great to read this as I’ve often asked myself similar questions about seventeenth century. I’ve speculated a bit, more about relative survival rates of different kinds of prints than absolute numbers, but haven’t made a sophisticated study or even an unsophisticated one
from an earlier period, Ferdinand Columbus, the illegitimate son of the explorer, had a collection of 3200 prints, the inventory of which survives. the collection itself is lost, but Mark McDonald made a close study of the inventory, I think he was able identify about half of the prints
Many thanks for the comment! If you have the data, we would be happy to cooperate on running similar analyses and estimations.
Do you refer to this paper of Mark McDonald? https://www.jstor.org/stable/41825887. I did not know it. My impression based on my own work on reconstructing a 18th century inventory, and others' work on analysing earlier inventories of the Hungarian Kingdom, is that identifying is quite difficult because of two reasons: 1) the bibliographical descriptions are usually drastically shortened and skipped the data elements needed for the unambiguous identification 2) there is a correlation between the value of the book (in the eyes of the descriptor) and the details of the description. Shortly: the more expensive/important books are described with more details, while for example contemporary literature, calendars, occasional prints (published in cheaper editions) were described with less details if at all. I am curious if this is the similar case in Ferdinand Columbus' inventory.
Thank you for the offer, this is not something I'm focused on at the moment, but I may return to these questions in the near future. If I do I'll ask for help. And yes, he goes into some of these questions in the paper you've linked, but there's also a two-volume plus CD-ROM version the British Museum published in 2004 (https://search.worldcat.org/title/57577291)
great to read this as I’ve often asked myself similar questions about seventeenth century. I’ve speculated a bit, more about relative survival rates of different kinds of prints than absolute numbers, but haven’t made a sophisticated study or even an unsophisticated one
from an earlier period, Ferdinand Columbus, the illegitimate son of the explorer, had a collection of 3200 prints, the inventory of which survives. the collection itself is lost, but Mark McDonald made a close study of the inventory, I think he was able identify about half of the prints
Many thanks for the comment! If you have the data, we would be happy to cooperate on running similar analyses and estimations.
Do you refer to this paper of Mark McDonald? https://www.jstor.org/stable/41825887. I did not know it. My impression based on my own work on reconstructing a 18th century inventory, and others' work on analysing earlier inventories of the Hungarian Kingdom, is that identifying is quite difficult because of two reasons: 1) the bibliographical descriptions are usually drastically shortened and skipped the data elements needed for the unambiguous identification 2) there is a correlation between the value of the book (in the eyes of the descriptor) and the details of the description. Shortly: the more expensive/important books are described with more details, while for example contemporary literature, calendars, occasional prints (published in cheaper editions) were described with less details if at all. I am curious if this is the similar case in Ferdinand Columbus' inventory.
Thank you for the offer, this is not something I'm focused on at the moment, but I may return to these questions in the near future. If I do I'll ask for help. And yes, he goes into some of these questions in the paper you've linked, but there's also a two-volume plus CD-ROM version the British Museum published in 2004 (https://search.worldcat.org/title/57577291)