conjectures on rarity

Conjectures on RarityAuthor(s): Ralph FranklinSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 309-321Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4306440 .

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CONJECTURES ON RARITY

Ralph Franklin

The literature about rare books, although not in agreement as to what consti- tutes rarity, employs a contemporary perspective that can distort the historical development of the concept. To recover this history, this paper examines primary materials dating from classical to modern times. It is hypothesized that neither classical Rome nor the medieval period had a class of books considered rare and so named. The invention and spread of printing fundamentally changed ways of thinking about books and introduced the conditions of abundance and relative scarcity that underlie the concept of rarity. By the seventeenth century book rarity had become an established, named category, although attempts at rigorous definition still lead to disagreement.

For one concerned with the concept of book rarity, the many twentieth- century discussions of the subject would seem a profitable place to start. Among the more promising titles, we have "What Makes a Rare Book?" [1] and "What Makes a Book Rare?" [2]. There is "A Rare Book: Its Essential Qualifications" [3] and also "A Rare Book Is a Rare Book" [4]. John Carter contributed "Reflections on Rarity" [5], and Jorge Aguayo offered "Que es un libro raro?" [6]. A reader will find that such discussions are not close to agreement as to what a rare book is, the definitions varying from "the book that failed" [3] to one which has an excess of demand over supply [7]. Carter alone enumerated eight factors con- tributing to just one kind of rarity.

It will also become evident that such articles are of little help to one working on the historical development of the concept of rarity because they are written from a twentieth-century perspective, with a twentieth- century rhetoric, about rare books today. The most helpful are the historical treatments of the book trade and of book collecting. These, however, also require some caution, since they employ a twentieth-century perspective and rhetoric just as the attempts at definition do. To recover the historical development of the concept of book rarity, one has to return to prinmary sources in order to learn what other periods thought on this subject. Since the primary materials that might be relevant are legion, as it were, and a complete coverage is not possible here, this paper will submit the evidence that has been discovered and will suggest certain working hypotheses. Such hypotheses are presented subject to the confirmation or revision of further research.

The word rare, in the sense we are concerned with, has nothing to do with cooking and underdone food. That rare, a variant of rear, has a

[Library Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 309-21] C 1974 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

309



310 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

different etymology and can be traced through the Middle English rere to the Anglo-Saxon hrer (to stir). The other rare, the one applied to books, descends from the Latin rarus. The Oxford English Dictionary [8] documents four chief meanings: (1) not dense, not closely packed, thin. This meaning, apparently the fundamental one, derives from its usage in physics, now chiefly in the description of gases, called "rarified" if their constituent particles are not close together; (2) few in number, widely separated in space and time. This meaning apparently developed from the preceding one: if the particles are not closely packed, they cannot but be "few in number," as well as widely separated; (3) seldom met with. Logically, that which is but few in number and also dispersed will be "seldom met with"; (4) unusual, of uncommon excellence; also a thing valued for its scarcity. If the imperatives of market value are applied to something satisfying meanings 2 and 3-that is, something that is few in number and is seldom met with-that object clearly can be valued for its scarcity. The other value judgments in this fourth meaning are less easily explained. They may derive from feelings of exclusiveness that value things that are not common, popular, or shared.-

In classical Latin the word rarus had essentially the same range of meanings as does rare in English, though the application of the four meanings differed at times, of course [13]. The two literal meanings in Latin were (1) loose in texture, thin (opposed to densus) and (2) scattered, scanty, far apart. The two metaphorical Latin uses are parallel to the last two meanings in English: (3) infrequent, seldom, and (4) extraordinary, distinguished. The point to be noted is that the chief distinctions familiar in present-day English were present even in classical Latin.

