the invention of rare books
its later revisions remained a standard work into the nineteenth century) was his use of an asterisk to mark those books which are ‘rarest among the rare’ and to grade the relative rarity of others. Haym’s view on the use of booksellers’ catalogues for reference is also worth quoting although twenty years later some had improved enough for McKitterick to devote a chapter to another of his heroes, Thomas Osborne and his retail catalogues of the great Harleian Library (5 volumes, 1743–5) which had descriptions ranging from a single line to hundreds of words though their use for reference was hampered by the absence of printed prices which were by then becoming the norm: I have abstained from using the almost infinite number of booksellers’ catalogues of books for sale in their shops as they are generally compiled by people of little intelligence, or even by booksellers themselves, and are not precise and therefore not to be trusted … However, I distinguish from these the catalogues written and published by highly intelligent people, such as those of the libraries in Naples. Florence, and so on … As McKitterick notes of Haym’s book, ‘there had been nothing quite like it in England before.’ On a scale even larger than the Harleian dispersal was the sale in Paris of the library of the duc de la Vallière (‘the greatest library to be assembled in late eighteenth-century France’). The library was consigned for auction to the erudite bookseller Guillaume de Bure, author of the influential Bibliographie instructive (7 volumes, 1763– 8), who employed the young Joseph van Praët (future librarian of the Bibliothèque Royale) to catalogue the manuscripts. The nine volumes of catalogues for the two series of sales (1783–4) were pio- neering in including illustrations, an expensive investment justified by the high prices achieved. They ‘became part of the bibliography of collecting, to be referred to – if more rarely read – when bench- marks were sought for rarity or for value.’ Passing over the enthusiastic but much-ridiculed influence of the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, McKitterick’s last great hero is Jacques-Charles Brunet, who ‘was to have easily the widest influence, far beyond his own country, far beyond England, and far beyond his own times.’ His Manuel du Libraire, et de l’amateur
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