Maria Berggren & Helena Strömquist: The ProBok project

The ProBok-project is run as a joint venture between the university libraries of Uppsala and Lund, and aims at creating a national database for recording information about provenance and bindings in collections of printed books from the hand press era (up to 1870).

Manuscript elements (inscriptions, marginal notes and handwritten passages added by later hands) frequently occur in old prints, and the demarcation line is not always easily drawn between manuscript material on the one hand and print on the other. Within the history of bookbinding - from the manuscript era via the hand to the machine printed book - technical, material and aesthetic changes were gradual. They formed part of a larger process and took place in interplay with the layout of manuscript and print, their form and format, paper quality, publishers' intentions and different supposed and actual groups of consumers.
Hitherto, the uniqueness of manuscripts as artifacts has been generally recognized but the value of printed books as unique objects with their own history has been somewhat overlooked. In the ProBok database the focus will be the copy-specific bibliographical description of the printed book. Every volume is to be recorded and documented as a unique object, an artefact.

A coherent terminology and methodology is an indispensable tool in this work. Any database of provenance and bookbindings must be founded on a firm methodology and a systematic terminology. Testing some of the pre-existing standards and thesauri for the description of bookbindings and provenance, we have found that for several reasons they do not quite match our needs. In our paper, we will discuss the method and terminologies developed within the ProBok project and present a few examples from the test version of the database in order to illustrate this.

We hope that making access to older books on a copy-specific level will increase the understanding of the material evidence embedded in the book. Notably, this applies to the status and condition of this evidence and their accurate recording. The altering of material evidence is always devastating from the point of view of historical research. The replacing or altering of bookplates, signatures, codes, notes and other markings in the book as well as the repairing or replacement of end leaves, spines, boards and covering material, resewing etc. destroys material evidence.

In the long run we are convinced that creating access to older printed material on a copy-specific level and as artefacts will entail a greater awareness of the importance of material bibliography and widen its scope. Making books available as historical and material sources of information opens up for new historical research on early printed books as material objects.