Scripta Mundi reads a bookseller's or a library's own description — title, author, year, place, publisher, whatever the text happens to contain — and resolves each book against K10plus, which carries VD16 and VD17; CERL's Heritage of the Printed Book; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek; the Library of Congress; the ESTC; and OpenLibrary. The list of catalogues keeps growing. What comes back today is the edition, identified and sourced, with every record linked. Two further services — the market for that edition, and the written descriptions — are in preparation, and this page marks them as such.
Charged per identified edition. Related editions and not-founds are free — I don't want to be paid for saying “I don't know.”
It is the step between owning the books and being able to sell — or catalogue — them. It is also the step nobody has time for.
Nothing you learn about one book helps with the next. The time doesn't shrink with practice, and the work doesn't carry over: each book starts from nothing, with the same searches and the same dead ends.
The year is sometimes roman, sometimes absent, sometimes printed wrong. Two editions of the same work can differ by one line of an imprint.
An edition claim you can't source is a claim a buyer, a donor or an auditor can dispute. In this trade that isn't a data problem, it's a reputation problem.
For a library it is the same wall from the other side. Rare-book holdings sit uncatalogued or thinly catalogued not because nobody cares, but because the people qualified to do the work are outnumbered by the shelves. A backlog of a few thousand early printed books is a career, not a project.
On material like this, around 156 come back Exact — the edition confirmed, with the libraries named and every record linked. The rest comes back honestly: not found where no catalogue holds a matching record, related edition where a different edition of the same work turned up and was reported as such. The other 44 need the research you would have done anyway.
| 156 identifications at $3.50 with viaLibri | $546 |
| At twenty minutes per book, not spent | 52 hours |
| ≈ 8 working days |
Twenty minutes is the figure this page has always used, and it is conservative for a book that fights back. The proportions move with the material — sixteenth-century continental printing is harder than nineteenth-century English printing. What doesn't move is the rule: nothing leaves here without a library record behind it, and whatever can't be confirmed costs you nothing.
The time never is. You cannot tell whether a book will take three minutes or two hours until you have already spent them. $546 is a number you can put in a calculation before you start.
Not the last. Without the report, the hard books surface one at a time, after the easy ones have eaten the week. With it, the forty-four that need you are named on the first page, and the rest are done.
A listing with four hundred words of sourced bibliographical context is found by searches a three-line listing never reaches. Written once, it sits on your domain and keeps working.
Not the saving — the calendar. Three to five hundred books come back inside a day, each with the catalogue records attached. Your specialists still check every lot; that does not change and should not. But checking a sourced claim is reading, not research, and reading is measured in minutes.
The constraint on how often you can hold a sale has never been the cataloguing talent. It has been how long the lots sit waiting for someone to establish what they are.
Same destination. The difference is where you're allowed to start.
You already have the text. The books are listed, the descriptions are written, and the prose sits on your site. Send it as it stands — an export, a CSV, a paste. The identification keys are pulled out of the prose; nothing needs structuring first.
The books are new in. Nothing is written yet, which is exactly why they are on your desk. Fill the seven fields instead — a few minutes each — and what comes back is the edition established, with every catalogue record linked — the part you were going to have to research before you could write anything.
Every book returns in one of four states. The refusals are the point: the system will not name an edition it cannot source.
The listed edition was confirmed in one or more catalogues. Public identifiers are attached where the records carry them: LCCN, OCLC number, K10plus PPN, CERL, BnF ARK, and bibliography numbers such as VD16, VD17, ESTC, USTC or ISTC.
A different edition of the same work was found. The one you listed was not. Reported as such; no match claimed.
No catalogue record matches. The gap is not filled in with what seems likely.
A record was found, but the support behind it is too thin to stand on. The reason is named, not hidden.
The rule underneath all four: no identification without a verifiable library record. Whatever a book turns out to be, it leaves here as one of these four — never as a guess.
And verifiable is meant literally. Every record used is linked, not merely named — one click, in a new tab, straight to the page a librarian would open. Where a catalogue publishes no stable public link, the record identifier is printed as plain text instead, and the difference is visible. Nothing is dressed up as a link that isn’t one.
