Giles Mandelbrote is a Curator, British Collections 1501-1800, in the Early Printed Collections department of the British Library. He also teaches book history in the University of London and is one of the organisers of the annual London conference on book trade history. Among his publications are Learning to Collect: the library of Sir Richard Ellys (1682-1742) at Blickling Hall (with Yvonne Lewis, 2004) and Under the Hammer: book auctions since the seventeenth century (edited with Robin Myers and Michael Harris, 2001). The current paper stems from his research towards a revised edition of Graham Pollard and Albert Ehrman's classic work, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue (1965).
This paper introduces a discovery - a catalogue of the books belonging to Jeremias Martius, printed in 1572 - which is (arguably) the earliest known printed catalogue of any library. Martius (c.1535-1585), an Augsburg physician who had travelled widely in Italy and southern France, assembled a collection of about a thousand titles, which was notable for its specialization in medical subjects. A question of particular interest for book historians, however, is why his library catalogue was such an early example of its genre to be printed. In suggesting an explanation and assessing its significance, the paper sets it in the context of the various other book catalogues which were being printed at about the same time, including printers' catalogues, sale catalogues and institutional library catalogues, and explores some of the historical distinctions that may be drawn between different types of catalogue in terms of contents, function and readership. The paper also draws attention to the pivotal role played by the city of Augsburg, not only in the evolution of printed catalogues, but also in the increasingly sophisticated development of book collecting and the book trade in the second half of the sixteenth century.