The 1691 Catalogue of Glasgow University Library
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Library stock
Nearly 3500 entries have been transcribed to date, each one
corresponding to a volume on the old shelves. It is difficult to say
what proportion of these entries correspond to what we would nowadays
call a ‘bibliographical unit’ - or ‘publication’, since multi-volume
works have an entry per volume,
as where the five volumes of Plantin’s famous polyglot
Bible (Sp
Coll Bm6-a.1-5) each have an entry. Furthermore up to 20 or more pamphlets may
be bound together, and thus listed as one entry. Rather more than 400 of
these entries are probably for books acquired after 1691. The
following facts and figures are not intended to be precise or exacting and
consider only sections A-AM. Only when all of the books have been examined
will it be possible to know how many bibliographical items are involved.
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Each volume of multivolume works
merited an entry in the 1691 catalogue, as here with Plantin's bible |
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This table provides a breakdown of
where stock held in the 1691 library was published
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Distribution by country of origin is interesting but it should be borne in
mind that ‘country’ does not always mean
the same thing in the late Seventeenth Century as now. With the notable exception of France (with leads with 21%), the chief
national provenances are from protestant centres of production in the modern
Netherlands (13%), Switzerland (mainly Geneva and Zurich (16%)), England
(17%), and Germany (also with 21%, but slightly fewer actual publications
than France). Scotland is poorly represented with just 1% of books examined,
doing better only than Spain. Considering what we know about the University
of Glasgow in the Seventeenth Century, with the exception of the dominance
of books of French origin, this national provenance distribution is not
particularly surprising.
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Subject to error
(and it can be difficult to be sure what the erstwhile colleagues of 1691
meant by some of their Latin place-names) there appear to be works from
about 145 different towns, all (so far) in Europe. The numeric distribution
is quite interesting. First of all there are 203 entries in which no
place is named - about 6 percent of the total. While a few centres
appear to account for the majority of the entries, the number of places
which account for a small number of entries is quite large: as many as 55
places account for only one entry (2% taken together), and 110 places
account for 10 entries or fewer, with a total of 279 entries (9%). Glasgow,
is the place of publication for only two entries; even Aberdeen and Dublin do
rather better with five each! The spread then becomes more widely spaced,
with 22 places accounting for between 11 and 124 entries (566 entries in
all, or 18%). This category includes Edinburgh with 26 entries, Cambridge
with 17 entries, and Oxford, with 45. This, together with London production, no doubt reflects the pattern of academic publishing in England, Scotland
and Ireland at this period.
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The expected bunching
of production in a few centres is very apparent from the cluster of 11
places which account for 125 or more entries. Nine centres (Antwerp,
Frankfurt am Main, Geneva, Amsterdam, Lyon, Zurich, Cologne, Leiden and
Basel) account for between 125 and 186 entries (1376 entries or 44%), while
Paris and London each account for more than 400 entries - 873 in all, or
28%. That London is represented by 450 entries is perhaps not surprising,
but the 423 entries for Paris is perhaps rather more noteworthy.
One factor perhaps
explaining the importance of Paris is the number of patristic texts coming
from there: Glasgow Divines needed patristic texts, and evidently went for
the best editions, wherever they were printed. But it is not only patristic
texts which came from Paris. The origin of the Glasgow University Library
books of the period needs further analysis - it is clearly a mistake to
assume that confessional questions in any sense subordinate the perceived
necessity to acquire a book. |
An example of a work published in
Antwerp - the imprint details of Bl2-d.7, Pineda's Biblical commentaries |
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This graph details the number of
volumes listed in the 1691 catalogue by decade
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In the analysis
by date it has been easier to assess what constitutes a ‘bibliographic unit’
- certainly to the extent of eliminating multiple references to multi-volume
works. The number of separate publishing units amounts to about 2750 (about
88% of the figure stated in the analysis by place).
Unfortunately no firm
conclusions can be drawn from these figures.
This graph omits the 29 incunabula and 12 manuscripts listed in what has
so far been transcribed from 1691. The average number of publications from each
decade is 143. We might have expected the earliest years of the Sixteenth
Century
to have been thinly represented; even so, the extraordinarily pronounced
peak in the graph in the first three decades of the Seventeenth Century must
signify something, allowing of course for time lag between publication and
arrival in the University Library - very possibly there was a spate of
acquisition around this period.
It is known that, around 1630, the University was seeking funding for
the library specifically, although the histories of the University
suggest that, in the event, the library did not do too well from the
fund-raising, even if the University’s buildings greatly improved.
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| The closer we approach 1691, the more accurately the figures must
reflect something about the acquisition rates for the later decades
(which are on the face of it, rather low) even though the 1660s, 70s and
80s could obviously have been the time at which a lot of the earlier
books were also acquired. However, if such were the case, it is not what one
would expect - all libraries must be assumed to have sought to acquire
newly published books whenever possible. It will be important to see how
the purchasing power of the Library fluctuated in the period in
question. |
Pages maintained by:
Robert MacLean
Specific enquiries relating
to content should be sent to:
Stephen Rawles
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