Sign them, stamp them, dot them with gold? I’m considering how to mark my books. Commission a bookplate? Use the embossing stamp a friend gave me last year? It didn’t feel quite right at the time: I preferred to leave my collection pristine. But now I have been taught for five days by David Pearson on the topic of Provenance. ‘Pristine’ has come to seem a synonym for ‘uninformative’.
The course was divided loosely into three parts. Day one was an overview of the field: what is provenance, what categories of provenance evidence exist, why might we care about it? Days two through four concerned particular types of evidence. I wanted to send copies of the exercises to my puzzle-enjoying family members, since they were not only useful but as much fun as jigsaws. We learned to read puzzling hands, what bookplate ornamentation styles are characteristic of what decades, what reference books we ought to have at our fingertips when working out the owner of an unnamed armorial stamp, and where else we might look outside a book itself to learn about its movement through libraries and auction-houses. Day five was the time to apply what we’d learned: each student chose an early modern book from a collection of fifteen, and spent forty-five minutes looking at them and working out a preliminary presentation. I’m not sure when I was last as gleeful as when comparing the handwriting of different notes on the endpapers of a fifth-edition Glossographia, or discovering, in that largely un-annotated copy, a single pedantic marginal note about the etymology of the word Yule.
The facilities provided by the National Library were exemplary: with drilling going on in the galleries downstairs, the room was perfectly soundproof; in the heat of summer, it was cool; and in this low-profile stage of the covid pandemic, it was well-ventilated. I had expected the seven-hour days to feel like marathons, but with a break for lunch and two for tea, each was divided into four hour-and-a-quarter lecture chunks, a very good length for this student’s brain. Anthony Tedeschi worked quietly behind the scenes such that one could almost believe that rare books were moving themselves up out of the stacks during our absences, and I’m sure a lot of even-less-visible work went on to make the space and books ready for us. I am grateful.
What have I come out of the class with? Of the fifteen taking it, I was certainly the least directly connected to the field. I am a booklover and bookseller, but I have never yet been a true antiquarian bookseller nor a librarian. I am not aware of having held a book published earlier than the year 1800 before this week in 2025.
Well, for one thing, I rejoiced in the opportunity to hear about the work of fourteen librarians, collectors, and curators. For another, I am two pages into writing a short story based on a particular book bound by the Twemlow family, because you cannot give me a large body of new knowledge without my trying to render its metaphors and whimsies into fiction. I have the emails of all my classmates, an open invitation from David to send him provenance puzzles, and the home address of an Australian classmate to whom I am already writing a letter. Much of the factual information in the course I would have received by reading Provenance in Book History by David Pearson; but not only would that experience not have involved applying what I had learned to more than sixty early modern books, I would have missed hearing a classmate from another stream advise someone that the place to pursue a research question was the work of Wimble, early Australasian typefounder; I would not have heard David advise one of my own classmates that the way to follow up a particular book’s puzzling provenance was to talk to the living expert on the sewing structures of parchment bindings, whose email address he could provide; I would not have seen my classmates point out things in David’s slides that he’d never noticed before – which, he says, happens every time he teaches a class; and I would have missed his warm, wry teaching style. He received questions with generosity and interest, and never seemed more pleased than when he didn’t know the answer – ‘a research opportunity’, was his both joking and sincere refrain.
On arriving home after the course ended, I picked up my copy of British Calendar Customs, Scotland, Vol. II. I had never thought twice about the provenance of that book, which I picked up for two dollars at a library sale, except to be surprised its companion volumes seemed so dear. Now, it was obvious at a glance that Wellington Public Libraries had the book rebound, not only because the spine is kind enough to say so, but because the flyleaves are a different paper than the main book and several stamps in the upper parts of the pages are partly cut off, while the margins are of uneven size, suggesting trimming. With the original binding gone, no trace of provenance survives in this book except the many markings of its long ownership by the library itself – ink stamps, a perforating stamp, pencil markings beside certain passages, and various inkings and pencilings representing cataloguing and shelving, as well as a mark that could imply a seller’s price tag long ago. Each of these things will have a history. I could find out in what date range the library was using those perforating stamps. Perhaps I could learn when, or in what collection, it was an anti-theft policy to mark the pages so many times. This is not a provenance-rich book, and still there is much to follow up.
Jack Larsen
Bookhound
132 Riddiford Street
Newtown
Wellington
New Zealand