The ultimate source of rare is the Indo-European root Ra and its variant Re [11, 14]. Re descended into Greek, seen in the word eremos (9pnA.&o0-"solitary"), then appeared in late Latin in the word eremia, and emerged in English in eremite, hermit, and hermitage. Ra, on the other hand, descended in the Latin rarus, and thence into every Romance language and into at least German and English as well. Rare has been in English since at least the fifteenth century and in French-perhaps, but not necessarily, the immediate source for English-since either the thirteenth or fourteenth century. In Greek the Re forms did not take on the range of meanings, or even the same meanings, that the Ra forms did in the Latin rarus and the English rare. To translate its meanings into Greek, the English rare in fact requires several different Greek words, none of them apparently a Re form.

To discover instances of the Latin equivalent of the term "rare book" during the classical period, I checked concordances of Roman authors, many of which cite the full line in which rarus or its related forms were used. A search was made for some association of rarus with liber, volumen,

1. In addition to the Oxford English Dictionary [8], the following are useful for the meanings of rare: Skeat [9], Onions [10], Partridge [11], and Webster's Third New Intcrnational Dictionaty [12].



CONJECTURES ON RARITY 311

or codex, the three Latin terms for book. No examples appeared. A similar search was made through Latin dictionaries [15, 16] that cite actual uses of the terms defined, but, again, there was no Latin equivalent of "rare book." I also examined the untranslated quotations used in two twentieth-century treatments of the book trade in classical Rome [17, 18]. No instances of rarus in conjunction with the Latin for book appeared. The tentative conclusion that the Romans did not use the term seems warranted-this in spite of the fact that Felix Reichmann's article on "The Book Trade at the Time of the Roman Empire" has a section called "The Rare-Book Trade" [17, p. 65].

In another part of his article, Reichmann quotes, in translation, a sentence from Lucian, Greek prose writer of the second century, who, in attacking the "Ignorant Book-Collector," refers satirically to the status of the book trader during the empire: "To whom does it ever occur to look for education among booksellers and rare-book-dealers who possess and sell so many books?"2 Reichmann's translation is loose in using the phrase "booksellers and rare-book-dealers" for Lucian's phrase TOtS 4E1rdpOL1

Kdi ToV; f3LfXL0oKa1-jXoLs. The word E.A7r6pots translates as "merchants" or "traders" and p8q,3XLoKa7r 'XoLq as "booksellers." The English translation by A. M. Harmon, for example, is simply "dealers and booksellers" [19, vol. 3, p. 181]. A check of Latin translations [20-23] published in 1619, 1743, 1789-93, and 1822-31 shows no instance of a form of rarus in this passage. The conclusion is that Reichmann's rhetoric, in this passage as well as in the section headed "The Rare-Book-Trade," is modern, not classical.

Similarly, in his Ancient Libraries, James Westfall Thompson mentions the trade in Rome of "rare old books," citing two passages from the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius as evidence [18, pp. 92-93]. In one passage, one of Gellius's friends, having had a dispute over the reading of a certain line in the Annals of Ennius and desiring to settle the question, "'procured at great trouble and expense, for the sake of examining one line, a copy of heavy and venerable antiquity'" [24, vol. 3, p. 315]. The phrase Gellius used here was librum summae atque reverendae vetustatis,3 with vetu4statis meaning "old" or "ancient." He did not use here a form of rarus, nor did he in the second passage cited by Thompson. There, in the midst of another'dispute over a reading, Gellius recalled that he had seen "a remarkably old copy of the second book of the Aeneid" that settled the issue. As before, he used the word vetustatis and no form of rarus, his Ltin phrase being librum Aeneidos secundum mirandae vetustatis [24, vol. 1, pp. 128-29]. Thompson's rhetoric, like Reichmann's, is that of the twentieth century.

My conjecture, then, is that book rarity was not a formal concept so labeled in ancient times. Some of the ideas we now associate with rare books were, of course, extant then. As the citations from Gellius show, 2. The translation is from Reichmann [17, p. 70]; the italics are mine. 3. Gellius [24, vol. 3, p. 314]. 1 have corrected the spelling of vetustatis.




some books were regarded as old, hard to get, and expensive. But the Romans apparently called an old book an old book, not a rare book. I would hypothesize that they had no such category of books, in spite of the fact that rarus, as we have seen, had a range of meanings that, like modern English, could have covered such a category.

