One of the principal aims of the Incunabula Project team at Cambridge University Library is the identification, whenever possible, of the previous owners of our incunables.  Sometimes we are able to find unnamed bookplates, stamps or arms in printed publications or identify them through online resources, such as the images posted online by the Penn Provenance Project or Paul Needham’s Index Possessorum Incunabulorum (IPI) in the online Provenance Research pages provided by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), but other times we are at a loss and unable to find the answer.

We would therefore be most grateful for help from our readers in the identification of the puzzling bookplates, unknown stamps and unidentified coats-of-arms that we will occasionally post in our blog.

Our first query concerns a small bookplate (31 x 31 mm) representing a bull head in a collar pasted onto the front pastedown of a recently acquired copy of Biblia latina : cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra et expositionibus Guillelmi Britonis in omnes prologos S. Hieronymi et additionibus Pauli Burgensis replicisque Matthiae Doering, Venice : Franciscus Renner, de Heilbronn, 1482-83 (ISTC ib00612000; GW, 4287), volume 2 only (Psalms to Maccabees), Inc.2.B.3.6d[4638].  We suspect a 19th-century English provenance, but have not been able to trace it.

The second query relates to a stamp found on the first leaf of a Libro da Compagnia printed in Florence by Antonius Francisci Venetus around 1490 (ISTC ic00788450; GW 13393), Inc.4.B.8.12 [4461], [A1]r.  The library copy is one of the only three extant examplars of the edition.  The stamp shows three crescents addorsed, an eagle regaurdant, wings expanded, below, and the motto «Expecto», all surmounted by a princely crown.  It has been identified with the stamp of a member of the Strozzi family of Florence.  The same stamp also appears in one of the two copies of Angelus Politianus, Miscellaneorum centuria prima, Florence : Antonio di B. Miscomini, 19 September 1489 (ISTC ip00890000), held in the Houghton Library at Harvard, Inc 6149 (B) (26.4) (J. E. Walsh, A catalogue of the fifteenth-century printed books in the Harvard University Library, 5 vols, Binghamton NY, Tempe AZ, 1991-95, no. 2872). In the Hourghton copy a princely crown surmounts the initials “F.S.” in the lower compartment of the late 18th- or early 19th-century binding (information kindly supplied by William Stoneman).  According to the genealogy of the Strozzis, four members of the family by the first name beginning in “F” bore the title of Prince of Forano.  They were as follows:  Filippo (1699-1763), 2nd prince,  Ferdinando Giuseppe (1718-1769), 3rd prince, Ferdinando Maria (1774-1835), 5th prince, and Ferdinando Lorenzo (1821-1878), 6th prince.  We would be grateful for any information that might help in the identification of the actual owner of these books.

We are also seeking help for the identification of a coat-of-arms that belonged to an unknown family, probably Austrian [?] or South Tyrolean, possibly from Brixen (i.e. Bressanone, Italy).  The arms are painted in the upper pastedown in our copy of the Missale Brixinense printed in Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt in August 1493, at the instance of Florian Waldauf von Waldenstein, a member of the Kannenordens (Orden de la Jarra y el Grifo, i.e. the Order of the Jar and the Griffin), and by permission of Melchior von Meckau, Bishop of Brixen  (ISTC im00653000; GW M24292), Inc.2.A.6.18[837] (Oates, 964).

Finally,  we are still trying to identify the arms found in our copy of Pomponio Mela, Cosmographia, sive De situ orbis, Venice : Bernhard Maler (Pictor), Erhard Ratdolt and Peter Loslein, 1478 (ISTC im00449000), Inc.4.B.3.23a[1454] (Oates, 1744).

With thanks from the Incunabula Project Team.

The Library of Michael Wodhull (1740-1816), Dibdin’s ‘Orlando’, poet and the first translator into English of the extant works of Euripides, is well-known. His books are immediately recognisable, either through his distinctive gilt armorial device, or from his equally distinctive annotations. The history of his collection is succinctly described in de Ricci’s English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts. Wodhull haunted the London sale rooms between 1764 and 1815, amassing a remarkable collection of early-printed books, many of which he subsequently had bound by Roger Payne.

After Wodhull’s demise, appropriately enough within the Library he created at Thenford, his books passed first to his sister, Mary Ingram, from her to Samuel Amy Severne and then to J.E. Severne, who auctioned the collection at Sotheby’s in 1886. During his lifetime Wodhull disposed of a number of duplicates, and books from these sales can be clearly identified from his habit of excising the upper corner of the front flyleaf, removing evidence of the date and price of purchase.

