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COLLECTOR TO READER: Bern Dibner and History of Science Collections by Roger Gaskell Text of a lecture delivered at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 3 October 2001 Introduction My title is chosen in memory of my father, the bibliographer Philip Gaskell, who died of cancer on the 31st of July this year at the age of 75. I grew up surrounded by printing presses and old books, and when I visited my father at work, it was in the special collections department of Glasgow University Library, or the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. I suppose everyone who loses a parent regrets that he did not fully appreciate him, and learn all they could from him while he was alive. As a schoolboy, who found biology easier than literature, and then a student of biochemistry at university, I did not appreciate the importance of what my father was doing. So I do not claim any special understanding as a result of my upbringing. But I have benefited, as all of us have in the world of books, whether consciously or not, from his enormous contributions to the history of books. He was the first editor of Book Collector from its inception in 1952 and 20 years later published the book for which he is best known, A New Introduction to Bibliography. To quote from the Times obituary: ‘Sooner or later most literary students and historians find that bibliographical information gives crucial insights into the what, why and how of anything from Shakespeare’s coinages to the economics of Victorian advertising. Since its publication in 1972, Philip Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography has been the standard manual and point of reference, explaining in exacting detail just about everything that can be derived from a book short of actually reading it’[1]. In From Writer to Reader, published in 1978, the book from which I have adapted my title, Philip Gaskell demonstrated the use of bibliography in textual criticism. This was followed by his Trinity College Library: the first 150 years (1980). His trilogy, the New Introduction to Bibliography, From Writer to Reader and Trinity College Library thus tell the story of how books are made, how they transmit texts, and how they are organised in a library. My talk is called ‘From Collector to Reader’ because I want to discuss the ways that books are brought together, and made available to readers. I will show that book collecting is integral to the history of science – nowhere more so than in Dibner’s case. In the first part of this essay I will describe Bern Dibner’s career as a collector and his contributions to the history of science, and in the second part I will outline the history of collecting science books. Bern Dibner (1897–1988) Several significant anniversaries in the history of science have been celebrated in the last few years, and these help to place Dibner’s career in the context of the development of the history of science, which he did so much to encourage. We have passed the 75th anniversary of the founding in America of the History of Science Society in 1924; the 50th anniversary of the British Society for the History of Science, founded in 1947; and the 50th anniversary of the founding of the DeGolyer Collection at the University of Oklahoma, which prompted the establishment of one of the first academic departments for the history of science in America [3]. Isis, the leading journal for the history of science, had been founded by George Sarton in Belgium in 1909, and it was to support the journal’s publication that the History of Science Society was begun. The British journal, Annals of Science was founded in 1936. By the middle years of the twentieth century, history of science, on both sides of the Atlantic, had acquired the three essentials for a professional academic discipline: journals, professional societies, and university departments. Bern Dibner’s company, the Burndy Corporation was founded in 1924, the same year as the History of Science Society. He was inspired to start collecting by reading a book about Leonardo da Vinci in 1930 and the Burndy Library was chartered as a non-profit-making educational institution in 1941. This catalogue of dates shows how prescient Dibner was in embracing the history of science and making his books available for study to the fledgling history of science community. The development of history of science into a major university subject has all taken place in the last 50 years. Bern Dibner was a successful engineer and businessman[2]. Arriving with his family in the United States at the age of seven, the youngest of eight children, he attended the Hebrew Technical Institute in Manhattan, a school designed to train immigrant boys to become technicians. He took an electrical maintenance job in the printing industry where workmen’s compensation for an industrial accident gave him enough money to enrol in the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After graduating in 1921 he worked in the electric power industry for only three years before setting up his own business, the Burndy Corporation, in partnership with his