Thomas Gray Manuscripts : Thomas Gray, Catalogue of Books in the Royal Library

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray Manuscripts

Alongside his annotated books, pocket books, and Commonplace Book, Gray made notes on his reading and observations on loose leaves of paper. He usually used these at an earlier stage in his studies of a particular topic, or to organise information as he collated it from multiple sources. This example of Gray’s loose notes relates to his interests in library organisation and in the history of the book. Originally a single bifolium, Gray used it to make an untitled catalogue of some of the European incunabula and post-incunabula in the collection that was known as the Royal Library after its donation to Cambridge University Library by George I in 1715. Gray first listed and described 58 titles – mistakenly numbered 1-59 – which he grouped under loose headings: ‘Biblia Sacra, Libri Theologici, &c’ [Holy Bible, Theological Books], ‘Libri Claſsici’ [Classical Books], ‘Modern Grammarians, Antiquarians, &c’, and ‘Modern Poetry’. Then he wrote the heading ‘2d Shelf’, implying that the first 58 titles were on a first shelf, and underneath wrote the sub-heading ‘Bibl. Sacra, Patres, Lib: Theolog:ci &c’ [Holy Bible, Church Fathers, Theological Books], followed by a further 25 titles, numbered afresh from 1 to 25. The repetitions between the headings clarify what ‘2d Shelf’ already implies: Gray made this catalogue shelf by shelf, grouping each shelf’s books under categories that repeated between shelves, rather than attempting to bring together books of the same type found on different shelves. This is essentially a shelf-list, then, primarily following physical rather than subject arrangement. Moreover, the fact that the bifolium was clearly once folded into four and includes revisions and additions suggests that it represents preliminary work, probably made in the library in front of the shelves themselves then folded to be carried away in a pocket – quite the contrast to the solidity and formality of its current state, enclosed in a modern binding flanked by ten flyleaves.Another marker of the preliminary nature of this catalogue is its incompleteness. The Royal Library comprised over 30,000 printed books and manuscripts collected by the Bishop of Ely, John Moore (1646-1714). Its cataloguing, physical housing, and arrangement had been a Cambridge challenge since before Gray was born, and remained so throughout his life, as he joked about in a 1758 letter to his friend William Mason that described the impractical shelving of its new extension as ‘claſses, that will hold any thing, but books’. Its printed books were not fully catalogued until 1753, and the manuscripts not until 1761. Moore’s incunabula were especially numerous, rare, and celebrated, and they expanded the University Library’s holdings considerably. When John Taylor, Bibliothecarius [University Librarian] between 1732 and 1734 then Registrar until 1758, catalogued the University Library incunabula, he identified 382, of which 240 were Moore’s. Gray listed a mere 84 titles and only used the first three pages of the bifolium, breaking off before the end of the third page and using the fourth for nothing more than a few sums (one sum seems to relate to his catalogue, for it subtracts 25 from 58).The categories under which Gray grouped books are also surprisingly capacious, many comprising groups of disciplines rather than distinct topics. This was not unusual for Gray, who organised the catalogue of his own library, now Pierpont Morgan Library MA 165, under similarly broad headings that grouped disciplines and were made broader with a liberal use of ‘&c’, including ‘Libri Claſsici’ [Classical Books] and ‘Grammarians, Antiquaries, &c’. But such headings are unusual in comparison to what others were trying to do with the Royal Library in the middle of the eighteenth century, and indeed in comparison to broader contemporary cataloguing trends. Influenced by the ground-breaking work on the classification of knowledge by seventeenth-century librarians such as Gabriel Naudé, these favoured multistage cataloguing methods that result in logical organisation and facilitate information retrieval. Conyers Middleton, Protobibliothecarius [Principal Librarian] between 1721 and 1750, and a friend of Gray’s, recommended precise subject categories for classifying the Royal Library in his pamphlet Bibliothecae Cantabrigiensis ordinandae methodus (1723), for example. And when Taylor catalogued the Royal Library incunabula in the 1730s, he organised them chronologically by decade, then subsequently began to develop his own subject classification using letters of the alphabet – work recorded, for example, in University Library manuscripts now catalogued as GBR/0012/MS Add.2671, GBR/0265/UA/ULIB 7/3/50, and GBR/0012/MS Oo.07.58. In contrast to the kind of loose categorisation that results in headings such as ‘Bibl. Sacra, Patres, Lib: Theolog:ci &c’, Taylor’s subject classification distinguished Bibles from other religious texts, which were also finely divided: there were two categories for different kinds of commentary, the Greek were separated from the Latin Fathers, and theology, dogma, and sermons were distinguished from liturgy.In his history of Cambridge University Library, David McKitterick describes Taylor being assisted in his efforts to catalogue the Royal Library in the 1730s and 1740s by ‘a motley of undergraduates, young postgraduates, and local talent’, who helped to rearrange shelf-lists into an author catalogue. Gray was in Cambridge around the right time to have numbered among them: he was first admitted to Peterhouse in 1734 and returned in 1742 after his Grand Tour. But his catalogue is unlikely to represent a stage in Taylor’s process. Its broad, overlapping subject categories make it more organised than a shelf-list in the strict sense, but its organisation is uninterested in any of the principles Taylor was trying to develop: it is not arranged by author, or date of publication, or indeed geographically, for it jumbles together books written in English, French, Latin, and Italian that issued from a range of early presses across Europe. Moreover, it includes substantial copy-specific information that most eighteenth-century cataloguers would have found surplus to requirements. The extent and nature of that information suggests that Gray followed personal motives rather than professional imperatives when he made his catalogue.When Taylor compiled his chronological catalogue of the Royal Library incunabula, now GBR/0012/MS Add.2671, he characteristically only recorded author, title, translator or editor, and place and date of publication. In contrast, when Gray catalogued the same collection, he recorded not only more extensive details about the standard information – editor, translator, commentator, printer, format, type, illustration, and number of volumes – but also copy-specific information such as marginalia, hand-drawn illumination, binding, substrate, and imperfections in collation, as well as detailed cross-references to information in Michel Maittaire’s ground-breaking bibliography of early printing, Annales Typographici (1719-1725). Take Gray’s twenty-fifth entry for the second shelf, which describes the bible now catalogued as Cambridge University Library Inc.2.B.11.4[2097] – ‘Biblia Latina. Neapol: 1476. Impreſsit Mathias Moravus. ∧Fol:o∧ Epistles of Blasius Romerus & Thomas Taqui in ye Beginning. Gothic: Charact:r Initials colour’d. (Matt: I.358.)’ – or his eighteenth entry for the first shelf, which describes the copy of Sigmund Gelen’s edition of Pliny annotated by Isaac Casaubon now catalogued as Cambridge University Library Adv.a.3.1: ‘C: Plinii Historiæ Mundi, cum annotat: Sigism: Gelenii. Basil: apud Frobenium, 1549. Fol:o∧Liber∧ refertus annotationibus Mſs Isaac: Casauboni’. These are scarcely less detailed, and in points more detailed, than their contemporary equivalents describing the same copies (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21286551330003606'>https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21286551330003606</a>; <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21468417400003606'>https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21468417400003606</a>). The level of copy-specific detail and the cross-references to Maittaire’s bibliographical descriptions therefore contrast as strikingly to the practices of Gray’s Cambridge contemporaries as do the vagueness and disorganisation of his categories.Gray had a long-term interest in the history of libraries, which he wrote about under the head ‘Bibliotheca’ in the second volume of his Commonplace Book. In a series of discrete but cross-referenced entries under that head, he summarised the history of the King of France’s library and wrote lists of its acquisitions and librarians, made notes on the Viennese Imperial Library again with lists of its acquisitions, librarians, and important holdings, and copied out a catalogue of English printed books printed before 1600 organised by printer, beginning with William Caxton. On none of these occasions did Gray record copy-specific information as minutely as when cataloguing the Royal Library’s early printed books. But on none of these occasions was he working with the books themselves: his information was derived each time from other sources, respectively the French journal Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, the commentaries of the seventeenth-century Viennese Imperial Librarian Peter Lambeck, and Joseph Ames’s history of printing, Typographical Antiquities (1749). When Gray had the opportunity to inspect early printed books in person, as he did with the Royal Library, he was drawn to their unique details, and evidently sought to understand them better by consulting Maittaire. Like so many of Gray’s scholarly manuscripts, then, the catalogue seems to represent not a professional task but self-motivated learning, as Gray sought to understand a new topic using the best reference tools available at the time.Like other items in this collection, this manuscript sheds light on Gray’s practices as a cataloguer and library user, and on how he organised information. Alongside the catalogues and histories of libraries and printing he recorded under the head ‘Bibliotheca’ in his Commonplace Book, it contributes to our understanding of his bibliographical methods, also evident in his own book lists and other personal catalogues such as the descriptive lists of prints and books that he made on the Grand Tour, now included in the item catalogued as MS-GAR-0046 in the John Work Garrett Library of Johns Hopkins University. It was published in this digital edition in November 2024, with editorial and bibliographical metadata by Ruth Abbott, and images courtesy of Cambridge University Library.Ruth Abbott University of Cambridge <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a> How to cite: Thomas Gray, Catalogue of Books in the Royal Library (GBR/0012/MS Add.5994), ed. Ruth Abbott, in Thomas Gray Manuscripts, ed. Ruth Abbott, assoc. ed. Ephraim Levinson, <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a>