Although famed for its classical incunabula, Wodhull’s library was diverse. The Incunabula Cataloguing Project has to date recorded 21 fifteenth-century books from his collection, amongst which is an intriguing volume containing two legal texts; Vocabularius juris utriusque ([Basel : Michael Wenssler, between 1475 and 1478] – ISTC iv00335600 ), the law dictionary compiled by Jodocus Erfordensis (fl. ca. 1452), and Maffeo Vegio’s Vocabula ex iure civili excerpta (Vicenza: Philippus Albinus, 1 Dec. 1477 – ISTC iv00122000).

Wodhull’s ever-helpful annotations demonstrate that the two items were formerly in the monumental Venetian library of the director of the official Venetian press, Maffeo Pinelli (1736-1785), brought to England by the bookseller James Edwards (1757-1816) and sold by auction on 2 March 1789 and 1 February 1790.  Wodhull acquired the book for the bargain price of 8s, then paid a further 16s to have it bound. The catalogue of the Pinelli sale confirms this; item 6016:

“Vocabularius Juris utriusque, Absque ulla nota, Sæc. XV. fol.- Editio pervetusta est, sine numeris, signaturis, & custodibus, character Germanico, eoque rudi.
Vegii Liber Vocabulorum ex Jure Civili excerptorum, Vincentiæ, MCCCLXXVII, fol.”

At the 1886 Wodhull sale the volume was item 2730, described there as having “MS. notes and initials historiated with drawings”, a “fine copy in russia by Mrs. Weir”. It sold for £1:15s to the bookseller Bennett, who then offered it as item 228 in an as yet unidentified catalogue, listed under ‘Early Printing’ – “A capital specimen of early printing in Black Letter … finely bound in russia gilt, rough edges, by Mrs. Weir.” From Bennett it went to the great collector and benefactor of Cambridge University Library, Samuel Sandars (1837-1894), bequeathed to the Library in 1894.

The attribution of the binding to Mrs Weir is intriguing – I can find little written on either Mrs Weir (sometimes Wier) or her husband, David (possibly Richard?), assistants in Payne’s bindery in the 1770s, and would welcome leads on more information. The earliest printed reference I can find to the Weirs is in Dibdin’s Bibliographical Decameron, where he states that the husband and wife worked together in Toulouse, repairing and binding books for Count Justin MacCarthy-Reagh (1744-1811) before working for Payne. Charles Ramsden confirms the Toulouse connection, convincingly showing that the Weirs spent at least three years with MacCarthy-Reagh, although there is some discrepancy around the precise dates – Ramsden 1771-1774, Dibdin 1774-1777 – and his attribution of a group of bindings to MacCarthy-Reagh and then to Weir remains hypothetical.[1] Dibdin further notes that Mrs Weir undertook repair work for Payne, then later “betook herself to Edinburgh”, repairing the books and documents at Edinburgh Record Office.[2] The Jaffray MSS confirm this move to Edinburgh: “She went down to repair, wash and mend the MSS. of the Society of Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh at a salary of £1.1.0 a week, where she died.”[3]

Cyril Davenport’s Roger Payne gives a sketchy account of the activities of both Weirs, identifying Mrs Weir as “a very skilful repairer of old books and paper” and concluding “Certainly one or two bindings credited to Payne were not done by him at all but by the Weirs … The great test is the quality of the gilding … Payne’s … is brilliant; Weir’s … is not so clear and smooth.”[4] Bernard Middleton notes Mrs Weir as “renowned as a paper-mender” and cites a single unidentified binding signed ‘Bound by Weir’, supplementing the corpus of three identified by Ramsden and one further Storer Bequest binding identified by Mirjam Foot.[5]

Mirjam’s ODNB entry for Payne is more enlightening, but again restricts Mrs Weir’s activities to paper repairs and red-ruling:

“Both David Wier and his wife appeared to have worked for Payne. Mrs Wier, who apparently was a capable mender and restorer as well as ‘an excellent hand at ruling red … lines on prayer books’ (Jaffray, 4.182), was, according to Dibdin, ‘pretty constantly and most successfully employed’ (Dibdin, 517) by him, probably before 1774, while her husband (according to the same source) worked for Payne from 1777. The partnership was not a happy one—‘Wier happened to be as fond of “barley broth” as his associate … They were always quarrelling’ (ibid., 515)—and they parted company.”[6]

