Hidden in Plain View Decoration and Double Meaning in the English Private Library
ed potten
In the early 1640s an unidentified and scholarly Oxford book buyer acquired for himself a three-volume set of the Bartenura , the commentary on the Mishnah of Ovadiah ben Abraham of Bertinoro. Printed in Kraków in 1642, and bound either there or nearby soon after publication, the book’s plain, provincial binding clearly stood out on the shelves. In an attempt to introduce uniformity, whilst minimising expense, its frugal English owner sent it to a local binder to have the spines gold tooled and lettered in a characteristically English style. 1 The boards remain unaltered, but a casual viewer of the shelves would see no di V erence between the spines. This Oxford scholar was not alone. The Michel Wittock Collection, sold through Christie’s in 2004, contained a similarly duplicitous copy of the 1591 Aldine Latin orthography, bound in contemporary white vellum. The original binding was later coloured and decorated in such a way as to change the book’s appearance on the shelf and to give the im- pression that it was bound in brown calf, with a gold-tooled spine, redolent of the late-seventeenth century. 2 Whether they knew it or not, these seventeenth-century English book owners were early foot soldiers in a long campaign of ob- fuscation in English libraries, ranging from small deceits practised 1 . These volumes now reside in the Fellows’ Library of Clare College, Cambridge, where they have been since 1721. The tooling on them matches tooling found on at least four other books now at Clare College. All came from an as-yet unidentified English collection, dispersed in Oxford in the 1670s and early 1680s, there acquired by the Hebraist Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724). 2 . The Michel Wittock Collection: Important Renaissance Bookbindings, Wednesday 7 July 2004 (London: Christie’s, 2004), lot 78, p.124. In 2007, George Bayntun o V ered a re- markably similar volume, this time a 1674 copy of the Elzevier Lucius Annaeus Florus. I am grateful to Ed Bayntun-Coward for drawing this binding to my attention: George Bayntun EBC Catalogue 15 (Bath: Bayntun, 2007), item 15.
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