Uncancelling the cancelled: recovering obliterated owners of old books

What a fascinating article, Heather – thank you so much for posting this. One silly question, though: you mention that later removals of names aren’t of interest to you, but how do you actually tell those apart from early modern cancellations? Is it really possible to identify, say, late 18th-century ink or pen-scrapings on sight? Or did later owners always use different obliteration techniques, i.e. bleach etc? (Maybe this is a wrong assumption on my part, but I always thought that people used pens and ink made by much the same methods even into the 19th century, so if the didn’t actually *write* anything that would allow you to date the handwriting, it might be difficult to tell the age of any hatching or looping done by them).

The summit has happened! Folger catalogers will add “Cancelled ownership marks” to records for items that contain any evidence of ownership cancellation, whether the name is legible or illegible, and are free to use whatever general language in the copy note that best describes the cancellation.

As of now, there is one record in Hamnet proudly bearing this genre/form term, _Answer to the vntruthes published and printed in Spaine_, mentioned by Heather above: . We will, eventually, add this term retrospectively, and propose the term for inclusion in the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies.

Good point. It would be more responsible for us to say that we are focusing on cancels that appear to have been made with iron gall ink, and that predate the washing/bleaching era of collecting. This could potentially extend well into the eighteenth century.