There is no doubt that David (Richard) Weir bound books, despite the paucity of surviving signed examples, and more work is needed to clarify the relationship between the Weirs and MacCarthy-Reagh – a recent communication with Mirjam Foot suggests that the late Giles Barber had long planned to work on some intriguing-sounding archival material in Toulouse. Beyond bookseller’s descriptions, however, there seems to be no evidence at all to suggest that Mrs Weir also worked as a binder. There is nothing on the CUL book to indicate why it was attributed to her in 1886, but it is worth noting that attributions to the Weirs seem to have been in vogue in the 1880s. Quaritch’s catalogue 93, Bookbinding, November 1888, for example contains sections dedicated to ‘Richard and Mrs. Wier’, and to ‘Bindings said to be by Roger Payne; probably done by Richard Wier and Roger Payne in partnership’. I suspect a degree of bookseller’s verbiage – if one could get away with attributing a binding to Payne one could charge a premium, if not then citing the Weirs was the next best thing.

[2] Thomas Frognall Dibdin The Bibliographical Decameron (London: 1817) p. 518-9.

[3] Mirjam Foot The Henry Davis Gift … Volume I (London: 1978), p.110, footnote 53.

[4] Cyril Davenport Roger Payne (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1929) pp.22-24.

[5] Bernard Middleton A history of Englisg Cradt Bookbinding Technique (Delaware: 1996) pp. 207, 357; Charles Ramsden ‘Richard Weir and Count MacCarthy-Reagh’ in The Book Collector vol. 2, no. 4, winter 1953, pp. 253-4. Mirjam Foot The Henry Davis Gift … Volume I (London: 1978), p. 101.

[6] Mirjam M. Foot, ‘Payne, Roger (bap. 1738, d. 1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21654, accessed 12 July 2012]

I was delighted to get a place on the masterclass “Epidemic print: medical incunabula and their readers”, particularly as I look after the Royal College of Physicians’ rare book collections which includes over 100 incunabula. The session was conducted by Mr Peter Jones, the librarian at King’s College, Cambridge, who certainly brought the books on display to life, as well as putting them into context.

Mr Jones commenced with an overview of how medical incunabula ended up in Cambridge University Library. Many arrived in Cambridge relatively soon after printing, including nine separate volumes brought from Ferrara in 1477 straight to Cambridge. After religious houses, doctors were the main acquirers of books, so medical texts came to Cambridge from the 1470s onwards. These were intended for both medical practice and academic study and many found their way into the University Library. The spread of epidemic disease in Europe played a big part in the production of medical books. In the 15^th century plague was localized and specific, so places where the plague struck were also places where plague tracts were produced. Diseases such as the ‘English Sweat’ and syphilis had a high mortality rate even amongst the wealthy and led to the publication of related tracts.

We went on to examine twenty incunabula in detail. One of the joys of a small group such as this, was the chance to see these close-up and study them ourselves. They were arranged in thematic groups, and Mr Jones introduced each one, with plenty of opportunity for further comment and questions from participants.

We started off with texts  whose publication followed an outbreak of disease, notably the Regimen contra pestilentiam, ca. 1485 (ISTC ij00013400; Inc.5.J.3.5[3604]). These are texts that tend to be ephemeral in nature and are accidental survivors; there were probably far more of these in circulation than we are aware of now. There were two editions of this text in 1485, coinciding with the arrival of the English Sweat. It was a useful comparison with the plague tract at the RCP (ref. no. 21858), extensively annotated and published in Antwerp between December 1486 and May 1487 (ISTC ij00003550).  Similarly, the next item, Jacobi Soldi Opus de peste , 1478 (ISTC is00613000; Inc.5.b.10.10[2064]), demonstrated how these texts were written to be used, with annotations dating from the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

Another example was a broadside, Johann Muntz, Tabula minutionum, before 1495, with tables giving particular months of the year for blood-letting, targeted to provide information with a very practical reference purpose (ISTC im00875300; Inc.Broadside.0[4100]).

