Printed Catalogues of French Book Auctions and Sales by Private Treaty, 1643-1830, in the Library of the Grolier Club (review)

In his preface to this catalogue Eric Holzenberg outlines the history of the Grolier Club's collections of book sale catalogues and its policy of retaining such catalogues as bibliographical tools. The collection's origins date from the beginning of the Club in 1884, since when 'the Library of the Grolier Club has set aside a special table piled high with the current catalogues of the major antiquarian booksellers and auction houses'. The superseded catalogues have been preserved and classified according to a scheme drawn up specifically for the Library's own needs. The collection has been frequently augmented by purchase and gift, including the acquisition of a large collection of French catalogues from E. Ph. Goldschmidt in 1931.

Based on work started by Waters S. Davis and continued by Gabriel Austin, a new catalogue of these materials was undertaken in 1998 under the direction of Michael North in the form of entries in the SCIPIO database (Sales Catalog Index Project Input Online) hosted by the Research Libraries Group of America. The size of the collection is estimated at about thirty thousand items, of which the present catalogue of pre-1830 French items records 616 entries (some in multiple copies).

The catalogue is presented in chronological order, starting with the 1643 Bibliothecae Cordesianae catalogus, the library of Jean de Cordes, a canon of Limoges, which was sold in Paris by the bookseller Laurent Saunier the year after its owner's death. The entries present a transcription of the title and imprint, a page and signature collation, bibliographical references (including frequent references to Pollard and Erhman's Distribution of Books by Catalogue), and edition and copy notes. For the de Cordes sale, the notes record that the catalogue was compiled by Gabriel Naudé, that there were around 7,500 lots, that de Cordes had acquired the library of Simon Dubois, and that the collection is said to have been purchased by Cardinal Mazarin. The notes on the three copies in the Grolier collections include information about bindings and donor provenances.

Among other significant collections included in the catalogue we can count the library of the brothers de Thou, which had around 17,000 items, recorded in a twovolume catalogue of 1679 (no. 6), here in a copy that had belonged to the eighteenth-century Protestant author and bookseller Prosper Marchand; the library of Archbishop Jacques-Nicolas Colbert (1708, no. 14; also no. 28, 1728); the Baluze sale of 1719 (no. 20, c. 10,800 items); and the Lavallière library (1784, no. 313).

Among the smaller collections (which are no less interesting), I noted the library of the author and cleric Bossuet and his nephew (1742, no. 65; 1,470 lots); the royal historian Théodore Godefroy and descendants (1746, no. 80); and Louis XIV's navy minister, Jérôme Phelypeaux de Maurepas, Comte de Pontchartrain (1747, no. 83).

The period of the French Revolution sees the sales of the Prince de Soubise (no. 338), the Baron d'Holbach (no. 344) and the revolutionaries the Comte de Mirabeau (no. 353) and 'citoyen' Georges-Jacques Danton (no. 363, apparently the only known catalogue of the sale). Among bibliographers, there are two entries for Antoine-Augustin Renouard (1812, no. 528; and 1829, no. 601); and there are collectors and scholars such as Charles Nodier (1830, no. 606) and the Comte de MacCarthy-Reagh (1817, no. 567), whose catalogue included a Gutenberg Bible. The subject index records eleven other sales for which a Gutenberg Bible was listed (two copies in the case of the Loménie de Brienne sale in 1792, no. 354). One copy can be tracked through several sales: it appeared in the Rive sale in...