brother-in-law, to manufacture connectors for the electrical power supply industry. Six years later, in 1930, Dibner read the book that changed his life, Stuart Chase’s Men and Machines, which listed Leonardo da Vinci’s major scientific achievements and technical inventions. Dibner was astonished and dismayed; he had no idea that engineering and technology were so far advanced in the late fifteenth century. He felt he had been denied an acquaintance with the background to his own field and its development. As he later said, he felt deprived of his own heritage[4]. Nonetheless, he was sceptical of some of the extravagant claims being made for Leonardo as an inventor and set out to read everything he could about Leonardo and his contributions. This was the start of Dibner’s collecting and his deep commitment to the history of science. Dibner was an avid student. He travelled in Europe to study the history of science. Later he enrolled as a special student at Columbia University, where he was taught history of science by Frederick D. Barry, Carl Boyer and Edward Rosen. He also learnt some Latin[5]. Bern Dibner was discovering the heritage he had been denied, and he was collecting books under the guidance of knowledgeable book dealers in Europe and the United States, whose contributions Dibner was always generous in acknowledging. Bern Dibner’s collections Bern Dibner’s growing collection of books and manuscripts was first housed in metal boxes in his office in the factory, but books gradually spilled out into bookcases in the offices of colleagues and in the corridors. When the plant moved to an eleven acre site in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1951, collections were housed in conference rooms called the Newton Room, the Einstein Room, the Galileo Room and the Leonardo Room. By this time the collection was known as the Burndy Library and was chartered as an educational institution in 1941. It was time to separate it from the engineering business, and, in 1964, a freestanding building was erected to house the 25,000 volumes then in the collection[6]. The Burndy Library building was a light and airy construction of great charm and modest elegance designed by a local architect, Robert Rogus of the Stamford, Connecticut firm of Sherwood, Mills and Smith[7]. It was a modernist building, speaking the language of modern humanism, very different from the faux-Renaissance, faux-Louis XV; faux-baronial, or faux-what-you-will usually favoured, if you’ll forgive my saying so, by American collectors. It looked forward, not back and perfectly suited Dibner’s vision of historical research in the service of the modern world; not an antiquarian’s shrine, but a place in which to study and understand the contributions of scientists and engineers towards, as he saw it, the creation of a better world. Beginning in 1945 the library published an annual monograph, of which were written by Dibner himself. Several of these were also published commercially[8]. The best known of Dibner’s works, is The Heralds of Science, first published in 1955 and reprinted in 1980, a scholarly and lucidly annotated catalogue showing the importance of 200 seminal works in the biological and physical sciences[9]. Even more important than Dibner’s own contributions to the literature of the history of science, Dibner’s energy and generosity were of enormous importance in the establishment of the history of science as an academic discipline. He endowed several chairs and curatorships, including one at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the building of the Bern Dibner library at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. He led the drive to secure the financial future of Isis, every issue of which carries a modest notice that, since 1984, its publication has been supported in part by an endowment from the Dibner Fund[10]. The culmination of his efforts on behalf of the history of science was the founding of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology on the MIT campus in Cambridge. Dibner helped to plan the institute and took part in the inaugural meeting on 6 December 1987. He spoke with personal satisfaction of having been able to witness the growth of the history of science as a discipline from its infancy to its present vitality[11]. Above all, Dibner was a truly great book collector. The scope of his collecting was immense. Within the context of a very large library, he gathered together over 320 incunables (one of the largest collection of scientific incunables anywhere), the collection of seminal works that is described in Heralds of Science, large quantities of important manuscript material, and portraits and prints. Moreover he secured, by purchase and as gifts, the libraries of a number of major scientists. These included over two hundred books from Alessandro Volta’s library and 250 volumes and hundreds of pamphlets from the library of the English physicist John Tyndall [fFigures 1 to3]. Dibner was also able to acquire the superb library and offprint collection of the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra (1860–1940), which he donated to Brandeis University, together