One might question whether the term "rare book," in the sense of a scarce book, would have had much meaning at a time when most books, in spite of an active book trade, were relatively scarce. Scarcity, in a sense, may be seen as the absence of abundance-as cold is the absence of heat-and the scarcity of books may not have been a meaningful category without a standard of widespread abundance against which to judge. Few books were so abundant in Roman times. Some books, to be sure, enjoyed large editions (even up to 1,000 copies), but most books probably did not. Often one did not even buy a preproduced book, but copied the desired manuscript or had it commercially done. As a category, "old books" seems to have been more meaningful to the classical period than "rare" or "scarce" books.

Commercially, books were even less abundant in the medieval period than in classical times. As the empire declined, so did the book trade, though in Rome at least it did not fail altogether, assisted no doubt by the fact that Latin remained the standard language through all the rav- ages. Rome, however, was the only city with an established trade during the early medieval period. A new book trade began in Italy in the second half of the thirteenth century. There was probably a trade in London in the fourteenth century, certainly by the start of the fifteenth century. During the long period between the sixth century and the rise of a new trade, most books were hard to come by. At the beginning of the seventh century, Isidore of Seville did speak of people who collected books for their fine bindings-perhaps remnants from the empire collected by relatives of Lucian's "Ignorant Book-Collector"-and in the ninth century the sale of Charlemagne's library, as directed by his will, was an opportunity to acquire what today would be called rare books [25, p. 636]. But, during most of the medieval period, according to James West- fall Thompson, "ordinarily, any reader could acquire books only by copying them himself or by hiring a scribe to do this for him" [25, p. 635].

The production of books shifted from the bookshop to the monastic scriptorium. The scriptorium was introduced in the sixth century by Cassiodorus Senator, whose Institutiones, written for the monastery he established at Vivarium, set the pattern for the scriptoria of the monastic period as a whole. Cassiodorus extolled the nobility of copying and included secular as well as sacred works. The collecting and copying of books was not a pastime, not a hobby, but a serious and honorable enterprise done in the name of the Lord.

The term "rare book" does not appear in the Institutiones, despite the fact that Cassiodorus found many books hard to obtain. Of one of his




successes, he wrote: "And, admonished by his instruction, I have discovered many ancient codices which were unknown to me" [26, p. 85]. The phrase he used was multos codices antiquos [27, p. 23]. Other searches were not so successful: "St. Jerome," Cassiodorus explained, "also wrote a commentary on Jeremiah in twenty books; we have been able to find only six of these, but with aid of the Lord we are still seeking the rest" [26, p. 82; 27, p. 19]. And again: "The blessed Ambrose is also said to have written and left a codex filled with a most delightful exposition of all the letters of St. Paul; up to the present, however, I have not been able to find it, but I am diligently searching for it" [26, pp. 91-92; 27, p. 30]. In these two passages, and others, after telling of works he has found, he mentions those that, in spite of diligent search, he has been unable to locate. These are situations in which one might expect to find the word rarus referring to books. But not so.

In another instance, Cassiodorus had obtained a copy of a work he valued highly and recommended for the monks' reading. "This codex," he wrote, "will be read with profit in my opinion, for the diligence of a learned man [Eugippius] has been hidden in a single work, and this work can scarcely be found even in a great library" [26, p. 121]. His Latin for this final phrase is quod in magna bibliotheca vix praevalet inveniri [27, p. 62], emphasizing not scarcity as such, but one's difficulty in finding the work in even a great library. Surely this is one of the modern ideas of rarity-that of books that are hard to find-but, as with books that are old, no form of rarus is used to express the idea.

