In the fall of 2011 I asked the administrators of the
English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) if they could provide me with a list of all
the records in their database which reported holdings only at the University of
Pennsylvania –
i.e. “unique to Penn”
imprints. The ESTC has as its purview all printed material produced in the
British Empire or in the English language from the dawn of printing to 1800.
[1]
The ESTC sent me back a list of 313 record numbers which they identified as
having a holdings location only at the University of Pennsylvania. On and off
over the intervening time, I’ve gone through the list, matching record numbers
with titles and shelf locations and examining some of the records more closely.
Though ESTC imprint data has been collected and corrected by
experts over many decades, I was well aware of the problems and possible errors
inherent in such a dataset. To that end I looked carefully at the records and,
in many cases, the physical books themselves to determine which were likely to
be actually unique holdings.
Of the 313 imprints listed by the ESTC as existing only at
Penn, I found clear evidence that 51 were also held by other libraries. A
variety of factors explain these errors, some of which are instructive for
users of the ESTC at large. In the majority of the cases simple cataloging
aberrations caused mis-reporting.
[2]
Others were so-called “Wing Ghosts” i.e. listings in
D.G. Wing’s bibliography that
could not be identified in retrospect.
[3] In some cases, Penn had cataloged volume
parts of a series individually creating “unique” records where entries for the
series as a whole existed elsewhere.
[4]
In other cases, as with the 1783 false London imprint
Memorie sulla Bastiglia del celebre Sig. Linguet scritte,
libraries outside the ESTC’s sweep proved to have relevant holdings.
[5]
Examining the list of 262 remaining “unique” imprints with an eye towards
understanding their survival in only one known institutional location is a larger project but I
thought I would introduce the findings in aggregate first.
Chronology:
The earliest “unique” title found was printed in 1555 – a London
second edition of a translation of Erasmus. This is the only 16th century
imprint on the list and has unfortunately been missing from the library for
some time.
[6]
Taking the other 262 imprints a clear chronological theme
emerges, representative of larger trends in book production. Of these, 26 date from
the 17th century and 236 from the 18th century.
 |
| Chart showing number of "unique" ESTC imprints held by Penn grouped by five year intervals |
Above you can see the near exponential increase of “unique”
holdings by year of publication. Accordingly, the 5-year period 1795-1800
claims the highest number of imprints on the “unique” list with 29.
Geography:
As one might expect London dominates the list by printing
location. Given Penn’s collecting history however, there are also a number of
western hemisphere imprints represented. One of my early finds from the list
was a
unique 1719 Jamaica imprint, which is the oldest example of Caribbean book
printing extant in the Americas. Below is a list of the 262 "unique" imprints by place of printing. Detailed map
here.
London: 155.
Elsewhere in England: 13. This includes two from Wolverhampton and one each from Reading, Rochester, Shrewsbury, Southampton,
Tunbridge, Manchester, Newcastle, Lincoln, Eaton, Canterbury, and Bristol.
Ireland: 30 from Dublin, 1 from Armagh, and 1 from Belfast
Scotland: 6 from Edinburgh and 5 from Glasgow
The Continent: 3. One each from Amsterdam, the Hague,
and Mainz as well as one false Florence imprint (likely London).
Americas:
Caribbean: 3. Two from Kingston, Jamaica and one from Antigua.
North America: 43
Philadelphia: 31, Boston: 3, as well as nine from elsewhere in the 13 colonies including one each from Lancaster, Pa.,Whitehall,
Pa.,York, Pa., Peacham, Vt, Hudson, Ny., Hagerstown, Md., Exeter, N.H.,
Baltimore, Md., and Annapolis, Md.
Availability:
While ECCO, EEBO, and Digital Evans contain a wealth of digitized content, only a small fraction (a little over 8%) of the items on the Penn "unique" list are
available in online databases. This number would of course change significantly
if one were interested in any edition of a text rather than the specific
imprint held here.
