Magdalene College Magazine No.63 2018-19

BOOK REVIEWS C S KNIGHTON (ed), Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College: Cambridge: Supplementary Series II. Collections 1 (Boydell & Brewer, 2018, 525pp) More than forty years ago Robert Latham, as Pepys Librarian, commenced a project to catalogue the great library of Samuel Pepys at Magdalene.

This volume is the ninth to be published and is the second in the Supplementary Series which was began in 2004 by Latham’s successor, Richard Luckett, at the suggestion of Dr Charles Knighton, now Principal Assistant Keeper of Archives at Clifton College, Bristol, and a widely published authority on Pepys. With the active encouragement of the current Pepys Librarian, Dr Jane Hughes, Charles Knighton continues a distinguished series with a publication that is indispensable to the fuller understanding of Pepys’s extraordinary collection.

Before this modern undertaking, the only general catalogue was that made

by John Jackson, in two volumes, under his uncle Pepys’s direction. This consists of an alphabetical index with both class and subject catalogues, with the books numbered from 1 (the smallest) to 3,000 (the largest). Nonetheless, Pepys's books have been catalogued in other ways and on many occasions during his lifetime and in the centuries since. Pepys attended closely to the arrangement of his books, as he pondered the range of his acquisitions, adding new titles and disposing of others. He was greatly concerned to catalogue his collection, renumbering many of his prized volumes when he moved them between shelves.

His bookcases protected books arranged by size, but the size, appearance and, crucially, the original cataloguing, of many volumes disguised their construction: many volumes contain dozens of small pamphlets and printed items, gathered together under a generic title given to them by their proud collector.

The cataloguing of these miscellaneous works has been the task of the Supplementary Series of the modern catalogue to the Pepys collection. This new Catalogue volume contains three sections: Maritime, comprising the four Pepysian volumes of Sea Tracts and one of Naval Pamphlets; Religious, comprising the eight volumes of Sermons Polemical, the three of Liturgick Controversies, one of Sermons on the Death of Queen Mary, and the ten of Convocation Pamphlets; and finally Political, comprising a volume of Parliamentary Votes and Papers, and seven of Narratives and Tryals. Each separately bound volume of pamphlets has its own original catalogue number, with a number in brackets 90