Again, the hypothesis of relative scarcity seems an appropriate expla- nation. Widespread abundance of books is needed to establish scarcity or rarity as a category. The nearly fatal decline of the book trade in the early medieval period made almost all books what we, with our abundance, would call "rare." Cassiodorus did not call them that, however. Moreover, the codex, like the papyrus roll before it, contained several works and, to a medieval mind, was not synonymous with the works it contained. (Cassiodorus, for one, could tell the dancer from the dance.) While the modern mind tends to confuse the work with its vehicle, the medieval mind did not, and Cassiodorus searched for a text, for a content, not a specific artifact. To get a text was to locate a copy and to transcribe it. Locating that copy might be difficult, the text might be old, even the artifact might be old, but the medieval mind, like the classical mind, probably did not call it "rare."

At the end of the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth century-the same century that witnessed the awakening of humanism in Italy and the avid pursuit of old manuscripts by hunters like Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Poggio-Richard Aungerville, now better known as Richard de Bury, was the most indefatigable collector in England. As bishop of Durham, he used his ecclesiastical influence to gather a large library of books, which, it is said, were a more welcome gift than money. Like his Italian counterparts, de Bury was interested in old manuscripts and in




humanistic learning. In his Philobiblon, the love song of Richard de Bury, he talks of "books old as well as new" (librorum tam veterum quam novorum) [28, p. 88]; he urges the advantages of books, the love of books, the blessings of books-in no case, however, does he refer, in his Latin, to a "rare book." As before, rarus was not in his bibliographical lexicon.

Collecting books, according to de Bury, was not an idle pastime, "for," he declared, "we know that the love of books is the same thing as the love of wisdom" [28, p. 137]. His argument is cogent if one collects books chiefly for their contents, and not as artifacts. Like Cassiodorus, Richard de Bury was able to distinguish readily between the container and the contained. Recognizing that the "bodies" of books, like human bodies, decay and that "it is needful to replace the volumes that are worn out with age by fresh successors," de Bury instructs the scribes to make new copies [28, pp. 147, 149]. There is no lament in doing so, for his concern as a collector is chiefly with content, not artifact.

One can perhaps appreciate the immense difference between de Bury's point of view and ours in the present century if one considers what the reaction of a twentieth-century collector would be to the pro- posal that, in lieu of his Gutenberg Bible, he cherish a transciption of the text. Between de Bury and us there came a historical event of such importance and power that some of our mental categories, and perhaps even fundamental ways of thinking, would never again be as his. That event was the invention and spread in Europe of printing with movable types.

This fifteenth-century event at last gave us the means of making books abundant enough to warrant talking not just about old books and new books, but also about scarce books and common books. After the 1440s there was an increasing current bibliography, both in number of titles and number of volumes, against which older, scarcer books could be compared as to availability. To be sure, the manuscript trade had de- .veloped significantly during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, making books more available, and one may even cite an instance in the early fifteenth century, before the rise of printing, of someone using rarns in association with terms for the bo;k. Amplonius Ratinck [29] in his catalog of 1410-12 used the word, usually as a general term of approbation for either the contents of a work or for the physical artifact itself. The chief meaning seems to have been "excellent" or "unusual." Although he used the term a number of times, it is not clear that he referred to scarce books or that he thought of a certain class of books as being rare. Printing, however, established such conditions of abundance and relative scarcity that we may expect to see more "rare books" thereafter and to see them, in due course, form a class.

Printing, moreover, somewhat standardized the artifact and, in doing so, identified it more closely with the work it contained. The medieval codex could have several works in it, and the particular combination of works would vary from codex to codex. Printing generally allotted one




work to each artifact, and that one work was constant (with some textual variations, to be sure) for all the artifacts containing it. The result was a basic change in thinking about books, so that if one wanted a certain work one thought of a certain prepared artifact to which the work was more or less tied. It became more difficult to distinguish between the work and the artifact, whereas the medieval mind had been able to do so easily. Thereafter, to get a work, one no longer copied a text, one pur- chased an artifact. Though only a slight shift in perspective, the change was basic.