with a major Leonardo da Vinci collection. He also made substantial contributions of books to Harvard, Yale, and other universities. Ten thousand volumes of printed books and all the manuscripts, the cream of the collection housed at the Burndy Library in Norwalk, Connecticut, came to the Smithsonian Institution in 1976.. The printed books include the 320 title incunable collection and all 200 ‘Heralds’. These books form the foundation of the Dibner Library for the History of Science and Technology, located in the National Museum of American History. After the departure of the Smithsonian books, Bern Dibner immediately set about replacing as many of these books as possible, adding many ancillary works. As an electrical engineer, Dibner was especially interested in the history of electricity and magnetism, and his collection of 13,000 volumes in this area, mostly printed before1900, is one of the largest of its kind. The Burndy Library is now the research collection of the Dibner Institute in Cambridge and now includes the Babson Newton collection, on deposit from Babson College, and the Volterra collection transferred from Brandeis. The only sad thing is that the lovely Burndy Library building in Norwalk was torn down after the site was sold to an office equipment company. In recognition of Bern Dibner’s support for the profession and for the foundation of two great research libraries, the History of Science Society awarded him its Sarton Medal in 1976. It bears the inscription: ‘To Foster the Study of the History of Science’[12]. Dibner did this with seriousness; he was no mere dilettante, but an amateur in the best sense of the word. His historical research was inspired by his book collecting, and it was through books that he made friends with many leading figures in the history of science, regularly lending rare books to scholars for their private use. Books and manuscripts inspired him to make a deep and lasting contribution to the study of the history of science. Collectors of scientific books The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology is a rich resource for studying the history of collecting science books. This is greatly helped by the excellent catalogue, available on-line, which includes extensive provenance notes[13]. A keyword search for the terms ‘former owner’ throws up 1024 records for which provenance information has been recorded[14] – but what of the many thousand more books in the collection in which former generations have not recorded their ownership, or the marks of ownership have not yet been deciphered and recorded? Even if former owners leave no marks in their books, the content of their libraries is sometimes known from catalogues prepared for personal use, probate valuations, or auction or bookseller’s catalogues. A former librarian of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, the late and much missed Ellen Wells, published a pioneering bibliography of secondary sources relating to scientist’s libraries in 1983. Wells unearthed catalogues and other material relating to 880 scientists libraries; more recent research has added many more[15]. From the Renaissance to the close of the eighteenth century, science was the province of all educated men and women [figure 4]. Anyone building a private library could be expected to include what we would now classify as scientific books. To a large extent this was a consequence of the close alliance between natural science and the collecting of cabinets of curiosity, which demonstrated the wealth, intellectual attainments and connoisseurship of the owner. A scholar, a doctor, or a natural philosopher on the other hand might have built up a library for his own use, because he needed to have the books to study. There was probably no public or university library, which had all the books he wanted to work on, particularly the most recently published. Just as any academic does today he wanted to have the books he was using readily at hand. Isaac Newton (1642-1726) was typical of the scholar collector, a user books, not a bibliophile. As a young man he wrote his name in his books, but he soon gave this up. He never had a book-plate engraved, or made a catalogue of his books, or took any trouble over their arrangement. As he matured Newton did not feel the need to possessively stake out his ownership of his books by writing his name in them. However we can detect a rather juvenile self-centredness in the way he always turned down the pages in other people’s books to where his name was mentioned[16]. This dog-earing to mark a specific place on a page was a habit of Newton’s throughout his life and surprisingly does not seem to have been a common practice, and may even have been unique to Newton. Out of the 862 volumes of Newton’s books in Trinity College, Cambridge, 274 have some pages turned down, or have creases where pages have been turned down in the past. Newton found that it is possible to turn down either the top or bottom of a page so that the corner can be brought to point to any word on the page. Otherwise Newton annotated his books to only a limited extent, preferring to make his notes on separate