Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century: A Report from Two Workshops

Summary

THE FIRST SELF-PROCLAIMED General Bibliography of Printed Inventories (Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés) (1892–1895), arduously compiled by Fernand de Mély and Edmund Bishop, starts with an immediate disclaimer: “If the fear of incompleteness had deterred its two authors, th[is] publication … would have never seen the light of day.” “We have only included inventories properly speaking,” the preface states, leaving aside “manuscript and library” catalogues, “mere lists of relics,” and “testaments and literary descriptions,” which “would have carried us too far.” De Mély and Bishop's pointed reference to “proper” inventories (as distinct from other types of itemized written records) calls for further examination. While the volume does not offer any definitions for the terms it invokes, the commentary here can be considered against the background of nineteenth-century dictionary entries. In Larousse's Great Universal Dictionary, for example, the term “inventory” is primarily understood as a “catalogue, a record that inscribes and describes, article by article, all the objects, immovable and movable property, goods, titles, papers, belonging to a person, or found in a house or residence.” But during the nineteenth century, a growing interest in inventories of artifacts associated with historical sites or collections (such as those announced in the Bibliographie générale) gives rise to the need for more diverse and, at the same time, more systematic approaches. In the process, categorical limits are continuously tested and reexamined. By their own admission, de Mély and Bishop are “compelled to admit some exceptions,” challenging their own self-imposed criteria and thus returning to the impossible task of not going “too far.” Inventories, as de Mély and Bishop’s efforts suggest, promise an overview and a systematic organization of accumulations of discrete objects, yet are based in a sense of incompleteness visà- vis the excess of practices of storing, listing, ordering, and recording with which they are confronted.

De Mély and Bishop's multivolume undertaking thus serves as an apt starting point for a discussion around the slippery margins of inventorying categories, their nineteenth-century histories, media practices, and techniques. What cultural premises mark the increased awareness of the importance of inventorying that gives rise to metaprojects such as the Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés?