The Invention of Rare Books 1 robert harding
There are common rare books, scarce rare books, and rare rare books. How this apparent conundrum came to become accepted in the 200 years from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was the subject of David McKitterick’s Panizzi Lectures at the British Library in 2015. He has now greatly expanded on these in The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840. McKitterick asks how, in the age before the near-omnivorous collecting of modern national libraries, and faced with an ever- increasing avalanche of old printed books in circulation (due not just to the massive expansion in production during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also to the natural dispersal of older collec- tions culminating in the continent-wide upheavals stemming from the French Revolution), a consensus was reached among scholars, librarians, collectors, and booksellers on defining a corpus of older books that should be considered suitable for both the private and institutional library? This gradual process resulted in the first steps towards modern bibliographical standards and the ‘orderly setting out of editions in a comprehensive way that has survived to be still acceptable today.’ In this wide-ranging investigation McKitterick also aims to make a second and larger enquiry: ‘how are canons of knowledge, of reading, of taste or of values constructed?’ While the answers have changed over time these are, as he notes, questions faced by today’s librarians in the face of an overload of born-digital, printed, and manuscript materials, all demanding preservation. Rarity was not, then, a statistical actuality (that has only come, 1 . the invention of rare books : Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600– 1840 by David McKitterick. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp.xii, 450 inc b/w illus. isnb 978-1-108-42832-3 Hardback. £ 45
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