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May. 24th, 2017 09:36 pmOn Sunday I went to the last of a series of conservation workshops I've been participating in as a volunteer. We've been evaluating and stabilizing the condition of a very diverse collection of historical medical texts.
My last book of the day - my last book of the workshop series! - was a frankenbook. I'd been working on a section of very fragile books packed in tight together all day. Some of them were missing covers and had their spines broken. Some of them were pamphlet bound to begin with, with paper covers barely to not at all heavier than their textblock pages. I'd found some interesting stuff. A textbook of psychiatristry from Turkey from the late 1930s, autographed by the author. The papers presented at the first conference of Geographical Medicine in Geneva (in French, German, and English).
But the last book... I thought at first it was another pamphlet bound medical text from the 1880s. A number of publishers sold these cheaply, largely through mail order, in the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th. They're very flimsy and the type is cramped - they often don't even have a proper title page. Instead they'll have the title and author and publisher given on the upper half of a page, with the start of the preface underneath for the second half of the page. There's always multiple pages of advertisements. Originally they sold for five cents each: if you wanted, say, a solid cloth binding with stitches instead of staples, you'd need to pay more in the neighborhood of a dollar fifty, and it went up from there if you wanted leather or what have you.
It wasn't until I got it back to the table and (very very carefully) opened it up that I realized it wasn't one cheap pamphlet bound medical text - it was six! Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get those pages flush, and had even made a spine to cover over the six spines bound together.
People who study manuscripts call that kind of thing a 'miscellany'. They're very common in Medieval and even Early Modern books - people would bind together a group of short works that interested them into a size of book that they felt was 'reasonable', that was an aesthetically appealing size and shape. They become less common the closer you move to the present, and I'd actually never seen one from the 1880s before.
I wonder why the person who went to all that trouble did it? It was a very odd assortment of texts. They ranged from 1875 to 1883. There was one that was a surgical manual, and one that was a primer on women's health, and one that was a student's manual of "venereal diseases" and, which seemed most out of place to me, one of the Asylum Reform Society's pamphlets on how to construct and furnish an effective and humane mental hospital. I say it seemed the most out of place to me because the others, including the volume on proctology, were the sort of things a general practitioner might need on a fairly regular basis in the usual course of their practice. It makes sense to me that you might want them all together and easy to hand. But generally, if one does need to choose a suitable site for a new hospital, there's some warning beforehand. It's not the kind of thing life springs on you suddenly and on the regular.
Unfortunately, who ever had put this miscellany together had chosen to bind it with metal wire, which was now rusting, so I marked the book down for As Soon As Possible attention and copied out all the bibliographic data for each book, and recorded the whole as "miscellaneous medical texts."
I have so many questions! I know I'll never get the answers to them, most likely, but I have them, to turn over in my head and contemplate on. Who was the person who put the books together? How did they choose? Did they do that to more texts from their library? What was the reasoning behind their method? What kind of practice did they have? How did the person who donated the books to the academic collection they belonged to come by them? Was it the same person who bound them together? Why in the world did they scratch out the original "5 cents" publisher's price marks and write in in heavy red pencil "100 cents"?
My last book of the day - my last book of the workshop series! - was a frankenbook. I'd been working on a section of very fragile books packed in tight together all day. Some of them were missing covers and had their spines broken. Some of them were pamphlet bound to begin with, with paper covers barely to not at all heavier than their textblock pages. I'd found some interesting stuff. A textbook of psychiatristry from Turkey from the late 1930s, autographed by the author. The papers presented at the first conference of Geographical Medicine in Geneva (in French, German, and English).
But the last book... I thought at first it was another pamphlet bound medical text from the 1880s. A number of publishers sold these cheaply, largely through mail order, in the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th. They're very flimsy and the type is cramped - they often don't even have a proper title page. Instead they'll have the title and author and publisher given on the upper half of a page, with the start of the preface underneath for the second half of the page. There's always multiple pages of advertisements. Originally they sold for five cents each: if you wanted, say, a solid cloth binding with stitches instead of staples, you'd need to pay more in the neighborhood of a dollar fifty, and it went up from there if you wanted leather or what have you.
It wasn't until I got it back to the table and (very very carefully) opened it up that I realized it wasn't one cheap pamphlet bound medical text - it was six! Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get those pages flush, and had even made a spine to cover over the six spines bound together.
People who study manuscripts call that kind of thing a 'miscellany'. They're very common in Medieval and even Early Modern books - people would bind together a group of short works that interested them into a size of book that they felt was 'reasonable', that was an aesthetically appealing size and shape. They become less common the closer you move to the present, and I'd actually never seen one from the 1880s before.
I wonder why the person who went to all that trouble did it? It was a very odd assortment of texts. They ranged from 1875 to 1883. There was one that was a surgical manual, and one that was a primer on women's health, and one that was a student's manual of "venereal diseases" and, which seemed most out of place to me, one of the Asylum Reform Society's pamphlets on how to construct and furnish an effective and humane mental hospital. I say it seemed the most out of place to me because the others, including the volume on proctology, were the sort of things a general practitioner might need on a fairly regular basis in the usual course of their practice. It makes sense to me that you might want them all together and easy to hand. But generally, if one does need to choose a suitable site for a new hospital, there's some warning beforehand. It's not the kind of thing life springs on you suddenly and on the regular.
Unfortunately, who ever had put this miscellany together had chosen to bind it with metal wire, which was now rusting, so I marked the book down for As Soon As Possible attention and copied out all the bibliographic data for each book, and recorded the whole as "miscellaneous medical texts."
I have so many questions! I know I'll never get the answers to them, most likely, but I have them, to turn over in my head and contemplate on. Who was the person who put the books together? How did they choose? Did they do that to more texts from their library? What was the reasoning behind their method? What kind of practice did they have? How did the person who donated the books to the academic collection they belonged to come by them? Was it the same person who bound them together? Why in the world did they scratch out the original "5 cents" publisher's price marks and write in in heavy red pencil "100 cents"?
