Anna B. G. Dunlop
SCOTTISH COMMITTEE ON ACCOUNTING HISTORY

THE PRESERVATION OF SOURCE MATERIALS

A copy of De Morgan’s Arithmetical books from the invention of printing to the present time dated 1847 in the Antiquarian Collec-tion of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland contains the passage: “The most worthless book of a bygone age is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the places of more important bodies.”

Although the number of books published since then has made us more selective today, there is still a lot of truth in that comment. All types of accounting records are potential sources of economic and accounting history. Each type (manuscripts, company records and statements, and published books) has value and should be carefulIy preserved.
Manuscript Materials

Manuscript accounting material may have considerable side-value, for social or political history. As R. Waldron said recently in his article, “The Necessity of Preserving Accounting

Old manuscript accounts may also aid language studies. A strik-ing example of this was a Scots tailor’s MS account book dated 1629 in the Scottish Institute’s Antiquarian Collection. This was lent for several months to the staff of the Scottish National Dictionary of the old Scots language, at Edinburgh University. At that time the dictionary project had been going for 30 years; yet this book yielded 200 more “new” old words: it was full of tailors’ jargon.

First catch your manuscript — The accounting historian’s part in the wider preservation (i.e., keeping of old documents) is to conduct a campaign to persuade people—and this include librarians who are forced to prune their stocks of material through lack of space—not to destroy old busi-ness records or printed books until an accountant expert has ex-amined them. Even families may uncover and turn out useful his-torical records when they move house. (A former member of the Scottish Institute staff moved into a house two years ago and found newspapers dated 1928 under the floor-covering!)

During the second world war there was, especially in Britain, a very active salvage drive for paper. This meant that large quantities of old books, both in manuscript (for example, books of accounts) and printed form, were pulped in order to keep up the manufacture of paper. There was not time to sift the wastepaper—and anyway the experts were mostly otherwise engaged elsewhere. In this way, irreparable gaps were created in accounting history source material.

Today we have, in many parts of the world, recycling programs; again there is a danger of valuable material being lost. But now ac-counting historians are more numerous and they are alert to the wisdom of selecting that small proportion which should be retained for study from the material being thrown out. Recycling should be continued but such screening would cause no appreciable loss and a gain could be achieved for accounting history. Before a batch of business records is scheduled for recycling, it should be automatic for the owner or custodian to inform someone able to select what is of historical value, not only a librarian or museum keeper but also an accountant, who could at least put in touch an appropriate researcher. But action must be taken quickly.

The question of confidentiality arises if the manuscripts are fairly recent. This may be solved by advising the owner to donate them to an institution, with limited access, or for future use only, or even to “reserve” them for a stated period. Another difficulty may be that the owner, even when he has agreed that the records should be retained, may stipulate that they be placed in a local institution, which may or may not be geared to material of this kind. In such a case advice may be welcomed from an accountant.

There are very full archives in existence of some of the older manuscripts, for instance the Datini accounts in Prato in Italy. There are also probably large quantities of business records of the more recent past, mostly inaccessible. Preservation of really old docu-ments is so highly specialized that it would always be necessary to place them in the hands of experts.

Repair the damage — An example of what can be done with fragile pages is the pre-servation of a brittle, half-burned page with writing on both sides, which was placed in a frame of paper whose inner edges had been cut to fit the charred edges of the original page. Then the whole was sandwiched in thin tissue and heat-bonded together for a few seconds in an oven, so that it can be freely handled and bound into a book. It cannot be torn.

Some pages may be washed and hung up to dry, after having been made nonporous by an application of size. They may be mended by pasting on translucent tissue, which could be very thin silk. Self-sticking tape is not good for this purpose: in time it deteriorates and breaks and mars the page. If a page has become detached it can be bound into the gutter of a book (inside of the spine) by its inner edge being pasted on both sides into a guard, a strip of strong paper folded vertically which is sewn to the spine inside.

