Guerilla cataloguing part 1

The nineteenth century Prussian general von Moltke the elder is reputed to have said 'No battle plan survives contact with the enemy'.

Well it wasn't quite as bad as that, but my first problem when I tried out our tentative cataloguing methodology was that LibraryThing's link to the British Library catalogue kept timing out on me.

However the link to LibraryThing's own Overcat database of library records was robust, so rather than using the British Library, our plan has changed to using Overcat in preference.

Not all records of books published in the nineteenth century are perfect, so sometimes a little bit of editing was required, but basically using Overcat with a little bit of cross checking with the National Library of Scotland and the British Library catalogues along the way our plan seems to work well, even if things went a bit slower than we hoped.

With only ten records so far it didn't seem worth doing a MARC export and then using something like FastMRCview to validate the output.

However, actually handling the books was quite valuable. By chance a number of the books we catalogued today were editions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels.

Interestingly they still had paper stickers on the covers saying they were supplied through Mudie's Circulating Library.

George Mudie ran an important chain of circulating libraries in the mid to late nineteenth century in England charging his subscribers an annual fee of a guinea (£1-1s or a little over A$220 today using the Bank of England's inflation calculator) to borrow one book at a time - in comparison Netflix costs $120 a year with ads or $250 ad-free).

Circulating libraries were a middle class thing due to the up front subscribers' fee. They had a possibly undeserved reputation as a supplier of sensation novels to middle class women, and as a place where men and women could interact unchaperoned.

Mudie is also reputed to be responsible for the three volume novel format so common in the Victorian period as it allowed his libraries to lend out the volumes separately rather than have to stock multiple copies of in demand books.

And, as he bought so many copies of books he became an important wholesaler in his own right supplying books to overseas circulating libraries, including, quite obviously, the Athenaeum.

Incidentally the books had green covers with gold stamping. Fortunately they don't turn up in the list of known books where arsenic green bookcloth was used for the cover, but the list isn't exhaustive, so we  followed the sensible course of using nitrile gloves when handling them, rather than cloth gloves, or indeed handling them by hand.

I also learned a little bit about the business of publishing new editions of books in the late nineteenth century.

At that time books were still typeset by hand using movable type, much as they had been in Caxton's time.

However there was one important difference - once set and proofed they printers would make a papier mâché mould which they would then use to cast a single metal plate that they would use to print the page, and these moulds were called stereotypes.

This of course meant that the type could be quickly broken up and reused, and that, if they kept the moulds, they could quickly make a new set of printing plates if a book needed to be reprinted.

Sometimes, if you look at a late nineteenth century book it will have 'Stereotype Edition' on the title page, meaning that the book was printed by reusing moulds used to print a previous edition, rather than having the type reset.

Interesting what you can learn from cataloguing a few old books...