In my previous post I sought help identifying a signature that is found in many of the books that came from the library of the German legal historian Konrad von Maurer (1823-1902). Von Maurer's law books were acquired in 1904 by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and later came to our Rare Book Collection. I have an answer, not from my colleagues at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2012 annual meeting in Boston where I showed the images, but via Facebook. My friend the legal historian Mark Weiner forwarded my query to his European colleagues. One of them, Professor Dr. Peter Gröschler (Chair for Civil Law and Roman Law, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), explained that the signature is an old German style of script and that it reads "Maurer". Since the earliest examples of this signature date from 1823, the year Konrad von Maurer was born, the signature is probably that of his father, Georg Ludwig von Maurer (1790-1872), himself a legal historian and statesman.

This reinforces one of the points I made at my AALL presentation, namely that crowdsourcing via social media is a powerful and useful tool for solving provenance questions. My thanks to Mark Weiner and Professor Gröschler for their help.

All of the examples I showed at AALL are in a Flickr gallery, "Connecting Roman Law Books."

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

On July 23, I am giving a brief presentation, "Early Law Books and Their Readers: Examples from the Yale Law Library," at the American Association of Law Libraries 2012 annual meeting in Boston. It is part of a session, "Connecting Roman Law Books: Commentaries, Marginalia, Bookplates and More," offered by the Roman Law Interest Group, part of the Foreign, Comparative & International Law Special Interest Section, and organized by my colleague Lucia Diamond, Senior Librarian at the Robbins Collection, University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

The images I am showing can also be seen in a Flickr gallery, "Connecting Roman Law Books."

As part of my presentation, I am asking for help in reading and identifying the signature shown below. It appears in dozens of the books that once were part of the library of Konrad von Maurer (1823-1902), a professor of law at the University of Munich who was a leading scholar of early Germanic and Nordic law. Von Maurer's law books were acquired in 1904 by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; since 2006 the majority of them have come to the Yale Law Library, with some going to the Jacob Burns Law Library, George Washington University. The dates on these signatures begin in the early 1820s and end around 1860; see the Flickr gallery for more examples. It would seem that von Maurer acquired this individual's library en bloc. I'll be grateful for any clues.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian