François Fagel’s Bookcases: Visualising an Early Eighteenth-century Dutch Library in Trinity College Dublin

A lecture by Joe Nankivell (Senior Bibliographer, TCD Library) for the Centre for the Book Seminar Series.

The Fagel Collection is a remarkable survival: an early modern Dutch library in exile, owned by successive generations of the Fagel family, and rescued from dispersal at auction when it was purchased for Trinity College Dublin in 1802. Since then it has been preserved largely intact in the College library. It is a complex, layered collection, and a treasure trove for book historians. Since 2020 the project Unlocking the Fagel Collection has been peeling back its layers, cataloguing its 33,000 items, documenting their material characteristics, and conducting provenance research to examine the library’s relationship with its earlier owners.
 
This talk explores an earlier iteration of the Fagel Collection. In 1724, François Fagel the Elder (1659–1746) completed a detailed handwritten catalogue of his library as it stood then. This unusual document describes the contents of eight bookcases, nearly 5,000 volumes, in considerable bibliographical detail and shelf by shelf. Over 80% of these volumes are still to be found in Trinity. The survival of both the 1724 catalogue and the library it describes offers a unique opportunity for a reconstruction of the earlier library. We will explore Fagel’s bookcases with a first look at visual browser which merges photographs of the spines of his books with collection metadata to produce an interactive bookshelf visualiser. This new tool offers a range of insights into the collection, including its layout, spatial elements, and the variety and distribution of binding styles. Reunifying the volumes on the shelf in this way restores a context that is missing when they are consulted singly in the reading room, bringing the books back into conversation with one another.
 
Joe Nankivell is senior bibliographer on the project Unlocking the Fagel Collection in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. Previously, he conducted large-scale data preparation for the retrospective conversion of TCD’s 1872 printed catalogue. He has also worked in modern collections in the libraries of UCD and TCD. His particular interests are Dutch hand-press books and the reuse of bibliographic metadata.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: volmern@tcd.ie