Historical Shelf Marks as Sources for Institutional Provenance Research: Reconstructing the University of Virginia's First Library

This article describes four types of historical shelf mark-a letter, number, or other symbol in or on a book that signals the book-press, -case, or -shelf to which that book belonged-that survive from the University of Virginia's first library, a collection of approximately eight thousand volumes that first opened to students in 1826. While shelf marks can serve as evidence of ownership and provenance, they can also facilitate efforts to reconstruct a historical library's architecture and arrangement. From the evidence of the University of Virginia's early shelf marks, we propose a timeline dating each mark to a particular period in the library's history, establish that significantly more books survive from the university's first library than previously accepted, and show how these shelf marks inform our work to reconstruct the layout, size, and location of the university's earliest bookshelves.