Description
Book SynopsisQuestions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others have disappeared altogether. This is clear not only from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, but from many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be located. In this volume leading specialists in the field explore different aspects of this poorly understood aspect of book history: classes of texts particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. A final section describes modern efforts at salvage and restitution following the devastation of the twentieth century.
Trade Review“This is a rewarding and important book”. David McKitterick, Trinity College, Cambridge. In: Library & Information History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2017), pp. 145-146. “Pettegree’s introduction, ‘The Legion of the Lost’ is a full-length essay discussing not only how books become lost but how one can know about what has been lost. It is accessible and engaging and would be a worthy reading assignment for undergraduates or masters students studying book history.” Iona Hine, The University of Sheffield. Reviewed for Linguistic DNA [10 January 2017].
Table of Contents1. Andrew Pettegree, The Legion of the Lost. Recovering the Lost Books of Early Modern Europe. Part I: In the Beginning: lost incunabula 2. Falk Eisermann, The Gutenberg Galaxy’s Dark Matter: Lost Incunabula, and Ways to Retrieve Them 3. Jonathan Green and Frank McIntyre, Lost Incunable Editions: Closing In on an Estimate Part II: National Case-studies 4. Iain Fenlon, Lost Book of Polyphony from Renaissance Spain 5. Wolfgang Undorf, Lost Books, Lost Libraries, Lost Everything? A Scandinavian Early Modern Perspective 6. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, In Search of Lost Fortuna. Reconstructing the Publishing History of the Polish Book of Fortune-Telling 7. Alexandra Hill, Lost Print in England: Entries in the Stationers’ Company Register, 1557-1640 8. Goran Proot, Survival factors of seventeenth-century hand-press books published in the Southern Netherlands: The importance of sheet counts, Sammelbände and the role of institutional collections 9. Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, Publicity and its Uses. Lost Books as Revealed in Newspaper Advertisements in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic 10. Domenico Ciccarello, Lost Books and Dispersed Libraries in Sicily during the Seventeenth Century Part III: Censorship and its consequences 11. Christine Benevent and Malcolm Walsby, Lost Issues and Self-Censorship: Rethinking the Publishing History of Guillaume Budé’s De l’Institution du Prince 12. Michele Camaioni, The Editorial History of a Rare and Forbidden Franciscan Book of Italian Renaissance: the Dialogo della Unione Spirituale di Dio con l’anima by Bartolomeo Cordoni 13. Rosa Marisa Borraccini, An Unknown Bestseller: the Confessionario of Girolamo da Palermo 14. Roberto Rusconi, The Devil’s Trick. Impossible Editions in the Lists of Titles from the Regular Orders in Italy at the End of the Sixteenth Century 15. Giovanna Granata, On the Track of Lost Editions in Italian Religious Libraries at the End of the Sixteenth Century: a Numerical Analysis of the RICI Database Part IV. Libraries, private and public 16. Anna Giulia Cavagna, Loss and Meaning. Lost Books, Bibliographic Description and Significance in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Private Library 17. Martine van Ittersum, Confiscated Manuscripts and Books: What Happened to the Personal Library and Archive of Hugo Grotius Following His Arrest on Charges of High Treason in August 1618? 18. Maria Teresa Biagetti, Dispersed collections of scientific books: the case of the private library of Federico Cesi (1585-1630) 19. Alison Walker, Lost in Plain Sight: Rediscovering the Library of Sir Hans Sloane 20. Mark Towsey, Book Use and Sociability in Lost Libraries of the Eighteenth Century: Towards a Union Catalogue Part V: War and Peace: the depredations of modern times 21. Jan L. Alessandrini, Lost Books of ‘Operation Gomorrah’: Rescue, Reconstruction, and Restitution at Hamburg’s Library in the Second World War 22. Tomasz Nastulczyk, Two Centuries of Looting and the Grand Nazi Book Burning. The Dispersed and Destroyed Libraries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Historical Losses and Contemporary Attempts at Reconstruction 23. Flavia Bruni, All is not Lost. Italian Archives and Libraries in the Second World War 24. Saskia Limbach, Tracing Lost Broadsheet Ordinances Printed in Sixteenth-Century Cologne Index