A shift from the serious collecting admired by Cassiodorus and Richard de Bury can be seen in Sebastian Brant's "The Boke-Fool," one of the members of The Shyp of Folys (German, 1494; English, 1509). This fool reads his own indictment, admitting that although he does not understand the contents of books,

Styli am I besy bokes assemblynge For to have plenty it is a pleasaunt thynge In my conceyt and to have them ay in honde. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I folowe nat theyr doctryne nor theyr lore. It is ynoughe to bere a boke in hande; It were too moche to be it suche a bande For to be bounde to loke within the boke. I am content on the fayre coverynge to loke.4

This attitude was not introduced by the invention of printing, and Brant's "Boke-Fool" is a close relative to Lucian's "ignorant book- collector," just as he is an ancestor of many literary characters to follow. One might speculate, however, that the "boke-fool" and his descendants were aided and abetted in their pretense by the effects of printing. The increasing number of books perhaps made it easier to indulge oneself, and the growing confusion between artifact and content made it easier to conclude, falsely of course, that a large group of artifacts, the prettier the better, was an index of knowledge and wisdom. At any rate, this fifteenth-century "boke-fool" begat many children in his own image.

The fifteenth century also produced the first recorded use in English of the phrase "rare book." William Caxton, in the preface to his 1483 edition of Cato, related a tale of Poggio, who was "secretary to pope Eugenye & also to pope Nycholas" and who "had in the cyte of Florence a noble & well stuffed lybrarye whiche alle noble straungyers comynge to Florence desyred to see. And therin they fonde many noble and rare bookes" [31, fol. 2v]. (The best of which, of course, was this very Cato that Caxton was now publishing.) It is difficult to know precisely how to regard this use of "rare bookes." It seems to mean "excellent"; it could mean "unusual"; it could mean "scarce." Ortus Vocabulorum [32], a dictionary published in 1500, gives only the meaning "seldomne" and would seem to support Caxton's usage as "scarce" or "unusual." But dic-

4. Quoted from Murphy [30, pp. 10, 121.




tionaries lagged behind actual usage and cannot be taken comprehen- sively. If, as the Oxford English Dictionary [81 suggests, Caxton's use of "rare" means "excellent," I would suggest that there is an important difference between calling a book rare or excellent and establishing a recognized class of such books. When we say a book is excellent, we are not, except in the strictest philosophical sense, establishing the categories of "excellent books" and "not-excellent books." I would conjecture that this early use by Caxton does not indicate an established category recognized in 1483 as "rare books" and that it may mean little more than that the books mentioned were very good indeed. We shall not, in this sur- vey, encounter another English "rare book" for over a century after Caxton's edition.

In the early part of the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with Rome and dissolved the English monasteries in order to restock his treasury, some of the books released by the dissolution were destroyed-burned outright; others were sold and the parchment often used for other than bibliographical purposes. Many of the books went to the Continent. The exposure of so many books long hidden from the ordinary eye initiated a strong antiquarian interest in England, spurred on, no doubt, by the loss to Europe of so much native material. Chief among the antiquarians in sixteenth-century England were John Leland, John Bale, Matthew Parker, and William Camden. We shall confine ourselves here to Leland and Bale. Successively chaplain, librarian, and antiquarian to the king, John Leland began in 1533 a tour of the king- dom, lasting several years, during which he described the country, phys- ically and socially, and collected an immense amount of "Englandes Antiquitees." After his return, Leland presented to the king as a New Year's gift an account of his "LaboryouseJourney & serche," which John Bale, also a collector of "antiquitees," published with copious commentary in 1549-when Henry VIII was dead and Leland, though alive, was insane. The only instance of "rare" in the Leland-Bale work occurs in Leland's phrase "profounde and rare wyttes"-meaning "excellent" [33, p. 98]. Though the materials both Leland and Bale collected were scarce items, even unique ones, and though obtaining them was "laboryouse," neither writer described them as "rare." Instead, both used the phrase "noble Antiquitees" or some variation thereof. The adjective "old" was yet apparently more meaningful than "rare." Entries in contemporary accounts of sale seem to bear this out: "Old books in the choir 6d."; "old books in the vestry sold to Robert Dorington 8d."; "old books and a cope in the library 2s." [33, p. xx].

