Provenance

The history of a booklet, as told through notes, plates and stories

Cover to the Officium Baetae Marie Virginis.

One of the joys of collecting Starrettiana is getting to know the language of book collecting. Take the title of this essay, “Provenance.”

I won’t lie: The first time I heard this word I thought my friend had suddenly switched from talking about books to talking about that region in southeastern France in Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. (Fun book, by the way. Pick it up if you haven’t read it yet.) I later sorted it all out and discovered provenance referred to a book’s history, especially its previous owners.

This time, we’re going to talk about the history of one little volume. It’s so little, in fact, that I can’t call it a book. In fact, it’s only one page of printed text and a page of hand illuminated manuscript from a 15th century prayer book devoted to the Virgin Mary.

Here’s the description from the auction catalogue that was selling it:

The Freeman’s catalogue entry for today’s discussion.

While all this is quite accurate, it leaves much to be desired. We’re going to break that description down and dig deep in the history-and the provenance—of this remarkable item.


Frank Morris: The book Dealer

A photo of bookseller and publisher Frank M. Morris from the Chicago Tribune for March 28, 1925.

Francis “Frank” M. Morris was a name, and a man, Starrett knew well. As a young collector in Chicago, Starrett tended to visit the less expensive used book dealers. Morris sold antiquarian rarities and his clientele included that Chicago bookman of an earlier age, Eugene Field. A poet and writer of the middle to late 1800s, Field also developed a fine collection of old books. In fact, Field called himself a DOFAB—a Damned Old Fool About Books. It’s a term Starrett adopted for himself and used liberally.

“All of the years that I have known about books in Chicago I have known about Frank Morris,” Fanny Butcher wrote in her obituary tribute to the old bookseller on Marc 28, 1925. “And not once in my life have I ever heard anyone speak of him except with that most sincere appreciation of that rare quality of friendliness which was his special gift to a selfish and often grumbling world.”

Vincent Starrett was one of the honorary pallbearers at Morris’ funeral.

In 1922, three years before his death, Morris owned a damaged 15th century copy of a liturgical work devoted to the Virgin Mary, the Officium Baetae Marie Virginis. Written in Latin and painstakingly copied by monks, the illuminated manuscript was apparently so damaged it could not be sold as a whole.

Morris decided to break up the book into individual pages, each of which would be hinge mounted (essentially glued at the left side so it could be viewed on both sides) and bound between hard covers. Accompanying each illuminated page would be a single printed page of explanation, written by Starrett.

Since each page came from a book owned by Morris, you could say the contemporary provenance of this little work starts with him.

‘I should imagine this thing to be rare’

The entry for this piece from Honce’s bibliography of Starrett’s work, A Vincent Starrett Library.

In his bibliography of Starrett’s work, Charles Honce has a note from Starrett about the little work. The book has no title or limitation page, so Starrett’s claim that there were “perhaps 50 copies issued by Morris” is the only indication of just how few were produced.

It also strikes me that this is exactly the kind of object that Starrett would have loved to collect. I’m sure he was thrilled to be asked to write the text that accompanied the ancient page. That page is reproduced here. It should be large enough to be read without a transcription.

This is the only printed page in the bound volume. It’s too bad we don’t know more about its origins.

Starrett’s explanation page speaks for itself. I will note that the paper is supple and the printing is clean and clear — a lovely feature of this nearly 100-year-old page.

It might be worthwhile to note that Robert Hoe owned one of this country’s great printing press manufacturing operations in the late 19th century. Starrett is making the point that Hoe is a modern-day Gutenberg.

And here is the one-of-a-kind page from the liturgical prayer book. More than 600 years after it was created, it remains colorful and a handsome work of the copier’s art. Since I don’t read 15th century Latin, I can’t translate for you.

The single page from the Officium Baetae Marie Virginis. As you can detect, there is a second page of text on the obverse side, but the page is so delicate, I couldn’t figure out how to get a picture of it.

Let’s stop for a moment and consider the long, unknown history of this book. It was likely created for someone with some wealth, and then either handed down through the generations as a family heirloom, or sold as a collectible. Unknown numbers of hands have touched this page through the decades, either in prayer or in curious admiration for a relic of a long-gone era. And now it’s here, on the shelf behind me.

That, my friends, is provenance. Let’s dig a bit deeper and see what gaps we can fill in.

We can get a few indicators from two bookplates on the front inside paste-down endpaper of the inside cover.

Waldo Leon Rich, New York banker

Based purely on his bookplate, I think I would have liked Mr. Waldo Leon Rich. Take a look at that creepy fellow with his horny skull and cobwebby lectern, a wand in his bony left hand and a wall of ancient books behind him.

Rich is a fellow with quite the imagination.

A banker for more than 50 years, Rich spent most of his life in Saratoga Springs, New York, familiar to Sherlockians as the home to the triennial Silver Blaze race.

In its story announcing his death, the Glen Falls (NY) Port-Star said Rich had collected a fine library, specializing in first editions of rare old books and had made notable collections of birds and butterflies.

Notice the number “634” in the corner of the bookplate. I’m guessing that corresponds to a record that indexed Rich’s library.

Rich died in 1930, which leads us to the next owner.

Dr. Nellie Madeleine Brown, Pennsylvania physician

While not unheard of, it must have still been unusual for a woman to be a doctor in early part of the 20th century, when the field was dominated by men. A graduate of the Loyola University School of Medicine in Chicago, Dr. Nellie M. Brown was the daughter of a prominent coal mining family in Dunmore, Pa, not far from the locale for the flashback section of The Valley of Fear.

Many of the newspaper mentions involving Dr. Brown show her being involved with children’s health and Catholic charity causes. We know she was a resident staff physician at the Willard Packer and the Women’s and Children’s hospitals in New York, before she came back to the Reading area to set up her practice in 1931.

She retired in 1946 and passed away 20 years later.

Unlike Waldo Rich, I could not find a mention of book collecting in any of the stories involving Dr. Brown. I do know she was involved in Catholic organizations all her life, so the page from the ancient liturgy devoted to Mary might have been given to her, or acquired by her, in that regard.

After Dr. Brown, the ownership record once again goes dark, until it found its way into the Freeman’s auction catalogue, and then onto my shelves.

When I think about the long history that single page has traveled through time, I am humbled.

Building a private library feels in many ways like I’m accumulating something solid and substantial. The truth is that book ownership is as temporary as any person’s time on this planet.

Although I paid for it and call it mine now, I am merely the steward of this volume until it once again changes hands.

That’s the real lesson about provenance.

It never ends.