sheets of paper. Nevertheless the dog-ears are a fascinating insight into Newton’s reading, showing the places he wanted to get back to quickly. This is an unusual, but telling, example of the ways that the physical evidence of a book’ use has been preserved. Newton’s contemporary, John Evelyn (1620-1706), was also a user of books. He read his books and made detailed notes in the margins from which it is clear that he read some of them over several times, and he was an author in his own right. But unlike the solitary and reclusive Newton, Evelyn was a country gentleman, and his library, like his garden at Sayes Court, was part of his self-image, something to be proudly shown to his visitors. He had his books finely bound – some in London, some in Paris – and decorated in gilt with his initials and arms on the spines and sides, while Newton’s books are mostly in the plain sheepskin or calf bindings, without decoration, as they would have come from the booksellers. In Newton and Evelyn, we see two equally serious intellectual users of books, but their libraries served different social functions. The irony is that when Newton’s library was sold after his death, it was bought not for its intellectual content, but to confer gentlemanly status on its new owner. Newton’s library was purchased by a rather unsavoury character, John Huggins, warden of the Fleet prison – London’s debtor’s prison – , who was setting up his son as a country clergyman at Chinnor, near Oxford. By buying the living and presenting it to his son, and then buying Newton’s library, he was buying respectability for his son, something that he could not achieve for himself. Newton’s ownership of the books was quite forgotten until some of them turned up at an auction in 1920 and the provenance was subsequently demonstrated by Heinrich Zeitlinger, working for the book dealer Henry Sotheran in London. In 1927, the rest of Newton’s library, containing most of the scientific books, was tracked down in the library of a house in Gloucestershire and is now in Trinity College, Cambridge. The 1920 sale is the source of the individual volumes found in many institutional and private collections, and the Dibner Library has one, Philippe de La Hire’s astronomical tables, published in 1687, the year Newton’s Principia was published (there is no dog-earing in this copy). Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was much more of a book collector than Newton or Evelyn. By characterising him as such, I mean that he enjoyed the chase, and he bought books that interested him but that he was not necessarily going to use. Hardly a day went by when he did not record in his diary the purchase of a book at auction, from a bookseller, or from the many bookstalls in Moorfields. In 1693 Hooke recorded in his diary ‘I saw neer 100 of Mr Boyle’s high Dutch German Chymicall books ly exposed in Moorfields on the railes’, and a couple of days later he bought two of them[17]. I’m not quite sure what ‘railes’ mean here, presumably some kind of market stall: it conjures up a vision of the Parisian bouquinistes, who still line the banks of the Seine selling old books, prints and postcards. Hooke also bought at auction, for example his copy of a German edition of Vitruvius (figures 5 and 6). Hooke had other editions of Vitruvius and I think this reveals his book-collecting instincts, wanting to own multiple editions of an important book. Hooke was a practicing architect, so Vitruvius would have held a particular significance for him. Perhaps because so few of Hooke’s buildings survive, his career as an architect has been neglected in comparison with his standing as a natural philosopher, but his books remind us that natural science was only a part of his professional life. Hooke collated his books and sometimes returned them for imperfections, and he was interested not just in contemporary natural science but in earlier works as well. He owned the second edition of Copernicus, Basle 1566 and possibly the first edition of 1543 as well, though the 1703 auction catalogue lists only the second. He had a couple of incunables – at least: it is not clear what the entry in the sale catalogue ‘Caxton (Will.) Collections, 1490’ refers to[18]. On the other hand, another book owned and heavily used by Hooke, Experiments, notes &c. (1675) [figure 7], he did not buy. Rather, it was given to him by the author, Robert Boyle, Hooke has used the endpapers to remind himself of various passages in the separate tracts [figure 8], noting, for example, in a treatise on ‘Tastes’ Boyle’s description of an excellent raspberry wine, which according to the text on page 29 we learn kept its specific taste for two or three years. Books were frequently used as gifts, and the exchange of books was an important aspect of early modern book culture. The giving of books was analogous to the very common practice of giving away a portrait of oneself. And indeed, the two were sometimes combined, as in the case of a copy of one of Tycho Brahe’s books in the Dibner Library which has Brahe’s portrait stamped on the upper cover and must have been a presentation copy[19]. Newton’s teacher Isaac Barrow gave