One of my favorite aspects of the data work I do at DS as the Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow is when I am able to witness connections between manuscripts that haven’t been observed before. This has been particularly common while I have been working on our project of uploading our institutional manuscript records into Wikidata. For this blog post, I decided to investigate further some of the connections I’ve found, in the hopes that other institutions, collectors, and manuscript thinkers might recognize some names and add more manuscripts to our network of former owners.
The folks that I’m discussing below are all a part of a web of buyers and sellers who were exchanging manuscripts; collectors buying from and selling to dealers, who likewise buy from and sell to collectors. I observed these connections while perusing a dataset of all of the people included in the institutional records I have uploaded into Wikidata; this dataset, which we pulled down via this SPARQL query, enabled me to compare provenance (ownership history!) of almost 3,000 manuscripts at the drop of a hat. Almost all of the manuscripts and sales that I note below have been included in the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (many added by Laura Cleaver and her team as part of their research into the manuscript trade c. 1900-1945), but here I take the SDBM and Wikidata/DS data a step further by actually drawing the lines between these men and the manuscripts they interacted with. I was particularly interested in looking at manuscripts in different collections that share some aspect of provenance and the search was fruitful!
While uploading and reviewing manuscript records in Wikidata, I came across a group of collectors and booksellers with significant connections that may or may not have been observed before. Laura Cleaver has written about the relationships between several of these men in her phenomenal 2023 article, “George D. Smith (1870–1920), Bernard Alfred Quaritch (1871–1913), and the Trade in Medieval European Manuscripts in the United States ca. 1890–1920,” and this article provided some of the context that I’ve been able to add to the connections I’ve uncovered between the various characters I will discuss below. I hope that this blog post will add some texture to our understanding of the movement of medieval manuscripts in North America at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Cleaver’s research has provided significant texture to our understanding of the fact that premodern European manuscripts in American collections were, for the most part, imported into the U.S. within the last 150 years, and many of these manuscripts moved among a relatively small number of collectors and dealers. George D. Smith stands at the center of a network of collectors and booksellers active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Cleaver discusses, Smith rose to prominence as a bookseller in New York during this period. One notable episode involves the sale of a group of manuscripts originally owned by Henry William Poor, a New York City banker who experienced a financial disaster between 1908 and 1909. In 1908, Poor sold Grolier MS 11 to Smith, and the following year, he sold Smith two additional manuscripts: Huntington Museum (HM) 1048 and HM 1052. In 1909, Smith then sold these latter two manuscripts to Henry E. Huntington (1850–1927), a major collector and railroad magnate whose acquisitions would ultimately form the foundation of the Huntington Library’s collections. According to Cleaver, these two Huntington manuscripts—HM 1048, and HM 1052—and I contend Grolier MS 11 and HM 1155 (Poor to Smith in 1909, acquired by Huntington at an unknown date) as well, were part of a larger group of twenty-one manuscripts Poor sold during his financial crisis, with Smith serving as a key intermediary in their transfer to major institutional collections (Cleaver, 2023, p. 83).
HM 1048, HM 1052, and Grolier MS 11 mark only the beginning of the network of manuscript transactions I have uncovered through my work on institutional data at Digital Scriptorium. Another pair of manuscripts now in the Huntington Library—HM 1081 and HM 1248—were sold to Smith in 1918 by the St. Louis businessman and manuscript collector William Keeney Bixby (1857-1931). Smith quickly resold both manuscripts to Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), ensuring their eventual inclusion in the Huntington Library’s collections after Huntington’s death. An additional four manuscripts also moved through the same channels (Bixby to Smith to Huntington) in August of 1918: HM 884, 1131, 1200, and 1162.
The connection between Bixby and Smith also brings in another key figure in this network: Gabriel Wells (1861–1915), a New York bookseller who maintained a reciprocal professional relationship with Smith. The two frequently exchanged manuscripts, with Smith selling Grolier MS 17 to Wells, and Wells selling Ricketts 63 to Smith. Ricketts 63 had previously been owned by Bixby, from whom Wells acquired it before passing it on to Smith. Smith later sold the manuscript to Coella Lindsay Ricketts (1859–1941), a Chicago-based illuminator and designer whose personal collection now forms a significant part of the holdings of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
Identifying all of this provenance in DS allowed me to add details to the Wikidata entries for each of these collectors and booksellers. Pictured below are the additions I made in Henry William Poor’s Wikidata entry based on the connections I’ve outlined above:
There is still significant work to be done, even on these entries. For example, I’m still considering how best to represent the sale of a manuscript in Wikidata, especially with consideration paid to the person or firm who sold the manuscript. Does this really qualify as “ownership,” or would it be more appropriate to classify the seller’s interaction with the manuscript under different terms? I’m not finding a Wikidata property that I feel represents this type of relationship clearly, and would certainly be interested to hear thoughts from those reading this! (Watch this space for more discussion of this topic.)
It’s fascinating and useful for book historians to be able to reconstruct historical collections, and the use of structured data from DS and Wikidata is making this process somewhat easier. Disparate institutional collections now hold manuscripts that were, at one time, in the hands of the same collector(s); it’s equally useful to be able to see that certain groups of manuscripts, such as HM 1048 and HM 1052, have travelled together for quite some time. The more we engage with large-scale datasets, the more possibilities there are for uncovering the movement of manuscripts and the relationships between the people who have owned them over the years.
(Thank you to Laura Cleaver for her review and helpful comments on this blog post!)
References
Cleaver, Laura. “George D. Smith (1870–1920), Bernard Alfred Quaritch (1871–1913), and the Trade in Medieval European Manuscripts in the United States ca. 1890–1920.” Manuscript Studies 8, no. 1 (2023): 61–94. doi:10.1353/mns.2023.0002
See also Magnusson, Danielle, and Laura Cleaver. The Trade in Rare Books and Manuscripts between Britain and America, c. 1890-1929. Cambridge, United Kingdom; Cambridge University Press, 2022.