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On 18 Sep 1998, Christopher Crockett wrote: [...] > But maybe someone on this list has an answer to a simple > question that's bugged the hell out of me in twenty years > in the book bidness: > > WHERE _*DID*_ ALL THE VULGATES GO??? [...] As a sometime librarian, I find Christopher's question a poignant one. Daniel Boorstin, former librarian of Congress, wrote an intriguing essay somewhere about how the most common books become the rarest. As I recall, one of his examples was about biographies of Abraham Lincoln. The multi-volume biographies are available in American libraries everywhere, often in pristine condition, precisely because almost no-one read them, but of the immensely popular mass-market booklets which actually shaped the traditional image of Lincoln after his death hardly a trace remains. Something similar has certainly happened to liturgical and other religious books. The Liber usualis, once ubiquitous, is now a collector's item, and pre-Vatican II daily missals are surprisingly rare. The mass-produced booklets which nourished popular Christian piety were usually cheap and perishable, and the more popular they were the more shabby they are likely to have become and the less interesting to bookdealers and collectors. In my own community there were once 40 copies of the 4-volume Breviarium Carmelitanum in the chapel; no-one ever thought to put a copy in the library because they were in daily use, but when they were superseded all 40 were eventually thrown out, and it was years before it was realised none was left and a couple of surviving copies had to be searched out. All the shabby dog-eared underlined coverless seminary textbooks were deleted from the library years ago, and the crisp unread books left in their undisturbed peace, suggesting a pattern of readership and influence that never was. Medieval authorities occasionally decreed the destruction of older editions of texts when they were replaced with new versions (the attempt to replace all earlier lives of St Francis with Bonaventure's is a famous example), and a similar process often still happens. Librarians are constantly "deselecting" books obscure to everyone but us. As John Donne said (sort of), Never send to ask who tolls the bell, it is always a barbarian who is at the gate. -- Paul Chandler || Yarra Theological Union [log in to unmask] || Melbourne College of Divinity %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%