As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have been looking for a copy of this book for some time, with no success. It’s a bit of a good-news-bad-news story.
Good News: Roberts & Watson not only reproduce in entirety Dee’s manuscript catalog of his library collection, but they annotate almost every entry, indicating whether the original has been found and where, what marginal notes Dee wrote in them, and so on. It’s a treasure trove of information on what was the finest library in England at the time, in addition to showing where Dee’s interests were strongest (mathematics, optics, alchemy) and where it was weakest (magic, interestingly, is one of the least represented topics).
Bad News: The book is out of print, with all major book finders saying things like “we don’t know when or if it will be available again.”
Good: UT’s Perry-Castaneda Library (PCL) has a copy, and it was available when I went looking for it. This means I can not only read it, I can scan the relevant portions of it for my thesis research.
Bad: The book is in quarto, that is, it’s an oversized edition and my scanner can only capture a portion of each page.
Good: The PCL has oversized scanners in the computer lab.
Bad: They’re ergonomically set up bass-ackwards (the lids open towards you, you can’t reach the mouse when holding the book in position, etc.), the computers are running Vista and a version of the scanning software that is a total kludge to use, compared to what I’ve got on my own machine. Furthermore, the plates of Dee’s manuscript, which are reproductions of his handwritten manuscript (quill and ink on parchment, in Latin), are difficult to read, which means each scan must be fiddled with in Photoshop to make them readable. Worst, you only get an hour at a time on the PCL workstations, which given the rest of what I’ve said means getting maybe a dozen pages scanned per session. The plates of Dee’s manuscript alone come to some 200 pages.
…and so on.
BUT! I discovered last night that the authors include not one, but four different indices, including an alphabetical listing of all authors represented in the collection, and a listing by subject. This makes my task so much easier: I don’t even need to scan the manuscript pages, just the indices. Total score!
(I still want my own copy of the book, though.)
