Wow, getting to the tough questions straightaway!
So it's naturally very hard to have one particular favourite, and even harder to show you any of them when I'm not currently at the library. When things were looking serious, I made a few trips in the car to grab what I could in order to work from home, which wasn't an awful lot - I really don't have a lot of room at home for everything. So instead of showing you my absolute favourite, which even if I knew what it was, I probably don't have access to it, I'm going to show one of my favourite items I happened to bring home with me for cataloguing.
Gorgeous, isn't it? So, what is it?
It's a Christie's catalogue, for an 18-day sale in 1856. These are really useful for us - for provenance, we can use them to track down items which may have seen the inside of an auction house - some things more than once. Why did I pick it? Firstly, that psychedelic binding! A close-up below:
Here also we find that the book has its own provenance. Spencer P was a keen collector of antiquarian delights, and his bequest to the museum included a collection of chapbooks among many other things. But below is the other reason why I picked this item out.
That right there is some serious calligraphy porn. A beautiful hand, and some really fascinating information: he (I assume Spencer but haven't confirmed this) has noted down the price each items was sold for, and who it went to. Colnaghi is a dealer that we also have catalogues for, so maybe some of these items will be in some of their later catalogues too?
And finally, just another picture which shows the attention to detail when it was bound: the fore-edge has the same marbling as the end papers and the covers. Okay, it's no careful painting, and the design is the same all the way round, but for a book which is in my library, rather than the MSSPB collection, I think it's a quite stunning little work of art with a lot of interest!
PS For those of you who care about this sort of thing, yes, it really does smell fabulous.
So it's naturally very hard to have one particular favourite, and even harder to show you any of them when I'm not currently at the library. When things were looking serious, I made a few trips in the car to grab what I could in order to work from home, which wasn't an awful lot - I really don't have a lot of room at home for everything. So instead of showing you my absolute favourite, which even if I knew what it was, I probably don't have access to it, I'm going to show one of my favourite items I happened to bring home with me for cataloguing.
Gorgeous, isn't it? So, what is it?
It's a Christie's catalogue, for an 18-day sale in 1856. These are really useful for us - for provenance, we can use them to track down items which may have seen the inside of an auction house - some things more than once. Why did I pick it? Firstly, that psychedelic binding! A close-up below:
Here also we find that the book has its own provenance. Spencer P was a keen collector of antiquarian delights, and his bequest to the museum included a collection of chapbooks among many other things. But below is the other reason why I picked this item out.
That right there is some serious calligraphy porn. A beautiful hand, and some really fascinating information: he (I assume Spencer but haven't confirmed this) has noted down the price each items was sold for, and who it went to. Colnaghi is a dealer that we also have catalogues for, so maybe some of these items will be in some of their later catalogues too?
And finally, just another picture which shows the attention to detail when it was bound: the fore-edge has the same marbling as the end papers and the covers. Okay, it's no careful painting, and the design is the same all the way round, but for a book which is in my library, rather than the MSSPB collection, I think it's a quite stunning little work of art with a lot of interest!
PS For those of you who care about this sort of thing, yes, it really does smell fabulous.
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