The Present and Future of Incunable Cataloguing, I

With its weight of five kilograms, a format of nearly Royal folio, and a price of about half the average academic's monthly salary, the eleventh (and presumably last) volume of the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library (BMC) is not likely to find its way into many reference libraries, let alone into the hands of individual book historians. This is much to be regretted, as the hefty volume is much more than a mere descriptive catalogue of the 221 editions published in England between 1476 and 1501, of which 323 copies are preserved in the British Library (formerly the British Museum). The collection catalogue, together with the requisite indexes, tables, and bibliographies, constitutes only about half of the book, whose remainder is devoted to studies of a much broader scope. Taking into account the entire surviving production of English presses from the period, the introduction presents a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the development of printing in England in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, discussing also the evidence for early ownership of incunabula and outlining the history of the British Library's collection. The third part of the volume is devoted to 'materials', and its sections on the paper of English incunabula and their printing types demonstrate the methodological refinements that have been achieved since cataloguing of the collection began in the late nineteenth century, when Robert Proctor (1868–1903) compiled his Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum from the Invention of Printing to the Year MD, with Notes of Those in the Bodleian Library (London, 1898).

Following in his footsteps and those of such other eminent (and impressively long-lived) editors of BMC as A. W. Pollard (1859–1944), Victor Scholderer (1880–1971), Leslie A. Sheppard (1890–1985), George Painter (1914–2005), D. E. Rhodes, and A. K. Offenberg, Lotte Hellinga took over responsibility for the project in 1976, the year of the Caxton quincentenary, and pursued the work well beyond her retirement from the British Library as Deputy Keeper in 1995. Under her general editorship, a team of specialists cooperated on diverse areas of bibliographical studies: Paul Needham, Scheide Librarian at Princeton, contributed the results of decades of research on paper stocks, while at the British Library, Mirjam Foot, John Goldfinch, and Margaret Nickson provided expertise in the areas of copy description (bindings and provenances) and history of the collection. The analytical diligence and encyclopaedic knowledge of this team has made BMC 11 into a fitting and highly elaborate endstone to complete a monument that has been under construction for more than a century. For future incunable scholarship, BMC 11 will not only serve as an indispensable reference tool, but also as a model for methodological precision and evidence-based conclusions.

From Collection Catalogue to Bibliography

The British Library's collection of incunabula, which comprises c. 10,390 editions in c. 12, 500 copies,¹ is not only the world's largest and its catalogue therefore the most comprehensive, but it is also the basis of one of the two longest-running enterprises for the bibliographical description of incunables. The other, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW), was set up in 1904/05 with a central editorial office in Berlin. The first volume of GW appeared in print in 1925, and after publication of parts 3–4 of volume 11 in 2007² GW has now reached the catalogue number 13, 299 and thus covered nearly half of all editions published before 1501, whose number is today estimated at c. 28,000;³ the British Library, on the other hand, holds about 37 per cent of all known fifteenth-century editions. Work on BMC, the largest collection catalogue, and GW, the comprehensive bibliography, has thus been pursued in parallel for more than a century, and while both enterprises were based on the methodological...