Here’s something I stumbled upon recently & thought I ought to share…
Between 1935 and 1940, French scholar Seymour de Ricci published his gigantic Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. Not content with that, he quickly moved on to a similarly epic project: a Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United Kingdom. However, following his death in 1942, this ended up as a huge set of index slips (roughly 60,000 of them).
Because some of his secretarial costs were underwritten by the Institute of Historical Research, the Palaeography Room at University College London’s Senate House Library now holds the “De Ricci Slip Index“: about 65% describes books in public repositories, with the remainder describing those held by private collectors. Though De Ricci gained his information from wide and varied sources, he was especially reliant on sale catalogues (at his death, he had amassed 30,000 of these!). It has to be said that De Ricci was not hugely consistent in his note-taking: but for anyone doing provenance research on manuscripts, his slip index is a vital (if relatively little-known) resource.
Rather charmingly, the UCL webpage describes the thirty four boxes of slips as “idiosyncratic but recklessly and persistently useful“. Which is not far from the set of principles this blog tries to adhere to. 😉