The Inventory

The only book of inventory in the archive is dated from October 1929 till November 1932, which includes 348 pages of records on all the new books entering the library system (through purchase, donation, etc.) during that time period. Curiously, this timestamp coincides with the projected endpoint of the catalogues; the use of inventory thus might be related to the aforementioned systematic change in the library’s organization of its holdings. The two main questions are therefore: did the library keep inventory before 1929, and did it update catalogues after 1929? In other words, did inventory replace catalogues, or were they operating concurrently?

Each entry in the inventory includes, in the following order, an index number (without any prefixes indicating its genre), the title, the author’s name (often only the last name), the place and date of publication, and sometimes the source of the acquisition, such as the name of the donor. In contrast to the catalogues, the index numbers in the inventory are sequential, and range from 24,852 to 28,419, making a total of 3,568 books. Unlike the catalogues, the inventory features the time period that it covers as well as its range of numbers, neatly written on the first page. This suggests that the inventory might be part of a longer, continuing practice, of which the records from earlier years (and of numbers before 24,852) are unfortunately lost. It is an organizational system for librarians, especially useful to keep track of the number of books coming in, the order in which they came from, and where they came from. The catalogues, by contrast, are an organizational system for readers, to keep track of the books written by a particular author, regardless of where and when the books came in. Both use an index system to enable searchability: the former focuses on the process and therefore relies on time and sequentiality; the latter focuses on the product and its integrality. Let us assume that both operated concurrently to record continual accumulations of the library’s holding, the inventory - how it has been accumulated; the catalogues - what has been accumulated.

Intriguingly, this range of the inventory numbers does not align well with the catalogue numbers. The smallest number in the inventory (1929-1932) is 24,852, while numbers for borrowed books on the membership cards are mostly in four digits. Within our sample of cards (to be examined later), only about 8% of the numbers have five digits, of which the largest is 16,826. Among all the cards we photographed, the largest number is 19,212, which is still far from 24,852. The year distribution of the cards falls relatively evenly in terms of pre-1929 and post-1929, and thus should not be an intervening factor. Moreover, the largest number in the 1924-1928 belletristic catalogue is 8,958, which would entail an absurd increase from 8,958 to 24,852 within less than a year if the catalogue number equated to the inventory number for a given book.

There are two possibly explanations for this lack of overlap in the numbers: 1) None amongst the more than 300 readers who joined the library from 1929 till 1934 (the latest date on the membership cards) had borrowed any of the library’s recent (i.e. 1929-1932) acquisitions. This is a relatively unlikely scenario, and only possible if the library had prevented these books to be borrowable by the members: if they took a particularly long time to be sorted and labeled; if they were somehow lost and destroyed after entering the inventory; if they were restricted to on-site reading only, etc. 2) The library used a different numbering system for the catalogues than for the inventory. These newly acquired books could have been first recorded in the inventory, where their numbering indicates their chronological order, and then sorted according to genre and re-recorded in their respective catalogues with a different index number. Had the library stopped updating catalogues after 1929 and relied on the inventory as the sole method of organization, the inventory numbers (24,852-28,419) would have been featured on the readers’ cards as they borrowed these books. The absence of these numbers – and the presence of numbers larger than 8,958 – reveals that new books kept being added at least to the belletristic catalogue after 1929, and these books would have been recorded in this inventory. Therefore, the absence of pre-1929 inventories and of post-1929 catalogues does not suggest their non-existence or a drastic transformation of organizational practices, though it is unclear why the library chose to start new catalogues in 1929 – even if there is still ample space within the existing philosophy catalogue, for example.