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And another Point of View on Bookbreaking

A long journey to Kells

Editor's note - Earlier this year we published an essay by Martin Murphy railing against Bookbreaking. Here we present an opposing view. As for Books at Star Dot Star, we're still of two minds on the subject and are re-evaluating our position. We'd be happy to hear your view on the subject which you can e-mail to us here.

It's interesting that Martin should bring up this fine work - the Book of Kells - which was stolen from Iona, where it was likely created. It seems to have passed to the cathedral of Kells, thence through "Abp" Ussher to the Protestant foundation of Trinity College. It was defaced with the signature of Victoria in the 19th Century.

Selling individual leaves might well have been a good and pious work in that century and that country, particularly in the period of the 1840s. Catholic churches did not hesitate to melt down the gold and silver of their treasuries when need was.

But this is all opinion. I believe we have had enough of the jouranlistic habit of opining in the exchanges on this issue. I am particularly bemused that a fine American benefactor of libraries and museums and colleges [and Lord knows what else, in this country and in Britain - I note the preservation of the Battlefield of Hastings] should be the object of slander and calumny from the
resident of country whence we have the most recent large instances of the destruction of books.

But I believe readers of this article are mature enough in our book profession to give up trying to persuade those who will not hear; and have wearied of accusations of vandalism and money-grubbing and what else. [Arthur Houghton "weak-kneed before the IRS" is a marvelous picture and deserving of a cartoon. He would probably have commissioned one]. As Cardinal Newman finally
addressed his protagonist in his APOLOGIA: "Who is Mr. Kingsley? Mr. Kingsley, away with you! fly away!".

Gabriel Austin is an author/editor on matters bibliographic.

The Houghton story

The Houghton story was the kick-off point for this debate. The Shanameh
manuscript was one of the most famous of Persian manuscripts. It was apparently sold by the descendants of Baron Edmund de Rothschild in 1959 to Arthur A. Houghton Jr. According to one debater, when Houghton purchased the manuscript he first made a facsimile copy of it, a "project [which] took several years, including detaching the leaves from the bindings so that the pages could be photographed flat."

Reportedly Houghton wanted to present the manuscript to the Metropolitan Museum. But the IRS, this debater says, questioned the valuation and insisted on some manner of better determining it, including auctioning some of the leaves. And there the debate really got hot.

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