Gli incunaboli e le cinquecentine della Biblioteca Comunale di San Gimignano (review)

This substantial publication is divided into two volumes; the first contains a catalogue of thirty-two incunabula and 1,562 sixteenth-century editions in 1,685 copies, while the second contains essays, forty-eight colour plates, and the indexes. An introduction to the catalogue is supplied by the Director of the library of San Gimignano, Valerio Bartoloni, who explains the complex story of the catalogue's compilation, begun in 1999 as a research project of a highly interesting but short-lived postgraduate course (Fondazione SPEBLA) and continuing from 2001 until publication under the general supervision of Neil Harris with a different cataloguing model.

Harris opens the second volume with considerations of the role of a public library for its community and on the significance of rare books as representatives of the history of that community. Harris and Sara Centi then discuss in detail the complex case of an edition of Paolo Cortesi's De Cardinalatu printed in San Gimignano in 1510. Another essay by Harris ponders the survival rates of rare books, followed by a vademecum to bibliographical phenomena found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printed books (compiled by Centi, Di Renzo, Flori, Grazzini, Harris, Leggeri, and Razzolini), which explains terms such as cancellans, the use of 'carta grande', paste-on cancel slips, forme composition, two sheets mistakenly going under the press together, point holes, imposition, blind impressions, objects falling into the forme, and re-issue. It cannot be stressed enough how useful these observations are as an aid to other users of early printed books, whether scholars or students, towards training their eyes for the detection of similar cases and for expanding the available body of evidence. Centi then discusses a Bullarium that unites some ninety-eight different editions of individual bulls mostly issued by Popes Pius IV and V. Daniele Danesi provides an essay on books once owned by the Sienese Bellisario Bulgarini (d. 1620) and now in San Gimignano, and Graziella Giapponesi on the volumes owned by Alemanno Moronti, a sixteenth-century local poet. An essay on the bindings by Elisa Di Renzo concludes with a glossary. After the cataloguing rules have been spelt out by Maria Paola Barlozzini and Neil Harris we find forty-eight beautiful colour plates of inscriptions, stamps, labels, and bindings, as well as of leaves of text. These are followed by some 130 pages devoted to indexes: of frequently cited works; of secondary authors, editors, and translators; of publishers and printers, with their editions; of places of printing, again with their editions; a chronological index of editions, from 1472 to 1600; an index of engravings; and an index of labels, ex-libris, stamps, manuscript annotations, owners, and provenances. This final index begins with a discursive introduction and full description and measurement of each of the labels, stamps, and ex-libris, followed by alphabetical lists of sigla, monograms, and owners who appear with first name only, and a section entitled 'various curiosities', which ranges from money, measures, mention of fabrics, oil, and vernacular expressions, to recipes, items of clothing, and Calvinists. Finally an analytical index of manuscript notes lists personal names and institutions as they appear in the books.

The essays are important because they allow the editors to discuss freely and at length the many interesting points and discoveries that are encountered and assimilated by cataloguers in the course of their work, but for which the constraints of a catalogue entry cannot make sufficient space. Moreover, they allow the cataloguers to be the first users of the catalogues they have compiled, and to offer the first results of research conducted on the newly available data. Another equally important reason for welcoming this approach is that there will be more chance that a common reader —by which I mean a non-book historian...