away eighty copies of his Geometrical and Optical lectures[20], and for John Evelyn, the main purpose of publication was to have books to give away[21]. Such gifts helped to locate authors in their social and intellectual or scientific networks and played an important part in building up and maintaining these networks. Presentation copies were often bound to a higher standard or in a more distinctive style than copies offered for sale ready-bound by the booksellers,. Lavish gilt bindings would have been commissioned where the donor was using them to solicit patronage or support. Sometimes the expense of the binding is evident from the better material used, goatskin (‘morocco’) instead of calf or sheepskin, or in the amount of gilding, but may be subtler. For example the copies of his own works that Boyle presented to the Royal Society are in quite simple calf bindings but have gilt edges. Gilt edges on a seventeenth century book should always alert one to the possibility that it was a presentation copy. An author might gain the respect of someone of higher standing who might advance their career or provide financial support. Patrons also might want to advertise their intellectual interests and magnanimity. Thus Ferdinando II and Leopoldo de Medici supported the experiments the Accademia del Cimento and the printing of the Saggi de naturali esperienze (1666). It was printed for presentation only, not sold through the booksellers, and the Medici drew up lists of rulers, aristocrats and famous scholars to whom copies were presented.[22]. Similarly, Louis XVI was the patron of the French Acadèmie Royale des Sciences, and its early publications were printed as gift books. In the famous frontispiece to one of them [figure 9] the King is inspecting the Academy in the company of his finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert. The event is entirely fictitious, but the picture celebrates the King’s interest and solicited his continued financial support. These publications of the French Academy often had the bindings stamped with the Royal arms on the sides in gilt [figure 10], confirming that they were bound for presentation. In the eighteenth century, scientists continued to collect books for their own use and increasingly, as Hooke had begun to do in the seventeenth century, scientists systematically collected books by earlier scientists which provided the historical background to their research. In Hooke’s case, I think it was more antiquarianism than a real interest in history, and it was the same for the extraordinary Philadelphia collector James Logan (1674-1751). In 1709, Logan was the first person in America to own a copy of the first edition of Newton’s Principia, and he later boasted that he had all three editions of the Principia, 1687, 1713 and 1726[23]. A real interest in history is seen in Lavoisier’s collecting, for he used his books to write historical prefaces in some of his own works. (Dibner was particularly proud of owning Lavoisier’s copy of the Latin edition of Boyle’s work on colours, London 1665[24].) Between the 1780’s and the 1830’s science became more formally divided up into separate disciplines, and scientists with historical interests naturally collected in their own areas of research. As part of the process of specialisation, new disciplinary histories were needed, identifying founding fathers, fundamental discoveries and so on, and the scientist-historians needed to collect the early literature in their subject. For example Joseph Priestley, who wrote histories of electricity and chemistry, and J.J. de Lalande, who wrote histories of astronomy, both had large libraries[25]. Disciplinary histories continued to be written, but in the 1830s and ’40s a group of collector-historians emerged who were collecting books and writing a new kind of history in what has been called the ‘first phase of the history of science in England’[26]. This new history was based on bibliographical and archival work. For the first time, the personalities of the scientists and the history of their publications, not just what the books contained, became the subject of research. The collectors and historians involved were a fairly closely-knit group including George Peacock, Charles Babbage, James Orchard Halliwell, Augustus de Morgan, Francis Baily and Stephen Peter Rigaud. Augustus De Morgan, whose 1847 annotated bibliography of arithmetical books is still a standard reference, has in its preface this splendid call to arms for collectors and librarians: ‘The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the places of more important bodies[27].’ The collector James Orchard Halliwell founded the Historical Society for Science in 1840, the first British society for the history of science – a hundred years too early. It fizzled out in 1846, not helped by the revelation that the stunning collection of scientific manuscripts assembled by Halliwell included mediaeval manuscripts dismembered and stolen from Trinity College, Cambridge. (Some of them are still in the British Museum because Halliwell’s lawyers and the lawyers acting for Trinity fell out, and Halliwell was never brought to trial.) It is odd that two of the pioneers of history of science, both great book collectors, were also great book thieves, Halliwell and his contemporary Guglielmo Libri. Most important of the historical pioneers were Francis Baily (1774-1844) and his exact contemporary Stephen Peter Rigaud (1774-1839). Baily – an astronomer remembered for ‘Baily’s beads’ – made a study of Flamsteed’s correspondence concerning the publication of his Historia coelestis in 1712, one of the most fascinating and revealing episodes in scientific publishing. Baily’s An account of the Revd. John Flamsteed was published in 1835 with a supplement in 1837. In his meticulous use of sources, Bailey was a pioneer of the historical method applied to the history of science, and for the first time, he shed light on the personal relations of scientists in the seventeenth century[28]. Bailey’s library was sold at Sotheby’s in 1845. Stephen Peter Rigaud was professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford and Savillian professor of astronomy. In 1838, he published his Historical essay on the first publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia, a detailed account of the conception, composition, printing, publication and reception and subsequent revision of the Principia. This is the first essay in the historical bibliography of a scientific book. Like Bailey, Rigaud sought out manuscript sources, including the Macclesfield correspondence – which he later published – and the records of the Royal Society[29]. After his death in 1839, Rigaud’s library was purchased by the Radcliffe trustees, the governing body of the Radcliffe Observatory, recognising its importance not only as a great collection of early books – Copernicus, a presentation copy of Gilbert, and so on – but also as the library of a working scientist [figures 11 and 12]. Somewhere along the line this vision was lost, and when the Radcliffe Observatory was moved to South Africa (for the clearer skies) in the 1930’s, the library was sold. The sale at Sotheby’s in 1935 included Edmund Halley’s annotated copy of the 1712 Historia coelestis – even though the Bodleian Library had already had a chance to pick over the collection[30]. The collecting activities of three more recent historians of science, Pierre Duhem, J.L.E. Dreyer and Charles Singer, can also be traced in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology [figures 13 to 16]. Now considered to stand among the founders of the modern history of science, they were working before the professionalisation of the discipline, and all were working scientists, not full time historians. Indeed all the collectors I have mentioned, apart from the Renaissance collector Jacques August de Thou, were working scientists, or scientist-historians, whose work developed the history of science from antiquarianism, through disciplinary history, to the modern history of science. However, my survey is unbalanced because I have concentrated on a few collectors who we now regard primarily as scientists working in the physical, rather than the biological or medical sciences. A much bigger category of science collector is the doctor collector: Ellen Wells identified 640 of her 880 scientists—three quarters—as physicians. Medical books were among the first categories of books to be provided with bibliographies. There were printed book lists as early as the late fifteenth century and these lists provided a framework for collecting. These early book lists include what we would now call physical science, and doctor-collectors have generally included physical sciences in their libraries. The tradition of the physician-collector is a long one, and it seems that the urge to collect books in all subjects, and art and other objects as well, has been stronger among physicians than perhaps any other profession. But there have been changes in the late twentieth century, which I will just mention very briefly. Perhaps the last of the great physician collectors was Sir William Osler, who was enormously influential in popularising book collecting. Though interested primarily in medical texts , he also collected books on the physical sciences and was responsible for identifying a canon of the key works in all the sciences that a collector should aspire to own. This took the form of a ‘bibliotheca prima’, a list of primary works, which is the first section of the catalogue of his library, published under the title of Bibliotheca Osleriana in 1929, ten years after his death in 1919. A more refined list of canonical works was published in 1934, the catalogue of the Exhibition of first editions of epochal achievements in the history of science, mounted by another physician-collector, Herbert McLean Evans at the University of California at Berkeley. Unlike Osler’s ‘bibliotheca prima’, which cites a range of titles by each author, the 1934 Evans List selects just one, the number of authors being just over a hundred in both cases. The Evans List strongly influenced Bern Dibner in selecting his Heralds of Science in 1955, and indeed Dibner bought quite a number of books formerly owned by Evans, of which 12 are ‘Heralds’. Dibner’s Heralds