Update on the Tosti collection

Hi everyone,
I have been continuing the process of opening up volumes, going through to see if anything is missing/tipped in, and doing condition reports on the prints. This process is pretty smooth, but I am noticing things that I want to look into a little more. For instance, the volumes (which are all pretty big, but of varying sizes) are all bound a bit differently. Some volumes were clearly bound by the BPL: they have cloth bindings, the spines are stamped with BPL stamps, and the bindings are also stamped with numbers that we're pretty sure are the BPL identifying numbers (the A.2.1 kind of numbers that I mentioned last week). But this week I started working on some volumes that are covered in marbled paper, have gilt decorations on the spine, and have different identifying numbers that were possibly the original numbers used by Tosti. The different kinds of bindings have made me interested in how the prints were originally collected and organized: did Tosti buy volumes of prints already bound together? Did he select certain prints from his collection to be bound together? I think it would be cool to learn more about how the collection was originally organized and bound...if that information is out there somewhere!

Another update is the annotated catalog that Martha and the inventory workers found in the stacks. I have been working with a digitized version of the nineteenth century catalog of the Tosti collection, and a while ago, at some point, someone took the catalog, pasted it into a book, and annotated the catalog. This annotated catalog is going to be digitized and I am very excited to spend time looking at it: the annotations include information about portrait sitters, dates for the prints, and other notes that will be very helpful.

It seems like every time I open a new volume, I am learning something new about the collection!