What is Rare? The Case of the Remarkably Rare Old Church Slavic Prayerbook

Just yesterday I finished cataloging this prayer book written in Old Church Slavic. It was a collaborative effort with a friend who could read Russian, so we were able to piece together what the book was about. What was quite fascinating about this book was that it had already been cataloged by the Library of Congress in 1972 but had never been entered into an online catalog (so far as I can tell). It is possible that this book is so remarkably rare that only two copies exist in the American (and a few European) university and library system.

However, I think something else is occurring. Take a look at the preliminary leaf for the book; the recto is on the left, the verso is on the right

Both sides of the first printed leaf of an Old Church Slavic prayerbook

Surprisingly, the title occurs on the back of the first leaf in the middle of a block of text; well, actually just what I could use as a title. This book doesn’t have what I would normally expect in a title page, instead one must find a reference to what the book is called in the opening dedication. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem but this book is written in a language that most people cannot read. Even reading the year 7304 and knowing that this is 1795 in our Gregorian calendar requires some research. So, I had to find a friend to help with decoding the Cyrillic, and research the materials to read numbers in Church Slavic; without this help could I have done anything with this book? I don’t think I could have, and this is where I believe the rarity in this case comes from.

John Carter distinguishes two types of rarity in his Tastes and Techniques in Book Collecting: absolute rarity and relative rarity. Absolute rarity is a limitation in the number of copies created, while relative rarity is a limitation in the number of copies surviving. This is a durable book which must have been printed in fairly large numbers (it is just a prayerbook, used for services in Russia). It is probably not absolutely rare (many copies), nor relatively rare (though, it might be; I would have to know more about the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia). Carter suggests two other types of rarity, often closely allied: temporary rarity and geographic rarity. Temporarily rare books are simply not interesting to collectors and so appear rare, this is often accompanied by geographic rarity where the book might be commonly found in one region but not another.

This book has not captured particular interest, so far as I can tell, so it would be easy to argue that it is temporarily (and perhaps geographically in the United States, and more so on the edge of the Great American Desert). If at a hypothetical later date, this book were to become valuable and exciting (perhaps it has a naughty tale in it) then other copies might come out of the wood work. However, only finding two in WorldCat, a predominantly English language cooperative cataloging system that has pretensions of being a union catalog, speaks to another problem.

I would suggest that the apparent rarity is due to linguistic and cultural challenges in correctly cataloging this book. This is really a subtype of Carter’s temporary rarity since if sufficient interest were generated in books in Old Church Slavic, then people would better understand the language and classification of these texts.

Though, if I were selling this book I would still say “a rare copy with the only other copy in the NUC at the Library of Congress,” and I wouldn’t be wrong.