A brief post on guide letters

I was tempted to title this post "a brief guide to guide letters," but I'm afraid it's far too brief for that.

Printed vellum leaf: creases and slots on the
right hand side show that this was later
used as part of a binding.

In fact, it will cover only two examples of guide letters on a single leaf, and so it's not even much of a blog post, either.  

The leaf in question is a bit unusual, though, because it has been printed on vellum. Last week, I confessed to the soft place I have in my heart for medieval manuscripts written on paper, but only books that were intended to be deluxe copies, as a rule, were printed on vellum, because it was significantly more expensive than paper. 

This leaf, from a missal, may be from an incunable, but it's certainly from the early part of the sixteenth century at the latest. The date 1557 on one side may indicate the date of its recycling as the wrapper of another book. 

Most of the capital letters on this page were printed in red, along with the heading at the top of the page and subheadings of various sorts in the columns. But at the bottom of the right-hand column, a manuscript rubricator has added a large three-line initial in blue paint (which is now faded) with contrasting red-ink pen decoration.

The "guide letter" that the post is about is the letter (printed in black) that the printer placed in the space for the larger initial, so that the rubricator would know what letter to paint in. In many of the manuscript (and printed) examples I've seen, the large hand-painted letter often enough was designed to cover over the tiny guide letter, so it wouldn't be seen.

Manuscript "O" surrounding the printed "o"

On this example, as the close-up above shows, the printed guide letter has intentionally been left visible, and the decorative red pen-scrolls even seem to swirl around it and call attention to it. The printed letter ends up being part of the design. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I can't help but note that the visible page thus has two examples of the letter "o" here, only one of which can be used to read the text.

And apparently, this is no mistake from this rubricator, either. The three-line initial "d" on the opposite side of the leaf has the same effect, though damage from the leaf's later use as a book-wrapper makes it a bit trickier to see.

Nevertheless, it seems to be a wonderfully odd feature of this page to me, especially as it leaves two letters visible where readers use only one. But that's part of what I find fascinating about old books and leaves: the places where they do something unexpected, or at least something I do not expect. 

It's always interesting to see the moments when manuscript and print work together on the same page, and I usually think that the manual labor involved in adding decorated letters must have meant they had a higher value than the printed guide letters they were meant to replace. 

But here, the guide letters were not only not replaced, but they were allowed to keep their position of visual prominence at the center of the larger, manuscript letters' decorative adornments. Fascinating!

Marketing a manuscript fragment

As I suspect a number of my readers know, there are some large (or largish) collaborative projects out there that use the power of the internet to attempt the work of bringing together digital images of manuscript leaves and fragments that have been separated from one another. One can keep up to date on some of these projects (and projects within them) by following Lisa Fagin Davis's blog; one of her recent posts describes attempts to gather images and interpret the contents of various Otto Ege manuscripts. 

Elsewhere, one might consider the Broken Books website, for a slightly different approach. And there are probably others. 

15th c. German Gradual Leaf,
mounted behind paper mat.

My own little blog post today considers a leaf I recently purchased. Unlike many of the leaves and fragments I buy, this one is on paper, rather than on vellum, and I have to confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for medieval paper. Paper, as a cheaper alternative to vellum, was not often used for classy manuscripts, and this little leaf, I think, is no exception. This is an unpretentious leaf.

I generally make it a rule not to buy leaves from books that have been broken up recently: when I buy fragments from bindings, the books they derive from were probably broken up in the eighteenth century or earlier. 

But I am left with the question of how recent is recent, when the issue involves the breaking up of a medieval manuscript in the twentieth century.

I suppose each collector and dealer must answer that question for themselves, but as far as I am concerned, I generally think that as long as a leaf has passed through the hands of one owner who is not a dealer, the focus of my concern must be for the future of the leaf, rather than the past. The is, if a collector or owner has held onto a leaf and treasured it as an artifact from the past, then my role as a dealer is also to treasure it, and not to despise it as the product of a book-breaker. That collector may well have originally purchased the leaf from a book-breaker, but now that the damage has been done, my concern is to preserve the leaf I see before me for the future.

In short, I usually am not willing to give money to the modern day breakers of books, but even that position downplays the responsibility I feel towards trying to give all medieval books and leaves good homes. But I can and should be willing to buy from a dealer who finds such a leaf in a collector's estate, for example.

The leaf pictured here is a fine example. 

Original label accompanying this paper leaf,
affixed to the rear of the folding mat.

When I bought this leaf, there was an image included of the label from "Folio Fine Art," as I show in my own second image here. The estimate of the date given seems to be a reasonable one, but I was especially struck by the price: 1 pound, 12 shillings, and sixpence. 

Whatever else I could conclude about the leaf, I was certain that it had been a matter of some decades since this leaf had been offered at that price: not least because the price so obviously precedes the decimalization of the British pound in 1971.

Although I don't often check the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, I thought that there was at least a chance that this book would show up there. And indeed, when I typed "Cistercian Gradual" into the search box, six entries came up, two of which relate to this manuscript: fifteen leaves offered as part of a lot in a Sotheby's sale of 2005 (SBDM 59725) and a 1967 catalogue from Folio Fine Art, Ltd (SDBM 59797). Even without images, the size of the leaf, the material (paper) and the number of lines (7) all make it virtually certain that my leaf is part of this same medieval book. 

A bit of tedious Googling can turn up the online record of the Sotheby's sale, which also lists moments when other individual leaves from this book passed through the Sotheby's auction house, as well as the hands of at least one other dealer. The Schoenberg Database, perhaps as a matter of limiting its own scope, generally does not trace single leaves.

To me, the Folio Fine Art label, and the record of the price that they put on the leaf, are fascinating and important bits of its history. Where the leaf was between 1967 and 2019 may never be known for certain, but I cannot look at a leaf like this and refuse to buy it or treasure it because the book it came from was devalued and broken by another dealer over fifty years ago. History is full of such moments--when books, to take only one kind of example--were treated in ways I wouldn't treat them myself. 

But this leaf is a survivor, now, and I am pleased to be able to give it a home, at least for a time.

The verso of the leaf, showing tape
attachments and the mat.