Collections data:
Items like those identified here as “unique” to Penn don’t
come around every day. In fact, a large number of these “unique” items come
from collections carefully developed over many years by individuals and
institutions around particular themes. The ESTC data do a nice job reinforcing the
importance of focused and deep collecting. Within the data, the collection that
really shines through is Penn’s excellent
Singer-Mendenhall collection of English fiction to 1820. A whopping 32 of the imprints, all novels, come from this
collection, began in the 1920s by Godfrey Singer, a Penn student. Other focused collections represented in the "unique" list are the
Horace Howard Furness Collection, with nine imprints, nine also from the Curtis Publishing Company Collection of Franklin Imprints,
seven from the Teerink Swift collection.
[7],
four from the Edwin Forrest Library Collection, three from the
Yarnall Library
and three held at the Biddle Law Library. Interestingly, an additional four “unique”
items come from an artificial collection we call “Founders” indicating books
that were present in the
University of Pennsylvania library before 1829. Contrary
to the focused collecting of rare material made by later collectors, the four
“unique” books imprints in this collection were purchased for mundane use by
the students of the early University and include a (likely pirated)
1762 Dublin reprint of Hume's multi-volume history of England. These texts, which were likely
readily available at the time have not survived elsewhere likely thanks to
years of library weeding and the purchasing of the latest available editions.
The Penn 100:
At the very bottom of the page I have provided a link to the spreadsheet containing
all 262 “unique” items I identified, but I wanted to go further to locate those
works whose integral text exists nowhere but Penn. After filtering out
translations where foreign language versions exist, books with other
extant editions, and any sort of reprinting, I was left with just 100 items and
a list spanning 1659-1800, only 14 of which have digital surrogates.
These truly unique texts might be some of the most fruitful to examine in
detail in the future:
What might we say about survival and the circulation of print publication
based on this group? Surprisingly only 13 of these 100 are single sheet
broadsides. Given how ephemeral these publications are I expected them to
dominate the list of wholly unique items. Likewise, only four of the 100 are
related directly to the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, many of the
publications on the list are substantial works. Foremost amongst these, and the
clear leader on the list, are the 23 novels dating from 1765 to 1797 which do
not appear in any known institutional collection. Take for instance the 1787
novel
Lord Winworth; or, the memoirs of an heir, the copy surviving at Penn is noted as the second edition but
though an
advertisement survives announcing the publication of the first
edition, no copy seems to exist. Further proof that distribution and reprinting
of texts doesn’t necessarily lead to their survival. Going forward, I’m eager
to see the
Early Novels Database project and its students shed some more light
on these rare novels.
Also of interest on the list are the 10 imprints which are
textbooks, guides, or conduct manuals. These include such scintillating titles
as “An essay on a method of finding the solid contents of packages, by an easy
addition of three numbers only.” Textbooks and school manuals were commonly
used by the hundreds but due to the nature of their use, relatively few have
survived to this day. Not all of these 100, though printed in
British-controlled areas, were printed in English. In addition to a few
Pennsylvania German imprints, perhaps my favorite in this category is the
unique 1795
Le Chansonnier républicain a
book of French revolutionary songs printed in Philadelphia for the émigré
community.
Any of these “unique” works would make an excellent research
project for a curious student or scholar and I hope providing these lists helps
launch a conversation about the nature of library collecting and the place of
bibliographic data in print history.
[For the complete list of all 313 imprints listed as "unique" to Penn by the ESTC with my notes and comments see CSV file
here (filter by the field "Likely Unique" to see the final 262)]
****
I’d like to thank Ginger Schilling and Brian Geiger at the ESTC/UC-Riverside for being incredibly helpful in providing the data for this survey. Also note that the data in the ESTC is constantly being
changed and updated. I would love to know of any additions or subtractions to
these lists as appropriate – I’m sure it’s not the final word!
[2]
See the example of
N31145 which was perhaps not caught because of a slight misspelling in the title. This
imprint seems to actually be T132866 held by several libraries.
