Collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America’s Gilded Age was fraught with risk because of the uncertain identities of the artists and the conflicting interests of the dealers. Stanley Mazaroff’s fascinating account of the close relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the era’s preeminent connoisseur of Italian paintings, richly illustrates this important chapter of America’s cultural history. When Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, it was labeled as America’s “Great Temple of Art.” With more than 500 Italian paintings, including self-portraits purportedly by Raphael and Michelangelo, Walters’s collection was compared favorably with the great collections in London, Paris, and Berlin. In the midst of this fanfare, Berenson contacted Walters and offered to analyze his collection, sell him additional paintings, and write a scholarly catalogue that would trumpet the collection on both sides of the Atlantic. What Berenson offered was what Walters desperately needed—a badge of scholarship that Berenson’s invaluable imprimatur would undoubtedly bring. By 1912, Walters had become Berenson’s most active client, their business alliance wrapped in a warm and personal friendship. But this relationship soon became strained and was finally severed by a confluence of broken promises, inattention, deceit, and ethical conflict. To Walters’s chagrin, Berenson swept away the self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo and publicly scorned paintings that he was supposed to praise. Though painful to Walters, Berenson’s guidance ultimately led to a panoramic collection that beautifully told the great history of Italian Renaissance painting. Based primarily on correspondence and other archival documents recently discovered at the Walters Art Museum and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the intriguing story of Walters and Berenson offers unusual insight into the pleasures and perils of collecting Italian Renaissance paintings, the ethics in the marketplace, and the founding of American art museums.

By the late nineteenth century, advances in medical knowledge, technology and pharmaceuticals led to the development of a thriving commercial industry. The medical trade catalogue became one of the most important means of promoting the latest tools and techniques to practitioners. Drawing on over 400 catalogues produced between 1870 and 1914, Jones presents a study of the changing nature of medical professionalism. She examines the use of the catalogue in connecting the previously separate worlds of medicine and commerce and discusses its importance to the study of print history more widely.

A Manual of Cataloguing Practice is a text on cataloguing and covers topics ranging from the major cataloguing codes to the subject catalogue, the name catalogue, and cataloguing of special materials. Physical forms of catalogue are also considered, along with the filing and arrangement of catalogue entries; centralized and cooperative cataloguing; the organization of cataloguing; and the relation of cataloguing to modern methods of information retrieval. This manual is comprised of 16 chapters and begins with an overview of the nature and purpose of catalogues, as well as the history of cataloguing and catalogues. The discussion then turns to the development and application of the major cataloguing codes, including the British Museum Cataloguing Rules; the Vatican Code; the American Library Association Rules 1949; and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 1967. Some particular problems of author-title cataloguing are considered, together with the solutions suggested by some of the major codes and the practices of some individual libraries. External guides (instructions for the use of the catalogue) and internal guides (""signposts"" within the catalogue) are also discussed. Finally, the future of cataloguing is examined. This book will be a useful resource for practicing cataloguers and librarians as well as students of librarianship.