John Bale's own passion for collecting and listing old books led to the publication during his lifetime of two biographical catalogs of English writers. His Illustrium majons Britanniae scriptorum [34] was published in 1548, and his Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae [35] came from the press during 1557-59. The introductory matter to these two works yields no instance of Bale's having used a Latin form for "rare book,"




though he did use forms of rarus in other contexts. Similarly, the introduction to Conrad Gesner's pioneer bibliography [36], his Bibliotheca universalis (1545), had no mention, in its Latin, of "rare books."

Neither did Andrew Maunsell's Catalogue of English Printed Books, published at the end of the century, in 1595. His introduction, however, indicated that the London trade was prospering and that it included what today would be called "rare books." "And seeing also many singuler Bookes, not only of Diuinitie, but of other excellent Arts, after the first Impression, so spent & gone, that they lie euen as it were buried in som few studies: That men desirous of such kind of Bookes, cannot aske for that they neuer heard of, and the Booke-seller cannot shew that he hath not: I haue thought good in my poor estate to vndertake this most tire-some businesse. . .. Thinking it ... necessarie for the Booke-seller (considering the number and nature of them) to haue a Catalogue of our English Bookes." This passage [37, p. vii (unpaged)] is firm evidence that there was an active book trade in London at the time and that, though Maunsell (himself a bookseller) did not call them such, the London trade included dealings in "rare books."

By the beginning of the seventeenth century the word rare was common in English. Edmund Spenser, who died in 1599, used it some seventy-five times (no "rare books"). Shakespeare, who died in 1616, used rare and related forms nearly 100 times, generally meaning "uncommon ("Were man as rare as phoenix") or "excellent" ("1 think my love as rare as any"). Cymbeline, which Shakespeare wrote about 1610, has a brief passage puzzling to editors but very interesting in our present context. Posthumus, one of the virtuous characters, is nevertheless in jail by act 5. Upon awaking from sleep, he has some dozen lines on dreams, and then suddenly, as though a book had been thrust at him, he ex- claims:

A book? 0 rare one! Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment Nobler than that it covers. Let thy effects So follow, to be most unlike our courtiers, As good as promise. [38, vol. 2, p. 1273]

Is Shakespeare punning on the word rare? If so, his pun would assume that there was a category of books called "rare books" and that his audience was familiar with such books. They were perhaps more noted for external trappings than for internal substance, for Posthumus ad- monishes this "rare one" to "Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment / Nobler than that it covers." The passage would suggest that many owners and collectors of books may have been principally interested in the book as an artifact, as a piece of show-as though descendants of the "boke-fool" had been very active.

There is other evidence by this time that some books were considered rarities. In 1598 Sir Thomas Bodley announced his intention of restor- ing a library to Oxford-Duke Humfrey's library having been destroyed




during the reign of Edward VI-and in 1602 Bodley's library opened. In 1610, probably the same year in which Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline, Bodley's statutes for governing the library were approved by Convoca- tion. After reviewing the care required by chained books, which were openly available to all library users, Bodley turned to another sort of book:

For the smaller sized Volumes, in Quarto and Octavo, and such as are within the Grates, and under the Custody of the Keeper alone, that they may not be wasted with much handling and tossing (being Books of special Worth, for their Antiq- uity or Rarity, Costliness, or Beauty, or other note of prime Account) it shall be a part of the Keeper's Duty, when any Man is desirous to use any of these kinds, to deliver them out by Hand, and by Tale; and with Condition, that they shall be studied there in Sight, and after presently restored, before the Person goe from thence, upon pain of Satisfaction to the double Value of every Book detained; and (if so be it shall prove a wilful Fact) perpetual Expulsion out of the Library. [39, pp. 81-82]

This is surely an early description of a Special Collections department. Unlike the chained books, the books Bodley described here require special handling so that "they may not be wasted with much handling and tossing." And, as with modern special collections, more items get special treatment than just those that, in Bodley's terms, have "rarity." He specifically mentions small size as a criterion for special treatment, and he cites age, costliness, and beauty, along with rarity and "other note of prime Account," as factors involved in locking books "within the Grates." The watchfulness urged upon the keeper, the strict security, and the consequences for unethical patrons all would save Bodley from the charge of being an enemy of valuable books. Even if Bodley had not used the word rarity, a modern reader could recognize here the ethos'of a good many twentieth-century rare-book rooms.