Pages affected by moisture can be made non-porous and strengthened in similar ways, but of course writing that has been made illegible by damage cannot be restored, though when the page can be handled and studied closely, historians can sometimes make inspired guesses.
Then tame it

Once the material has been safeguarded from destruction, whether within a larger collection or on its own, it needs to be catalogued and stored-catalogued to make it known and to “fix” it (here illustrations are a great help), stored in a form which makes it easily accessible to researchers. The more publicity it receives the better, whether by articles or news items in local newspapers, a television interview, or mention in learned journals. A published catalogue, or even a handlist, is more useful in this respect than a card index (though the two may be combined by photographing down the cards). Another idea is a local exhibition of business archives, with expert captions for the exhibits. This could provide another route towards a published explanatory catalogue.

Another means of “fixing” a collection of early manuscripts is to have them transcribed into typescript or type, and translated, if necessary. This could mean calling in other experts, not only in language but in handwriting. Some of the older manuscripts are easier to read than later ones, since the early writing is by profes-sional scribes, practically the only people who could write at the time. They had a certain uniformity of style and a system of ab-breviations. However, only the wealthier cities (of which Edinburgh was not one, in the 16th century) could afford a professional scribe for their municipal accounts.

In later centuries—say the 17th in Scotland and England—liter-acy had spread to Thomas, Richard and Henry (though not yet to Tom, Dick and Harry), and the more familiar they became with writing the more cursive and fast their handwriting grew, and the more idiosyncratic or even careless they became. Spelling was anything but consistent.

The classical order of the 18th century, with the rise of the writ-ing-masters and calligraphers, brought an improvement in legibil-ity, and similar progressions apply to many other countries.

COMPANY ACCOUNTS

A few years ago a collection of company accounts (financial statements of corporations) was started by the Scottish Institute. Major industrial concerns were circularized and invited to send an-nually a complimentary copy of their annual report and accounts, with, in the first instance, accounts of as many previous years as they cared to contribute. Most companies complied handsomely. One company sent an unbroken sequence of 93 years’ accounts, and several sent sets covering 50 to 70 years, a number 25 years upwards. Some companies very kindly filled gaps with photocopies of unique documents.

Among the benefits of collecting company accounts are that such a collection is easily maintained and takes up little space, though it needs strong shelves to support the weight. A collection of company accounts would lend itself well to microfilming. Some of the Scottish Institute’s company account archives have been out on extended loan for research, and they also have been consulted from time to time.

Amalgamations of long-established accountancy or legal firms can bring interesting records to light. Business bankruptcies, liqui-dations and mergers should all make the noses of accounting his-torians twitch in anticipation. Official bodies have been set up to help preserve business records: in Britain there are the Business Archives Council (which covers England and Wales) and the Business Archives Council for Scotland. The Chairman of the Scottish body, Mr. R. C. Smith, is a member of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and also sits on the Institute’s Scottish Committee on Accounting History.

Printed Books

For accounting history studies in general more source material has been printed than is available in manuscript.

Book-hunting

Acquisition of this kind of accounting history source material is most likely to be by purchase, though bequests and donations of books are made to libraries from time to time. The book auction scene is becoming more and more difficult, even for the average institutional buyer. This is a sport that is rapidly becoming too ex-pensive for the individual, though there are still some possibilities.

Inflation is doubly to blame, first by pushing up the prices, and second by creating an “artificial” demand for old books—and other antiques—as a form of inflation-proof investment. Annual book auction records chart the value of books as investments. In the Scottish Institute’s Collection there is a Portuguese book dated 1722 in fine condition, which cost £ 70 in 1968: a second copy was sold four years later, by the same auction house in London, for £ 290. There is also an excellent example of the 2nd edition of Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica, printed in Italy in 1523, which was bought for £ 2 in 1904 (say 3 dollars and 50 cents today).

The catalogues for book sales at the great auction houses in London, New York, Amsterdam and several other cities are models of their kind and most informative on rare books. So are the occasional catalogues issued by specialist bookshops in, for example, Amsterdam and Florence, Copenhagen and Brussels, London and elsewhere in the U.K. One can learn quite a lot by merely browsing through these catalogues.

Browsing, whether in antiquarian, or just second-hand bookshops, at sales or in libraries themselves, is often productive, provided the browser has expert knowledge and develops that sixth sense that leads to a ‘‘find’—a status which, once conferred on a book, usually prevents its destruction, even if it has calligraphic drawings that might attract the print collector. Unfortunately browsing is also one of the slowest ways of unearthing the more obscure account-ing history texts.

