De Ricci Slip Index

The Palaeography Room has around 60,000 index slips compiled by the French scholar Seymour de Ricci (1881–1942) as part of a project to list the manuscripts of Britain and Ireland which he began in 1934. This enormous project – an ambitious companion work to his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada published between 1935 and 1940 – was, perhaps unsurprisingly, left incomplete at the time of de Ricci’s death. The index was first acquired by the Institute of Historical Research, which had provided some support for the project in a grant to pay de Ricci’s secretarial expenses, and given to the Paleography Room in 1953. It still provides today’s manuscript scholars with a valuable tool, especially in provenance research.

The slips have recently been digitised and are available online as the Seymour de Ricci Bibliotheca Britannica Manuscripta Digitized Archive.

The index is divided in to two main sections: one for repositories (approximately 40,000 slips) and one for collectors (approximately 20,000 slips). The cards contain information gleaned from wide reading and especially from sale catalogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which De Ricci had a private collection of 30,000 in his Paris appartment. The most significant nineteenth century English collector, Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), is not represented in the index since de Ricci owned an interleaved copy of Phillipp’s catalogue in which he noted his observations on those manuscripts. A microfilm of this volume, now preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale is available in the Palaeography Room with the callmark MIC. 89.

The slips are idiosyncratic but recklessly and persistently useful. Sometimes de Ricci added dates to names, sometimes not. For example, the slips for Henry Huth (1815-1878) and his son Alfred (1850-1910) are filed together. Used intuitively, and remembering the index was the first step before publication, the slips are a goldmine. A description of de Ricci’s working method by the writer of his obituary shows their strengths and limitations: “In his right-hand coat pocket [de Ricci] carried a wad of his blank slips, their size and texture invariable and determined once and for all. While he read a catalogue, he did not ‘mark’ it, he put down what he thought notable neatly in ink on one of his slips. When he viewed a book sale at the Hôtel Drouot or at Sotheby’s, he noted all copies that concerned him, each one on its slip. When you told him something, it immediately went down on a slip”. It is the accumulation of de Ricci’s attention to the smallest bibliographic detail which makes the index fascinating. A not untypical example from the collector sequence reads: Herbert, (Sir Henry). The University of Oxford had expected to receive by bequest his whole library; all they got was two boxes of books, as noted in a letter of G. Langbaine to Selden (12 Sept. 1648), quoted in the catalogue of the J. West sale (29 March 1773, n.3893).

De Ricci’s thirty-four boxes are a unique resource and the Palaeography Room is fortunate to own them. They are available to scholars in the Special Collections Reading Room, subject to a full working day's advance notice before a research visit.

For further information see:

Descriptions of the De Ricci slip index on the online archives catalogue.

Joan Gibbs, ‘Seymour de Ricci’s Bibliotheca Britannica Manuscripta’. Calligraphy and Palaeography: Essays Presented to Alfred Fairbank on his 70th Birthday. Ed. A.S. Osley. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. 81-91.

E. P. Goldschmidt, ‘Seymour de Ricci, 1881-1942’, The Library, 4th Series, 34 (1944): 187-194.

Nigel Ramsay. ‘Ricci, Seymour Montefiore Robert Rosso de (1881–1942)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 020 7862 8470