires librarians to inform themselves, not only through reading but also through conversation with other librarians and visits to other collections, about libraries and collections complementary to their own. Participation in national organizations provides regular opportunities to meet and to talk with one's colleagues, more useful than might at first glance seem likely. It is even possible that you will find (what in theory you are supposed to find) that activity in such organizations is a source of professional growth for yourself.

Journals (e.g., PBSA, SB, The Library) also provide important information, some discursive, some supplementary to existing bibliographies or catalogs. Traister, "Publication of Reference Tools . . . " (cited above), notes that discursive works as well as bibliographies and catalogs frequently have a reference function for special collections librarians. A recent (and controversial) example is McGann's Black Riders, which considers the significance of the relationship between private printing and the growth of literary modernism. The area or areas in which a collection is strong should provide a constant source of scholarly materials, not necessarily "bibliographical" in any traditional sense, that will nonetheless add to the sophistication with which librarians approach acquisitions and reference duties.

The instructor, striving always for plainness of diction and meaning, offers this "translation" of the preceding paragraph: watch less television. Read more scholarly, bibliographical, historical, biographical, and literary stuff about, and read more primary stuff from, your collection's area(s) of subject strength than you're reading now. Work, for the darkness is coming.


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