Virginia Grace Kendall is an Art Historian and Consultant Researcher at the Library of the Norwegian Institute in Rome. She is a chief contributor to the project Digitalizing the Archive: A Roman Chapter in HF's History, which aims to make the Institute’s archives more visible and accessible to students, researchers, and the interested public.
Over the last year as a library intern and consultant researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Rome, I have immersed myself in the library’s large and varied collection of offprints. These little excerpts, quite thin, often fragile, and relentlessly nondescript at first glance, are nevertheless delightful to handle. They contain the personal touch of so many scholars who, in their day, were important to the art-historical and archaeological work of Rome and beyond. Through old ownership marks and personal inscriptions, I have begun to understand the networks of people involved with the activity of this institution, as well as their interests, specifically through the evolution of a small corner of our library. Furthermore, it is clear that offprints are important, perhaps even indispensable, for the study of not only the Norwegian Institute of Rome and its environs, but for the field of institutional history in general. But, what, some readers may be wondering, is an offprint?
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What Is an Offprint?
An offprint (særtrykk, estratto, Sonderdruck, extrait, etc.) is a short excerpt from a collection of essays, an academic journal, or some such publication, printed separately from the rest of its intended collection for private, non-commercial distribution by the offprint’s receiver, which is typically the author. A phenomenon that began in the eighteenth century, the exchange of offprints between scholars was an ever-present part of academic life. Researchers relied on offprints as tools of proliferation and networking, as they could disseminate their new findings among targeted institutions and scholars before distribution of their work began publicly. Additionally, young scholars would send their works to seasoned professors for critique and, perhaps, in order to procure a mentorship. In the not-so-distant past, complimentary copies of offprints were given by publishers to authors in the dozens or hundreds, and authors used them to create and maintain connections with other scholars throughout their spheres of academic influence.
Why Offprints Matter
Today, this is not so. In the age of the impersonal PDF, offprints are decidedly obsolete as networking tools, in favor of digital accessibility. Furthermore, offprints do not often receive attention as objects of modern print culture, worthy of study. Lacking the gravitas of a proper book, offprints more closely resemble ephemera, such as brochures, lectures, inaugural addresses, or other booklets distributed for one-time events, rather than finished publications. Librarians often have difficulty cataloguing them, as they cannot be treated as publications that are independent from the journal they came from, but should nevertheless be treated as discreet works in a catalog (regardless of whether or not their frequently homemade title pages include any explicit reference to their original publication). These challenges are likely why it is not uncommon to find libraries that have made no effort to catalog their offprints in any way, thus allowing these little works to collect dust in (hopefully) acid-free storage containers.
Offprints are redundant by nature and, for that reason, a little troublesome. Yet, they should not be ignored or avoided. According to Carlos Spoerhase, there was a time when constructing these “archives of academic exchange” was not only a common practice, but considered to be a necessary one. The founders of DNIR’s library shared this belief, the proof of which can be found in a 1959 letter from then acting librarian Hjalmar Torp to Danish archaeologist Ejnar Dyggve, detailing the formation of a collection of around two-hundred or so offprints.
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Building DNIR’s “Archive of Academic Exchange”
This fledgling accumulation of little estratti developed into a formidable collection. Today, the library of the Norwegian Institute of Rome houses over 2500 offprints down in the annex of the library, 2331 of which have been catalogued. 788 total authors are represented in the catalogued portion of the collection. And although the collection does range from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, the bulk of the offprints come from publications released between the 1930s to the 60s. These little publications are by scholars from all over the world, written in more than fifteen languages such as Norwegian, Italian, German, English, Swedish, Danish, French, Hungarian, Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese, Finnish, and Croatian.
During my investigation, I chose to take note of three major categories of marks, all of which reveal something about the provenance of a given offprint: the ownership or donor mark, old catalog numbers, and handwritten notes or inscriptions, the handwritten notes being the most important elements. Most inscriptions are merely a stamped or written formulaic greeting such as the common phrase “homage de l’auteur,” accompanied perhaps by a signature from the author.
Other offprints, however, contain longer and more personal inscriptions, or even handwritten letters, such as the one shown here from the Norwegian neuroscientist Henrik Seyffarth to Hans Peter L’Orange. Naturally, these more thoughtful notes which depart from the widely-used refrain “homage from the author” are both glimpses into the manners and mores of scholars in the mid-twentieth century, while also serving as windows into the personalities and lives of our founders and their many connections. These unassuming excerpts reveal incisively the physical mechanisms by which ideas were exchanged, the etiquette and collegiality employed to maintain useful relationships, and the true friendships that resulted in the formation of institutes and museums.
Learning from the Past
Studying the great scholars that founded our institute and the other national research organizations of Rome is an important, self-reflective activity. I argue that it is beneficial to learn from those on whose shoulders we stand, and I have learned firsthand that offprints are an eminently important tool to help us accomplish this. Not only might we recognize ourselves in the humanity of these penned inscriptions and the relationships they reveal, but we should be inspired by the scholarly reciprocity which these offprints represented and facilitated.
This blog post is a synthesis of a research endeavor connected to the library’s ongoing digitization project, sponsored by Humit – Centre for digital development at HF. The Norwegian Institute’s library will be releasing a complete presentation of this research on offrints in the first of three digital exhibitions, which will be published later in April. Through this digital format, we aim to make the contents of the Institute’s library and archives more visible, and to make our offprints, photographs, and other archival materials more easily accessible to both students and researchers.
