Collecting Manuscripts

A manuscript is a unique object. Whatever else may be said for or against a given example, no second copy exists, and that simple fact governs how the material is studied, valued and collected.

The category is broad. It runs from a fragment of a twelfth-century service book to a nineteenth-century family archive, and the questions asked of each differ. What unites them is that the evidence lies in the physical object as much as in the text.

Support, script and structure

Three things establish what a manuscript is.

The support — parchment or paper — is itself datable. Parchment predominates in the West until the later Middle Ages; paper arrives gradually and brings with it watermarks, which can often be matched to a mill and a period within a decade or two.

The script is the principal evidence of date and place. Palaeography is a disciplined field, and a specialist reads a hand as a geologist reads strata: the forms of particular letters, the abbreviations, the ruling and the layout together place a manuscript within a region and a generation. Learning to see this takes time and repays it.

The structure — how the leaves are gathered, ruled and pricked, and how the volume was bound — carries further evidence, which is why disbinding a manuscript destroys information that cannot be recovered.

Single leaves

A great many medieval manuscripts survive only as separated leaves, broken up by dealers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such leaves are the usual entry point into the field: they are affordable, beautiful and instructive.

Buy them knowingly. A leaf detached from its book has lost its context, and where the parent manuscript has been identified and recorded, that reconstruction adds materially to interest and to value. Ask whether the parent volume is known and whether the leaf has been published.

Illumination

Decoration ranges from a plain initial in red to full-page miniatures in gold and lapis. Value follows quality, condition and attribution: a miniature attributable to a known workshop is a different proposition from an anonymous one of similar appearance.

Look closely at the gold. Original burnished gold leaf sits on a raised ground and has depth; later reinforcement is flat and dull. Retouching of faces and skies is common and should be disclosed.

Condition

Manuscripts tolerate age well and handling badly. Look for cockling and distortion of parchment, flaking pigment, offsetting, damp-staining, mould, rodent and insect damage, and trimmed margins from a later rebinding. Ink corrosion, in which iron-gall ink eats through its support, is progressive and needs a conservator's assessment.

Text loss at the edges of a leaf indicates trimming; a full margin is always to be preferred.

Provenance and legality

Provenance carries more weight here than almost anywhere else in the trade. Because manuscripts are unique, an object removed from a library, an archive or a church can be identified with certainty, and it will be. Shelfmarks, stamps, ex-libris inscriptions and old repairs all speak.

Before buying, ask where the manuscript has been since it left its original institution, and be sceptical of an answer that begins in the 1980s. We will not offer material whose recent history we cannot account for.

Reading and looking

The field rewards patience. Read the catalogues of the great collections, use the digitised holdings of national libraries, and handle whatever you are given the chance to handle. A collector who can date a hand within half a century, however roughly, is in a materially better position than one who cannot, and that skill is acquired only by looking.