“I can do only two things in this world: love and read.” –book thief Guglielmo Libri to François Guizot, 1845

Special Collections Cataloging at Penn

Recently in the rare book cataloging department at the University of Pennsylvania, a not-very-exciting-looking red two-volume set appeared at the top of my stack of books to catalog in the French Culture Class Collection.  From a cursory look at the volumes, I could see it was a collection of items in various formats–published pamphlets, newspaper clippings, and manuscript letters–bound together and all on one topic.  Both volumes had a manuscript table of contents at the front.  At the start, we didn’t know what the subject of the collection was, who compiled it, or where and when the library acquired the collection.  In rare book cataloging at Penn, we’ve begun to create finding aids to describe some of the more unusual items in our collections that warrant further description than we can fit into a traditional catalog record. This set seemed like a perfect candidate to be described in a finding…

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