Two More Erik von Scherling Catalogues Online

In 2015 I wrote a blogpost about the Dutch dealer Erik von Scherling, including an attempt to list all his known catalogues, especially the series with the title "Rotulus".

 

At my request, and through the kindness of Candice C. Brown at Duke University Libraries, two more of his catalogues have now been digitized, and are available online at Archive.org.

Neither is dated, but one is datable to within a few months, and the other within a span of a few years.

[Source]

Probably the earlier of the two, List 2: Interesting Manuscripts and Documents, contains 68 entries, numbered from 96 to 163; so presumably List 1 (of which no copy is currently known to survive) contained nos. 1-95.

The fact that a Dutch dealer should issue a catalogue written in English is not surprising, but it is perhaps unexpected that he priced the contents in pounds sterling, as if he expected most of the orders to come from "British collectors":

Perhaps he felt that the Depression-era American market was hopeless, and if so, this opinion may have been based on very recent empirical evidence: List 2 is datable after May 1934, because it refers to "an exhibition held in May 1934 in the Public Library, Dallas (Texas), U.S.A.":

An enquiry to the Dallas Public Library produced no internal records of the exhbition, except for a newspaper clipping which reveals that the exhibition 

"of illuminated manuscripts ... are drawn from the collections of Otto Ege of Cleveland and E. von Scherling of Holland ... taken from missals, ancient Bibles and books of hours, all ornamented with bright initial letters and marginal designs":

Dallas Morning News, 29 April 1934, p. 10

In fact, it seems that not every leaf was illuminated: this item, for example, sounds like an undecorated piece of binding waste:

As Tommy Wasserman has shown, List 2 must not only date from no earlier than May 1934, the date of the Dallas exhibition, but also no later than November of the same year, when von Scherling sent a Greek Lectionary, item no. 96, to the University of Chicago [1]:

A clipping of this description is stuck, sideways, to the front pastedown of the Chicago manuscript:

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The other newly digitized catalogue cannot be dated so precisely, but it must have been issued between 1933 (because it mentions Rotulus volume III, published in that year) and 1937 (when Rotulus volume IV was published) -- indeed, it seems that von Scherling had no firm intention of continuing the series beyond volume III:

As with List 2, the prices are in sterling:

 

The contents are numbered from 1 to 135, of which 1-12 are codices; 13-97 are "Single leaves, fragments etc."; 98-114 are a "Supplement" including some miscellaneous groupings, e.g. "A collection of 11 framents of medieval mss., bound in one volume ... the greater part of these leaves was described in Rotulus" (no. 103); and nos. 115-135 are Antiquities, ranging from a sarcophagus lid to an Armenian lead plaque.

Just as the first item in List 2 was bought by an American university and has a clipping from the catalogue stuck to the front pastedown, the same is true of this catalogue: item 1 is now Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Lat. 158, and from its digitisation we learn that the von Scherling catalogue was printed on yellow paper:

Houghton Library, MS Lat. 158 [Source]

This manuscript was apparently acquired by Harvard in December 1936, which suggests (but does not prove) that the undated von Scherling catalogue was issued in that year, and maybe towards the end of the year:

The two newly digitized catalogues tell us a little about the movements of von Scherling's home-based business. List 2 was issued from 8A Valdezstraat, Leiden, and the 1936(?) Catalogue  of Latin, Greek, and Oriental manuscripts from Bilderdijkstraat 2, Leiden. Neither address appears in the list in my previous blogpost about von Scherling, in which I included this map:

8A Valdezstraat and Bilderstraat 2 are only about a 5-minute walk from one another:

If any more undated catalogues come to light, the relevant address will provide some evidence for dating, so I provide a revised list:

• 1928-1932  Vreewijkstraat 31a, Leiden
• 1933            Hooglandse Kerkgracht 24, Leiden
• 1934            Valdezstraat 8A, Leiden
• [1936?]       Bilderdijkstraat 2, Leiden
• 1937            Morsweg 38, Leiden
• 1949-1956  Juffermansstraat 35, Oegstgeest

Note

[1] Tommy Wasserman, 'A New Leaf of Constantine Theologites the Reader’s Lectionary in Uppsala University Library (Fragm. ms. graec. 1 = Greg.-Aland L1663)', Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok (2021), pp. 148-66 (available from his Academia.edu page).