During the seventeenth century, references to rare books appear more frequently in library writing than in other literature. A search among essays "On Books"5 and literary "characters," popular sketches, generally satirical, of various recognizable characters of the time, turned up only one instance of rarity. The antiquarian interest generated in the preceding century had increased significantly by the seventeenth century, and several of the "characters" were sketches of antiquarians, now suspected of being a relative of the "boke-fool." In his Micro-Cosmography (1628), John Earle charged that such a man "loves no Library, but where there are more Spiders volums than Authors, and lookes with great admiration on the Antique work of Cob-webs.... He would give all the Bookes in his Study (which are rarities all) for one of the old Romane binding, or sixe lines of Tully in his owne hand."7 By rarities Earle seems

5. For example, essays by Bacon, Montaigne, and William Cornwallis, the younger. 6. For collections of characters, see Murphy [30], Osborne [401, and Morley [41]. 7. Quoted from Murphy [30, pp. 159-60]. The italics for rarities are mine.




to inean chiefly old books, but the context does not eliminate "uncom- inon," "scarce," and even "excellent" as possible supporting meanings.

In library literature of the time, the idea of book rarity is encountered fairly easily. Gabriel Naude, librarian to Cardinal Mazarin and author of an influential work on librarianship, the Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque (French, 1627; English, 1661), spoke of "liures grandement rares & curieux" and "liures qui sont si rares." He referred to "rare books" at least half a dozen times [42, pp. 33, 49, 68, 77, 85, 108]. And in England, John Dury-minister, librarian, and man of political affairs-published in 1650 his somewhat less influential treatise, The Reformed Librarie- Keeper, in which he three times spoke of "rarities" and once even of "librarie-rarities" [43, pp. 53, 61-62].

The evidence uncovered in this search would suggest that, in referring to scarce books, uncommon books, or books of special distinction, the English term was usually "rarities." This was the term used by Bod- ley, Earle, and Dury. In France, on the other hand, the use of "livres rares" was common. Whether this conjecture be true or not, it can be said that the seventeenth century was the period when book rarity had become recognizable as an established category so named.

By the seventeenth century, book collecting was popular all over Europe [44]: In the eighteenth century, it became, in England at least, a spectacular sport for the very wealthy, all the while remaining popular with men of lesser means.8 The terms "book rarities" and "rare books" were readily recognized and understood both in England and abroad. One can cite examples from both England and the continent, though France and Germany seem to have used the term "rare book" more often than the English did. The same was true of the nineteenth century. The French had a formula-"les livres rares et precieux"-that frequently appeared in the titles of catalogs. The English still used the phrase "book rarities," as in Thomas Frognall Dibdin's pamphlet Book Rarities, or a descriptive catalogue of some of the most curious rare and valuable books of early date, chiefly in the collection of George John, Earl Spencer, K. G. (1811) and in C. H. Hartshorne, The Book Rarities in the University of Cambridge (1829). The term "rare book" is also met in English, of course, as in John Payne Collier'sA Bibliographical and CriticalAccount of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865) and in James Friswell's Varia: Read- ingsfrom Rare Books (1866). Either way, such books had come into their own and were avidly sought by collectors. Their definition remained vague and much the same: books scarce, uncommon, or distinguished for some special quality. In the twentieth century, the term "rare book" has supplanted "book rarities." The definition, however, remains generally the same. Although vague and difficult, it is operative, and, so far, only disagreement has followed attempts to formulate something more specific, rigorous, and systematic.

8. Seymour de Ricci [45] has a good account of collecting at this time.




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conjectures on rarity

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