An Unstandardized, Decentralized Carnival Fire: How Rare Books Are Cataloged

This is very much a bookseller's take and not a librarian's. Actually cataloguing rare books is a different, and also fascinating, set of stories.

I've had a growing collection of rare books for the last 30+ years. I have no idea what I'm doing, but its been fun. https://www.tiktok.com/@worklibrary

Eventually I want to make a sortable online catalog to archive / document the works for future use.

Collecting books that go back to the start of the printing press era is wild (manuscripts even more so!). The only things even coming close to a standard were the punchcutters [1] used to make the casts for movable type. The printing press was a relatively simple device but the punchcutters were some of the highest precision tools available before the industrial revolution so they were produced by a small group of craftsmen and guilds. Pretty much the only way to visually verify any printing in the first few centuries is to have all of the distinct punchcutter styles memorized because the vast majority of "counterfeits" are reprints, not attempts at tricking a book collector. Even then you can only conclusively identify something as fake, you have to know a whole book of tricks in book binding, printing, and paper making to conclusively say something is genuine (often requiring destructive chemical testing!)

The worst part about collecting old and rare books is that all the databases are themselves rare and old books. Book collectors hoard bibliographies so while they're not very expensive - since there isn't enough of a market for laymen to price discover - they're downright impossible to find because they get snatched up right away. Without those bibliographies, there are no contemporaneous sources of information on how many prints and editions a book went through or any identifying features. Libgen and Libz have been godsends because sooner or later many of them get archived by some library or collection and uploaded by a pirate/archiver (the vast majority are out of copyright but pirate sites are the most accessible central databases around).

For anyone who wants to learn more, I recommend Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography [2] which is a bit more academic and technical than Carter's ABC of Book Collecting mentioned in the OP.

> If we call a book “sophisticated,” we’re saying that we know the book was tampered with, faked or “someone tried very hard to make this look like a first edition,” but that we also feel this perhaps adds to its historical value rather than subtracts.

If you trade in rare and old books, for fucks sake don't do this shit. "Buyer beware" doesn't work for any book of value unless you're Sotheby's and the book is famous for being suspect. If I see a book collector trying to pass off a book they know is possibly a fake with code words like "sophisticated," I immediately assume the provenance of all their books is suspect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchcutting

[2] https://www.amazon.com/New-Introduction-Bibliography-Philip-...

/braindump

A good description how science works, though described as “not really a science” for some reason.

Similar overwrought language applies to wine, coins, antique furniture, and audiophile equipment.