By Ann-Marie Hansen
This unassuming little volume, barely bigger than your smartphone, is found at shelfmark Fag.I.9.61, the prefix signalling that it is part of the Library’s Fagel Collection. It is one of over 130 lots, and even more titles, from that collection which are on the subject of numismatics – that is the study of coins and medals. The work is a sammelband, meaning that within one binding it contains multiple separately published imprints. In this case, all three titles were printed in Amsterdam in the years 1558-1559, and document the value of gold and silver coins in the late sixteenth century, and are illustrated with examples of the coins in question. Because of the commercially significant nature of such information, it was essential that the textual and visual contents be correct, and so such publications were produced by printers with political permissions. In this case, all three imprints were published by Jan Ewoutzoon, who proudly indicated that he was printer and engraver to the king, as a gage of reliability. In Amsterdam of the late 1550s, this referred to Philip II of Spain (depicted on the left), as it would be another ten years before the Dutch Revolt. His father Charles V is depicted in the centre, in a re-edition depicting currency from the 1540s.
In actual fact however, only the first of these title pages is found in the Fagel copy. The others shown here are borrowed from digitisations of copies held in Gent’s university library. The Fagel copy looks more like this:
A mutilated book like this is worrying to see, especially for librarians, who begin to wonder, not only who would do such a thing, but – more importantly from a security perspective – when this happened. In 2004, a member of staff pencilled onto the flyleaf of this volume that the ‘Book [is] noted to be badly cut up’, so that at the very least we can be sure the hatchet-job happened before then. Prior to that, the Bibliotheca Fageliana catalogue from 1802 notes the volume to be ‘imperfect’, but that term hardly seems severe enough, considering the number of leaves damaged and missing. But then again, that description was made with the intention of selling the book at auction, so a minimising description of the damage makes sense.
The story about a book found in this state would normally end here, perhaps with some hypothesizing about the possible motivations for such curious cutting patterns, which seem to privilege the extraction of particular images, rather than a less attention-grabbing removal of whole pages. But as mentioned above, this volume fits into a larger collection, which provides additional context to explain this.
Another strange book from the Fagel Collection had drawn my attention a few years ago: Fag.Q.1.34, a large folio volume which contains the engravings that illustrated Gerard van Loon’s 1723 Nederlandsche historipenningen seedert de overdragt der heerschappye van keyser Carel de vyfden [Dutch historical coins since the abdication of emperor Charles V], a history of the early period of the Dutch Republic, as documented by coins and medals of the period.
This copy work contains no printed text, with the engravings surrounded by manuscript commentary. Additionally, it has been augmented with cut out medallions of printed and drawn coins, pasted onto the blank versos. So while the additions to this metallic history of the Netherlands do not overlap with the period documented in Ewoutzoon’s pillaged editions in Fag.I.9.61, this object does exemplify the kind of activity which may have motivated the cutting out of specific coins and illustrations.
With a little care, the portrait of Charles V figuring on the 1558 title page might have resulted in a neat little cut-out figure for reuse elsewhere… and perhaps it is even this exact copy which has been reused in another item from the Fagel Collection, now known as IE TCD MS 988 vol. XV.
The anonymous title-page is dated 1641, the several hundred pages of the manuscript are filled with careful script describing coins and medals telling of Charles V and his ancestors, then medals etc of Philip II, with yet others illustrating the history of the Netherlands. Many hundreds of cut-outs have been incorporated into this telling of the history of the foundational years of the Dutch Republic until 1629. The chronological scope therefore extends well past the coins depicted in the edition from 1558 where we began, suggesting that many more printed books will have been harvested for illustrations, most which probably did not survive.
This is what makes Fag.I.9.61 so interesting. While in bibliographic terms it is ‘imperfect’, in fact it tells a story of book use that is much less about destruction, and much more about the creation of something new. Now with the digital availability of more complete copies elsewhere, it is possible to puzzle some of these pieces back together, reconnecting disparate books from within the Fagel Collection to a single shared and even older history.
Dr Ann-Marie Hansen is a book historian and cultural heritage professional with a particular interest in the material evidence of early modern book use. She previously worked as project manager for the Unlocking the Fagel Collection project (2021-2025), and is now senior researcher for Co3Dicology – Investigating the Codicology of Medieval Bookbindings through Digital Imaging (Univ. Paris1 Sorbonne-Panthéon).
