Au Vélin d'or [I]

I want to check an ambiguous reference to some items bought from "Barroux" in 1929 or 1930, perhaps from a catalogue no. 24. After some effort I determined that this probably refers to Robert Barroux, whose Paris bookselling firm was called "Au Vélin d'or". But copies of the catalogues are apparently very rare, to judge by records on Worldcat.

A copy of Catalogue 23, from 1929, is at the IRHT in Paris, and Hanno Wijsman kindly made a scan of it for me; the front cover is shown above. It turns out that the items I am looking for are not in this catalogue, but I recognise two other items that are included, on which I will do two short blog posts.

The Goodspeed Bible (II)

The recently-published catalogue of the Rouse manuscripts at UCLA lists the five portions of the Goodspeed Bible that I had identified by 2010, and also refers to the Psalms section, which I did not mention in my original blog post because I did not at that time know where it was.

Bill Stoneman had alerted me and the Rouses to its existence; it is known to have belonged to Philip Hofer, because he refers to it on a flyleaf of his Esdras III portion of the Bible:

"P. H[ofer] personally owns the Book of Psalms M.S (section) from this same large Bible MS."

As the whereabouts of the Psalms section was neither mentioned in the catalogue description nor in any of the bibliography of the Esdras section, I assumed that Hofer had sold the Psalms section (as he did with many other manuscripts) at some point before his death.

Mapping MMBL

Many readers will know of Neil Ker's invaluable Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (5 vols, 1969-2002), often abbreviated to "MMBL", which, in about 3000 pages, aimed to provide catalogue descriptions for all uncatalogued medieval manuscripts in British institutional libraries, i.e. those

• in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Ireland)
• not in private collections (e.g. Holkham Hall, Arundel Castle, etc.)
• not already catalogued (e.g. at the BL, Bodleian, and Oxbridge colleges, although many of these institutions are included because, for example, several Oxbridge colleges have acquired manuscripts since the publication of their M.R. James or H.O. Coxe catalogues)