One of my jobs as Curator is to acquire new books for the collection. This is one of the worst books I’ve ever bought. It’s a broken set, missing one of its four volumes. Some of the pages are damaged, and we already have three copies of this edition. So why did I buy it? Provenance–specifically, its important connection to Harvard history, and the worst moment in the history of the Harvard College Library.
In 1764, the library suffered a devastating fire that wiped out nearly its entire collection of books, except for those few that were checked out or newly ordered and not yet unpacked. In the wake of the fire, many individuals and institutions offered generous gifts of books to help Harvard rebuild its library. Today, the Harvard University Archives hold the records that document these important gifts, among them £300 from the Province of New Hampshire. In 1765, the Harvard Corporation approved a list of purchases to be made with the New Hampshire donation, and the very first item on the list is the 1761 edition of Addison’s Works.
The set was duly purchased and used by Harvard students for more than a century, but was deaccessioned as a duplicate by Harvard Librarian John Langdon Sibley in 1873. Sibley gave the set (perhaps then already missing v. 1) to a student named Samuel Dennis Warren. As was standard practice, Sibley removed the Harvard bookplates from the volumes, but you can still see the traces of them, as well as the shelf marking system then in use.
Thankfully, Sibley transferred the information that those bookplates would have recorded, documenting the purchase of the set with the money given by New Hampshire.
Today, we’re very interested in identifying the books that survived the fire and those that rebuilt the library in its aftermath, so I was glad to have the opportunity to bring this book back to Harvard after an absence of some 140 years. Glad too that I didn’t have to pay too much for it–because who else would want it!
[John Overholt, Curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson and Early Modern Books and Manuscripts, contributed this post.]