New Fashions for Old Books:
Incunables in the Eighteenth Century

Were incunabula eighteenth-century books? Yes is the answer after reading Kristian Jensen’s thoroughly researched study based on the Lyell Lectures which he delivered at Oxford in 2008. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century these »cradle-books« published before 1501 were avidly collected. They were sought as luxury items by wealthy collectors from aristocratic sectors, target-marketed by a new genre of dealer-collectors. At the same time they were collected by developing libraries in the public sector, such as the Bodleian in Oxford and Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Dr. Jensen writes that, »Incunabula were eighteenth-century books in the sense that they were sold, bought, confiscated, and transformed…« (p. 2) In a time of radical social, political and economic changes, it had been duly noted that books could serve as historical markers for a past which required new narratives and exemplars. Incunables were taken off their dusty shelves to be revived as intellectual signifiers for new political and cultural agenda. Like our contemporary institutions of higher learning which educate, publish, and collect, but in the end reliably epitomize society’s definitions and exclusions of who and what will become the accepted history, so museums, libraries, and private collectors have toed the party line as they assembled the building blocks for cultural heritage. Dr. Jensen demonstrates how well-heeled private collectors who were politically well positioned, such as Earl Spencer, were in direct competition with institutional repositories for the same books. It was often such collectors who established fashions for collecting in tandem with dealers. Indeed, Jensen’s research reinforces the feeling that things really have not changed in the close but complex relationships among dealers, collectors, and institutions.

This is a fascinating in-depth study based primarily on archival sources in England and in France. Some heavy slogging through arcane historical references, often necessitating brief reference look-ups concerning names and dates, is repaid by Jensen’s own reflections. He has culled a truly fabulous collection of incidents and anecdotes from his close readings and research in order to knit them together in support of his theses.

Revolutionary Ways to Collect

The book’s chapters present different perspectives on the shared European arena of appreciation (in both senses of cultural value and market prices) for these early books. It is significant that the early incunable catalogues were defined by nationality, viewing these works as important cultural projects. The first chapter discusses redistributions of collections via the active policies of spoliation of libraries in times of conquests. Unlike past appropriations of entire collections, in late eighteenth-century Paris lists were prepared with specific desiderata to be confiscated, such as the 1457 Psalter and Turrecremata’s 1467 Meditationes. Far from reckless looting and helter-skelter loads of booty, indeed unlike the image by the ceramic painter Antoine Beranger shown on the dust jacket, the tide of incunables flowing into Paris was carefully plotted and integrated into official processes. This endeavor was based upon political support, and conceived as an intellectual project to link the invention of printing with the idea of progress and enlightened present government.

Although Jensen seeks to take a »resolutely pan-European view,« London and Paris are acknowledged hot-spots for acquisitions, part of the greater surge of collecting which took place in this period. Chapter 2 illuminates the parallel collecting initiatives of Earl Spencer in England and the Bibliothèque nationale in France. Concerning France, the good news is that the nation chose not to follow Talleyrand’s ideas that books often presented failed experiments and theories. According to such eminent thinkers, old books should be discarded so as not to impede new intellectual efforts. Another negative view saw early editions as symbols of a despised history. On the 4th of July in 1793 came an order to remove all the royal marks found in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale. Bindings, bookplates, printed armorials and dedication would all have to go. Only recognition of the steep financial cost of such an endeavor when it was put out for bid saved the books from being vandalized (pp. 34–5).

Dealers and Collectors: The Business of Feeding Passions

Earl Spencer’s collecting of art and books began with the 1789 acquisition of Count Reviczky’s library for an annuity of £600 paid to the Count together with permanent access to the books; this proved to be a good deal since the Count lived only four years after the sale (p. 42). To put this yearly sum in perspective, Dr. Jensen notes that it is the same price which was paid in 1790 by Lord Lansdowne for the statue of Hercules, taken from Hadrian’s Villa, now a highlight of the J. Paul Getty Villa Museum. Spencer had an annual income of £40,000 from which it seems he spent £60,000. During his lifetime he sold property worth £207,000 primarily to finance his book collecting (p. 43). Dr. Jensen regularly calls out Spencer’s acquisitions throughout the course of the book; although this volume is not about Spencer, in this way he seems to inhabit it.

A second anecdote reveals that dealers were reliably pragmatic rather than patriotic in their conduct of business. At the 1813 sale of an Aldine Homer on vellum, the bookseller Antoine-Augustin Renouard was praised for his efforts to retain the Venetian work for France. While the dealer appeared to represent the world of French letters in his professional dealings, in this case he was working for Spencer. Dr. Jensen concludes that [Renouard] »had to operate in a market presided over by the God of Gold, even when embodied in an English aristocratic war leader.« (p. 41) In their opportunistic operations, it is revealed time and again that it was dealers and insiders who simultaneously drove and fed the market, such as the Benedictine Jean-Baptiste Maugérard, who supplied books from German abbeys to French collectors and dealers, engaging in »sharp practice,« to quote Anthony Hobson (p. 49).