In recent years some texts which had been out of print for a long time have been reprinted commercially, on one or other side of the Atlantic (the Academy of Accounting Historians has initiated some of these reprints). Many still older texts have been microfilmed commercially. Photocopies can be feasibly made of some individual books. A certain amount of inter-library, and even international, lending is in operation. In Britain it is centered in the British Library, at Boston Spa in Lincolnshire, England.

Thus it is comparatively easy to get a copy, in one form or an-other, of a fairly wide range of works not located within reach. There is, of course, no adequate substitute for actually handling the original, and possibly variants of it, and examining it in the context of other editions or other works in a collection.

Isolated books may be useful, and even valuable, but they gain greatly from being incorporated in a group of similar items-and so, a collection is begun. Once begun, it never really ends; otherwise it becomes a fossil.

The care and maintenance of old books

The preservation of printed books shares some of the problems of manuscripts, in that clean, fresh air; exclusion of light, and es-pecially sunlight; an even temperature; low humidity; and an ab-sence of pests have not always obtained in the past. Some of the ravages of bad conditions, such as wormholes, cracked or broken joints (hinges), or pulverized leather covers, cannot be undone. The damage may have been inevitable, as in the decomposition, many years later, of calf leather bindings tanned during a certain period (1880 to 1890) when an unfortunate change was made—in Britain, at least—in the chemicals used in the process. In general, leather tanned before 1800 is more durable than the later product.
Another hazard, from the mid-19th century, was exposure to the fumes from gaslight. This was comparable to the pollution of to-day’s petrol fumes. To cope with today’s risks the best answer is to keep city collections away from open windows and in closed bookcases, though possibly with airholes. Better still, they should be in an air-filtered and conditioned atmosphere, with closed win-dows and in the shade.

Books that contain active mold, due to damp, should be ruthlessly segregated, or even photocopied and destroyed if their intrinsic value is small. Too much trust should not be placed in remedies for this contagious condition.

However, joints can be repaired with new leather, insects can be fumigated out, loose or torn pages can be mended, or the whole book can be rebound. It is generally better to retain the original binding where possible, but new joints and perhaps a new leather title label are a good compromise, and less expensive.

Contrary to some opinions, handling old books is, within reason, good for them. Some of the natural skin oil is transferred to the leather cover; the joints are kept flexible; with less risk of their be-coming so brittle that they suddenly break; and the paper gets an airing.

Since it is the absorption of sulphur from the atmosphere that damages bindings most, in particular on the spine, as the sides are normally partially protected by being up against neighboring books, cleaning the books can help preserve them. Once the leather has started disintegrating into powder, however, nothing will stop the decay.

Before that stage is reached, a leather-bound book may be washed, with saddle-soap and water, dried, and sponged with a solution of potassium lactate, to reduce the acid content and in-crease the alkaline content of the leather. Afterwards it can be re-furbished with a leather dressing. British Museum Leather Dress-ing, which includes lanolin and beeswax among its ingredients, is much used in the U.K. (though not on suede leather). The recipe is in a little book, The Preservation of Leather Bookbindings, by H. Plenderleith, published by the British Museum, in London, in several editions since 1947, the last in 1970.

One of the best texts on this subject is Cleaning and Preserving Bindings and Related Materials, by Carolyn Horton, published (2nd edition, 1969) by the American Library Association, Chicago. This is a well-illustrated book, or large pamphlet, intended for those who are not skilled in its subject, but advising when an expert binder should be called in. It has a useful bibliography and lists trade names of materials and suppliers on both sides of the Atlantic. Mrs. Horton was one of the international team of experts who helped to restore a million books in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, after the floods in Italy in 1966. She is not entirely in favor of the British Museum dressing, preferring one of the formulas proposed by Rogers and Beebe, in their leaflet, Leather Bookbindings, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in Washington, D.C., in 1956. A more detailed and specialized book is The Restoration of Leather

Bindings by B. C. Middleton, published (1972) by the American Library Association, Chicago.

