Book Trade Catalogues: From Bookselling Tool to Book Historical Source

In 1625, the University of Leiden appointed a young mathematician, Jacobus Golius, as their new professor of Arabic and Oriental Languages.Golius was filling a distinguished post, succeeding the late Thomas Erpenius, an international philological star.Leiden was a young university, and its prestige as a centre for the study of Oriental Languages was crucial to its appeal to students across Europe.Recruiting distinguished professors was the first strategy that Leiden employed to maintain its lustre: the other was to acquire an unrivalled collection of rare books.For this reason, Golius set off, only a year after his appointment, on a four year long tour of the Eastern Mediterranean, in search of Arabic and Oriental manuscripts.The trip was an overwhelming success, and Golius was received home in 1629 in the fashion of a triumphant conqueror returning with spoils of war.Some 230 Arabic, Turkish and Persian works were presented by Golius to the university library, cementing Leiden's reputation, after the Bodleian Library in Oxford, as the greatest centre of Oriental studies in the western world.Over the years, however, it emerged that Golius had not delivered to Leiden the entire haul of his funded tour of the Levant.Some of the most prized pieces he had kept for himself, including several books by the Greek mathematician Apollonius, previously presumed lost.Golius claimed to fellow scholars that he was working to prepare these manuscripts for publication, and thus required them for himself, but apart from a single Arabic-Latin lexicon, no further volumes were disgorged.1When Golius died in 1667, his valuable library passed to his heirs, who prepared to sell its entirety at auction.Leiden University offered to purchase the collection en masse, but could not raise adequate funds.To highlight the distinction of the collection, the library was split between the 353 rare Oriental manuscripts, including 36 Chinese books, and the main part of the collection, composed of some 4,300 items.The sale of the main library 1