The Most Dangerous Word in My Business Is “Probably”

There is a moment in cataloging when I become extremely attached to a fact that I cannot prove. It is almost always a very good fact.

The date fits. The names fit. The history fits. Three hours of research have led me directly to it, and by this point I am emotionally invested in its being true.

There is only one problem. I can’t prove it.

Welcome to one of the less glamorous parts of rare book dealing: deleting the best sentence in the catalog description.

Rare books are usually somewhat cooperative. They have title pages. They give you an author, publisher, place and date. They may occasionally lie about one of these things, just to keep catalogers humble, but at least there is somewhere to begin.

Ephemera is considerably less accommodating. A flyer might not have a date. A photograph might not have any names. A pamphlet might identify an organization that seems to have existed for approximately eleven minutes in 1972.

A stack of letters may refer repeatedly to “Bob,” apparently confident that fifty years later I will know exactly who Bob was.

I do not. So I start digging.

A name leads to an organization. The organization leads to a newspaper article. The article mentions an event. Suddenly the anonymous piece of paper on my desk begins acquiring a place, a date and a history.

This is one of my favorite parts of the job. It is also where things get dangerous. Because sometimes the evidence gets you almost to the answer. Everything about an undated protest flyer suggests 1970. The organization was active in 1970. The issue was being debated in 1970. I may even find a newspaper article describing a remarkably similar protest.

Probably 1970. There it is.

Probably is a perfectly respectable word. The trouble begins when probably quietly becomes was. That tiny change can turn careful cataloging into historical fiction.

And I am a rare book dealer. Historical fiction is another department.

People tend to think of research as accumulation. You keep discovering things until you have a magnificent catalog description overflowing with historical detail.

Sometimes. Other times, I spend an afternoon researching something and end up with fewer words than I had when I started.

A wonderful attribution disappears. A date becomes “circa.” A confident identification becomes “possibly.” A sentence I particularly loved gets highlighted and deleted. There should probably be a tiny memorial service for some of these sentences. They were excellent sentences. They just weren’t necessarily true.

The same caution applies to rarity. When I write “no copies located,” that means exactly that. It does not mean unique. Another copy could be sitting in an uncataloged archive, described differently in a library catalog, or owned privately.

Ephemera is very good at hiding. There is a surprisingly large difference between “I couldn't find another one” and “there isn't another one.”

The first is research. The second requires evidence I don't have.

Over the years, I have become very fond of circa, apparently, possibly, likely and we have been unable to determine. But perhaps the most useful three words in cataloging are:

I don’t know. An object is allowed to have mysteries.

My job isn't to solve every one of them. My job is to know the difference between what the object tells me, what the evidence allows me to conclude, and what I desperately wish were true because it would make an absolutely fantastic catalog description.

So I research. I follow names. I search catalogs. I disappear down rabbit holes. I become unreasonably excited when two obscure pieces of information suddenly connect. And then I ask one last question:

Do I know this?

Or do I probably know it?

Sometimes the answer means deleting my favorite sentence.

It still hurts every time.