Cloth and vellum bindings may be cleaned with a soft rubber eraser, and additionally vellum may be washed with milk and then wiped with water.
The results of processing books in these ways can be dramatic and lasting. After a week, several years ago, in which the Scottish Institute’s Collection was “invaded” by two of the binder’s employees, it was actually possible to read the titles on the spines of most of the books and to realize what colors the covers really were.

The vellum, from being dark gray, became creamy white, and its surface was restored. This substance is hygroscopic and is therefore apt to warp according to changes in the humidity. For this reason, it is sensible to renew, if necessary, the leather ties usually provided on the front edges of a vellum-bound book, so as to keep it from springing open.

The Follow Through

Finally, there is the effect of documentation in the preserving of sources intact. It is here that the accounting historian has the biggest part to play: the better documented a book is, the less likely that it will be thrown away. A logical stage further than descriptive writing about source material is research into its background, relating it to its historical context, finding references to it in the literature, and constructing well-authenticated theories about it, all activities which might well be fitted into current research projects. Bibliographies about such material form a first step in this process, especially when they include locations.

A typical bibliography is the first publication of the Scottish Com-mittee on Accounting History:—Accounting in Scotland: a historical bibliography, compiled by Janet Pryce-Jones and annotated by Professor R. H. Parker, which first appeared in 1974. A second edition, with over 300 more location entries, many in the U.S., was published in 1976. This book lists and locates books on accounting published in Scotland from 1683 (the earliest) to 1920. It was closely followed in 1976 by An Accountants’ Book Collection 1494-1930, the third edition of the catalogue of the Antiquarian Collection of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, which has nearly 1,000 entries and over 60 illustrations. It is arranged alphabetically, with a chronological index and an introduction.

Richard Brown, a Scottish chartered accountant active in Edin-burgh from 90 to 60 years ago, was a pioneer in accounting his-tory; he not only collected the nucleus of the Scottish Institute’s present Collection, but also searched the literature in order to plan the Collection and began to document it after it was put together. Bibliographies available to him were few: in contrast today there are many, and there are also location lists, both of books and of collections, though there is plenty of room for more.

Already there is at least one computerized bibliography for ac-counting history: Professor G. J. Previts has been extracting the pre-1900 books on accounting from the Library of Congress Na-tional Union Catalogue. One day, perhaps this bibliography will be combined with others to form an international bibliography, incor-porating holdings and locations in several countries.

It all comes down to the fact that what someone values for itself becomes valuable in the eyes of the world, and so is worth pre-serving. One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “pre-servation” is “keeping alive”, and this is the meaning that will ap-peal most to accounting historians.

REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY

(1) Collecting and Cataloguing
J. CARTER: ABC for Book Collectors (London, 1952). R. L. COLLISON: Book Collecting (London, 1957). EUROPEAN BOOK DEALERS, 2nd ed. (London, 1970-72). R. B. McKERROW: An Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1927; 1965). D. MURRAY: Bibliography: its scope and methods (Glasgow, 1917). M. J. PEARCE: A Workbook of Analytical and Descriptive Bibliography (London, 1970).
A. E. POLLARD & G. R. REDGRAVE: Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England and Scotland and Ireland (1475-1640) (London, 1956) (a supplement has
appeared and an 18th century volume is being planned).
S. ROBERTS: The Relevance of Rare Book Collections to a University Library
(Library Association Record, U.K., April, 1967). G. G. SIMPSON: Scottish Handwriting 1750-1650 (Edinburgh, 1973).
(2) Preservation
C. HORTON: Cleaning and Preserving Bindings and Related Materials, 2nd ed. (American Library Association, Chicago, 1969).
B. C. MIDDLETON: The Restoration of Leather Bookbindings (American Library
Association, Chicago, 1972)
H. J. PLENDERLEITH: The Preservation of Leather Bookbindings (British Museum, London, 1946; reprinted several times to 1970).
J. S. ROGERS & C. W. BEEBE: Leather Bookbindings (Leaflet) (US. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1956).
R. WALDRON: The Necessity of Preserving Accounting Records (Accounting His-tory, vol. 1 no. 1, Accounting History Society, England, February, 1976).