Provenance is the chain of hands through which a copy has passed, from its first owner down to the bookshop. It is traced through the marks left by successive owners: arms stamped on the covers, engraved or manuscript ex-libris, signatures on the title page, inscriptions, annotations, institutional stamps, sale labels, and, for the last two centuries, public sale catalogues, in which the copy may be found described under its owner's name. The study of provenance became in the twentieth century a discipline in its own right, with its own reference works on coats of arms, monograms and celebrated libraries.
For a bookseller, an established provenance changes the nature of a copy: a book that belonged to a writer, a scholar, a known collector or a great dispersed library carries a history that can be verified and told. Each link must be documented: an armorial binding is compared against known tools, the ex-libris against reference repertories, the signature against authenticated autographs, the sale mention against the catalogue itself. An unbroken provenance, from the contemporary binding to the most recent sale, is one of the most sought-after qualities a copy can possess.
The pitfalls lie in hasty attribution: a namesake's signature, misread arms, an ex-libris added later, a "from the library of" mention resting on nothing more than sale-room tradition. The vocabulary has its nuances, which our catalogue entries respect: "from the library of" denotes the personal library of an owner, "from the collection of" the named collection of a collector through which the piece has passed; and the recipient of a letter is not its provenance.
