In Memoriam Christoph J. Scriba (6 October 1929-26 July 2013)

Journal article

Academic tools are seldom seen by others, but can be most revealing. During a stay of over two years in Oxford in the early 1960s, working towards his habilitation thesis, Christoph Scriba prepared a personal card catalogue of all the letters of John Wallis (1616–1703) he had unearthed in, amongst other places, the Bodleian and various college libraries, in the Royal Society and the British Museum. On each card he noted details of date, manuscript and printed sources, and any other relevant bibliographic information. This was not all. He also produced two further catalogues: one of all manuscripts containing Wallis’s papers and letters, listing systematically the content of each of the folio sheets, and one of all the books formerly in the Library of the Savilian professors, now part of the Bodleian, giving precise details of when he had ordered each of the books and when they had been returned to the stacks, after inspection for underlining, marginalia, and so on. Nor did he buy neat new cards specifically for this purpose, as they would have been available from Oxford stationers at the time. Instead, he re-cycled the insides of envelopes used for sending him letters, some white, some brown, some grey, cutting them down to a uniform size. And these cards, carefully inscribed, were not housed in a varnished wooden box such as could then be found in libraries or offices up and down the country, but rather in re-used cartons, one for coffee filters here, one for a presentation table lighter there. The appearance does not diminish the content or the value in any way. These painstakingly produced catalogues and records of scholarly practice were not only accurate and reliable, but also contained a wealth of information which has only very rarely been superseded. Historical research instruments born of the shortages of post-war Europe and prepared by a careful mind averse to wastefulness, they are still in use today.

Authors: Beeley, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Historia Mathematica
• Volume: 41
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 6-12
• Publication date: 2014-01-29
• Acceptance date: 2013-11-20
• DOI: 10.1016/j.hm.2014.01.004
• ISSN: 1090-249X