was followed by the Grolier Club exhibition of ‘One hundred books famous in science’, curated by Harrison D. Horblit in 1958, and a catalogue was published in 1964. These lists concentrated attention on a small number of books and prices began to rise much faster than the general inflation in rare book prices. In this process, the ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’ exhibition, held in 1963, and the 1967 book with the same title (known as ‘PMM’), was especially influential[31]. Osler’s legacy then, to which Dibner and Horblit unwittingly contributed, has been a rise in the popularity of science collecting, which has now overtaken medical collecting financially[32]. A new generation of collectors has emerged whose collections are focused on the great books. Typically they will first buy the major books in the canon established by Dibner, Horblit and ‘PMM’ and only collect the supporting literature sparingly. It is a top down approach, very different from Dibner’s much more broadly based collecting, in which the ‘Heralds’ are the keystones that keep the whole structure standing. Dibner collected books to use, because he wanted to know the history, first of his own discipline of engineering, then, as his interests deepened, of science in general. He was therefore a user of books, and I place him in the same category as the scientist-collectors and scientist-historian-collectors who I have been discussing. As an historian, he was a user of books, so I think he was different from Osler, Evans and Horblit, who were pure collectors, however knowledgeable and sophisticated. His collections quickly grew so large that he himself could not use them all, but he made sure they were available for use by others. Conclusion It is clear from these examples that there are a number of different, often overlapping, categories of owners of science books: the bibliophile, the antiquarian, the intellectual, the working scientist, the historian, the patron, and the recipient of a gift. And each of these kinds of owner might use their books in one or more ways: for demonstrating their wealth, taste, or connections; for reading and studying professionally; and/or for personal improvement or enjoyment. Readers leave evidence of how they have used their books, and as I have suggested, such evidence consists of more than annotations. The binding material and decoration, the style of a bookplate, the wording of a manuscript ex-libris, dog-ears and thumb marks all tell their stories. And it may be just as interesting to observe that a reader never opened a book, or never got beyond the first chapter. I have also tried shown how collections of early science books have come into existence and the role of the private collectors of various kinds who have laid the foundations on which academic libraries have built. Readers in these academic libraries are the new users of the books. They are working with physical objects which, though primarily carriers of texts, also contain a large amount of historical information, which can be used in the interpretation of those texts. Studying books as physical objects can reveal much about the history of their production, their intended audience and their actual use. Every single copy adds something to this information. It is not easy to learn how to ‘read’ the non-textual information, to know the meaning of typography, decoration, illustration, paper, binding, and evidence of use (or non-use) left by readers. In many areas, the dictionaries and grammars of this kind of reading have not yet been written. This approach to books is a part of what has become known as the history of the book, still a very young discipline, much younger than the history of science. Most books are studied by historians for their texts alone but my contention is that the historian who thinks he or she can deal with the intellectual content of a work without engaging with the physical book is a bad historian. The study of old books is too important to be left to bibliographers and librarians (let alone booksellers). By working in a collection such as the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, the attentive researcher can learn to interpret the whole book. Bern Dibner’s legacy is to have gathered together books whose former ownership and use can be studied as an adjunct to reading their texts. A collector himself, he has conveyed these books from collector to reader. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Ron Brashear for inviting me to participate in the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Dibner Library and for asking me to deliver the lecture on which this essay is based. I am most grateful to Christine Ruggere for a number of discussions while I was planning the lecture, and for her help in giving the talk its final shape. In revising the text for publication I have relied heavily on valuable suggestions made by Sara Schechner to whom I am greatly indebted. NOTES [1] The Times,
Monday 13 August 2001, p. 15; Philip Gaskell A new introduction to
bibliography (Oxford 1972, reprinted with corrections 1974).
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