Several questions from the historians in the group were posed about the technicalities of printing illustrations whilst we looked at some herbals. The same woodcuts were used repeatedly, making the herbal of little use in identifying plants. Their use lay in describing use of plants in medicine, rather than botanical description. One example of this was the Herbarius Latinus, 1484 (ISTC ih00062000; Inc.4.A.1.3b[19]), with woodcut hand-coloured illustrations, names given in Latin and German and annotations giving Polish names in addition. These texts tended to be old-fashioned for the time – in two thirds of publications of this time the text was by an author who was already dead, for example, the Hortus sanitatis, not after 21 October 1497 (ISTC ih00487000; CCB.47.62).

Conversely the Opusculum aegritudinum puerorum, 1486-87 (ISTC ir00241000; Inc.5.F.2.7[3380.1-3])  was by a living author, Cornelis Roelans, a town physician. He put together various writings on the diseases of children. Tantalisingly, the first 77 leaves of every known copy of this work are missing, possibly indicating the author was not happy with the proofs and had them all disposed of? The only survival is single leaves found in Cambridge bindings.

Another theme was books without a strictly medical approach. One example was De secretis mulierum, 1485 (ISTC ia00304500; Inc.4.J.3.4[3603]), a book about generation and reproduction, written by an author in a monastic house, and notably misogynistic! This showed a more philosophical approach than scientific.  Information about medicine was not only accessed via medical texts, but also via  encyclopedias, an example of which was the final book on display, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, 1496 (ISTC ib00143000; Inc.3.J.1.2[3559]).

Other highlights for me included seeing another copy of Antonio Gazius, Corona florida medicinae, 1491 (ISTC ig00111000; Inc.2.B.3.45[1506]), of which we also have a copy at the RCP (ref. no. 21416-3), although, sadly, our copy isn’t annotated, and Antonio Guainerio, Practica, 1497/98 (ISTC ig00521000; Inc.3.B.3.85[1671]), which contains medical recipes at the back, attributed to Richard Bartlot, a 16^th century President of the RCP.

The masterclass was a great overview of medical incunabula, and, as well as learning about the books themselves, provided a good opportunity to engage with the variety of people involved with studying and working with incunabula, not just librarians. A useful bibliography was also provided. My thanks to Mr Jones, for such a lively and interesting masterclass, and to the staff of the Rare Books Room for organizing the event and putting out the examples for us to view.

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While working through the English incunables I came across a couple of provenance marks unidentified (indeed unmentioned) by Oates. The first occurs on a parchment fly leaf bound into the front of Lydgate’s Stans puer ad mensam (Westminster: William Caxton, ca. 1476) (Inc.5.J.1.1[3490]). It is an elaborate cipher apparently concealing all the letters of the owner’s name. 

The book was originally the first in a volume of eight verse tracts all printed at Westminster by Caxton in about 1476. It also bears the name of John Fawler in a sixteenth century hand, and was later in the library of John Moore, Bishop of Ely. Many other names appear in other tracts from the volume, including George Ferrers, Paul Haynes, Thomas Halm, Henry Birkenhead, Thomas Bristow, Thomas Drewe and “Arundell” (not, apparently, the 12th Earl of Arundell whose manuscripts are preserved in the British Library).

Still more mysterious is the rebus which appears at the end of Lyndwood’s Constitutiones provinciales (Westminster : Wynkyn de Worde, 31 May 1496) (Inc.7.J.1.2[3543]). This appears to depict a barrel surrounded by what may be a horse’s bit. Rebuses or canting devices are quite common in books of this period, and a similar example is found in Inc.1.B.3.1b[3730], an edition of Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Lectura super prima parte Codicis ([Venice] : Vindelinus de Spira, [1471]), formerly owned by Cardinal John Morton. Morton’s rebus depicts a barrel (or “tun”) with the letters “MOR” written on it to signify the Cardinal’s surname. Another incunable with Morton’s rebus in it can be found in Trinity College Library, and has recently been described by Katja Airaksinen (“The Morton Missal: the finest incunable made in England” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. XIV, pt. 2 (2009), pp. 147-172). It seems reasonable to assume that the early owner of the Constitutiones also had a surname ending in “-ton”, and I can’t help wondering if he might actually have been a Mr Bitton (if the other item in the rebus is indeed a horse’s bit). However, no Bittons are listed among the early members of Oxford or Cambridge Universities and the name does not appear among recorded owners of early books.

These are two former owners who will probably remain anonymous; we have however produced a list of those individuals whom we have succeeded in identifying (at least to the extent of providing a name and a possible date). It is supplemented by a list of institutional owners. Corrections and additions to these lists (and suggestions as to who the mysterious former owners of the books described above might be) are welcome.