New Disciplines: Academics, Antiquarianism and Authenticity

Chapter 3 provides the outlines of a developing history of the book and related provenance studies. »An object-based discipline emerges: Old books, new luxury« examines the topography of collecting in the eighteenth-century, tracing back to the foundational footprints laid down by English aristocratic collectors: the Duke of Devonshire; the Earl of Pembroke; the Duke of Roxburghe, et al. Books were collected for overlapping reasons. They were valued as texts for their subjects and information, but also as commercial goods which had certain markets and values. As academic products and outcomes of research and writing, books nurtured the development of new disciplines such as philology, antiquarianism, and historiography. If one is engaged in creating new knowledge, how can old-fashioned or even corrupt texts like incunabula be of interest? Antiquarianism and the development of historical research methods which referenced past editions and texts were of great help in responding to this quandary. In the process they established old books as canonical sources and monuments of the past. Erudite collections were intended to comprise a body of evidence, or more modestly to be a group of related objects which provided documentation. Scholarship and dealing melded in sales catalogues, such as that by Guillaume Debure l’ainé for the collection of the Duc de La Vallière. Books were acquired to form a corpus for study and comparison, to establish authenticity, and also to identify fakes.

Connoisseurship, Collecting and Completeness

As booksellers, dealers, collectors, and librarians vied to establish their authority and connoisseurship, authenticity of a different kind is discussed in Chapter 4. Some contemporaries questioned whether the most eminent collectors actually shopped in bookstores themselves or read their books. Earl Spencer’s diaries reveal that he made daily visits to London’s high-end bookshops. In fact, the deal for Spencer to acquire Count Reviczky’s collection was hatched in James Edwards’s place. Gradually, dealers moved up in society. Some were promoted to institutional roles. Joseph-François-Bernard Van Praet, once a shop boy, became keeper of printed books at the Bibliothèque nationale. Collections of distinguished incunables reified social credibility, and occasionally became a form of currency themselves. Higher-ups could even make demands on the collections of lower persons. In order to make his copy of the Golden Legend more complete, Spencer extracted some leaves for his copy from Francis Douce. How could Douce refuse such a request from the eminent Earl for his distinguished collection although it came from an amputation of his own book? (p. 123) Dr. Jensen also describes a dinner party cum book sale of 1811 in which books for purchase were served very inappropriately as the last course on the dinner table. (In suburban American homes, similar merchandising opportunities are called Tupperware parties.)

Cosmetic Surgery for Old Books

Recognizing that collections are always about memorializing, the final chapter deals with how incunables were adapted to function as historical objects. 1 Bindings, paper, illustrations and decorations were discarded, changed, and augmented to better serve their purposes. Old leather and parchment bindings, boards, clasps, vellum inserts were often discarded and replaced by morocco, gilt, and velvet the better to promote the importance of the collector. Texts that had been bound together for eons were split up. This view did not much honor the history of the particular book, but rather served to embellish the new history in process. Annotations, seen as unimportant scribblings and defacements, were washed away. Most horrifying was the use of muriatic acid to whiten pages. Although the short-term effect was to make books look as good as new, in the long term numerous volumes were destroyed because their paper had become embrittled, so fragile that the pages could not be touched.

Dr. Jensen writes intriguingly of a »most radical imposition of contemporary visual values« witnessed in the newly illuminated copies of the early books (p. 157). These eighteenth-century artistic additions appear in a number of George III’s books which came from the library of Joseph Smith, the British consul and longtime resident in Venice. Copies of a 1481 Dante and 1470 Livy bear eighteenth-century architectural decoration. The chapter highlights a number of examples, all texts of classics or Italian vernacular editions. Dr. Jensen postulates that in order to be worthy of their source cultures, they underwent an aestheticized transformation which effectively denied their historical integrity. Another tactic was restoring books in ways that were similar to antique sculpture restorations of this period. Limbs and heads were reattached, while possibly not from the same statue. In parallel efforts, books received new covers and occasionally had pages removed or facsimile leaves inserted. Incunables were old books; as physical objects, they could be disappointing in their plainness or decrepit condition. Evidently, they required some additional cosmetic enhancements to be worthy of their modern context and their new commemorative role in supporting history with desirable references from the past.

Conclusions

This volume is impeccable for its research, with 76 pages of footnotes, 40 pages of bibliographic citations, and a detailed index. It helpfully provides quotes or references to archival and published sources. It is a shame that its illustrations are small, gray muddy images. They do not convey the physical qualities which are an essential part of Dr. Jensen’s arguments. No doubt this decision was made for financial reasons, yet approximately 20 appropriately scaled color images would have made all the difference. In the twenty-first century is it possible that pictures are seen as unimportant? Even the wonderful dust-jacket detail of the painting »L’entrée à Paris des œuvres destinées au Musée Napoleon« by Antoine Beranger on a remarkable faux-antique »Etruscan« Sevres vase modeled by Charles Percier is not fully identified. The complete image can be found online in the Corbis image database. 2 For those with an interest in the essential importance of books in the history of culture, this is an original and captivating study of how incunables came to be seen as foundational objects for eminent collectors as well as cornerstones of institutional collections.