The product answers one question from three sides: what is this book, what is it worth, and what do I write about it. The first is delivered today. The other two are marked below with where they stand.
Which edition this copy is, confirmed against the library catalogues, with a link to every record used. Not the name of the catalogue — the record itself, one click away.
Edition statement, place, year, publisher or printer, as the catalogue transcribes them.
Pagination, plates, format, volumes.
Not only the author. Editors, translators, engravers, cartographers, illustrators, printers and binders, as the catalogues record them.
Every statement carries the catalogue it came from, linked, so it can be checked in minutes instead of researched from scratch.
Every copy of that edition currently for sale, with its price and where it is listed. Duplicates across platforms are collapsed. Sets are separated from single volumes, and other editions of the same work are excluded from the range, so the figure you price against is the one that applies to your copy.
A plain search returns everything with that title. Ten listings between $423 and $2,000 tell you nothing until somebody separates the five-volume set from the single volume from the later reprint. That separation is the work.
Where this stands. The method is worked out and tested by hand against frozen data. It is not delivered yet, because collecting listings at volume requires an arrangement with the platforms that index the trade, and I have not made one. Nothing automated is being sent to anyone in the meantime. When it is delivered, it is added at no extra cost for everyone who has already bought identifications.
Once an edition is confirmed, the reading matter for the page is written too — part of the price, not a second purchase. Three things, and only three:
A description of the book itself.
A life overview.
Illustrator, engraver, cartographer, lithographer, photographer, translator, publisher, editor, bookbinder — each with a life overview.
These are written from what the record holds and from sources that can be pointed at — nothing else. No biography is invented to fill a page. Where a contributor is genuinely obscure and the sources are thin, what you get is a sketch — the equivalent of a police artist's likeness, honest about being a likeness — or nothing at all. An engraver about whom the record is silent stays silent here too.
You buy the description with the identification, once, and it is yours to reuse every time that edition returns to your shelves — on your own domain, with no commission and no listing fee.
Where this stands. The identification half is finished; this half is not. I would rather deliver it late than deliver prose that cannot be pointed back at a source. Added at no extra cost when it lands.
Delivered as a CSV or as an HTML report you can read and print — one row per book in the first, one page per book in the second. Whichever suits the way you work.
Five listings, exactly as their sellers published them — open one and read it. In the middle, what Scripta Mundi read out of that prose. On the right, what the library catalogues confirmed or added, with the catalogue named under every value. Including the book it refused to identify, and why.
A platform export, a CSV, or your own descriptions as they stand. There is a form with seven fields — one of them a paste of the title page, or of the description you have already written. Every field you fill widens the search: more catalogues reached, more independent records to compare, a firmer answer. The collation matters most; it is what separates one edition from another.
Each book goes to the catalogues. Up to 500 books in 24 hours.
One row per book in the CSV; one page per book in the report, with the source catalogue named beside every statement.
Half the order up front, the balance on delivery. Related editions and not-founds cost nothing.
An identification is only useful to a library if it lands in the catalogue. MARCXML and ISO 2709 are delivered, with the bibliography numbers written back into field 510 where they were read from, the identifiers where they belong — LCCN in 010, OCLC and PPN in 035, ARK in 024 — and a 588 note stating plainly what was derived automatically and what a person checked. A relator term is never written when the record does not assert the role: the name goes into 700 without $e, as an honest omission rather than a false claim.
MARCXML · ISO 2709 · 588 note| Per identified edition | Everything included |
|---|---|
| Direct | $6.00 |
| With a viaLibri subscription | $3.50 |
Both rates buy the same thing: the edition identified and sourced, with a link to every record used. The market data and the descriptions are added at no extra charge, for everyone who has bought identifications, as each is delivered.
Related editions and not-founds are free. No setup fee, no minimum, no subscription to me. If an identification is wrong, tell me and I run it again at no charge. If the second attempt is also wrong, that book is refunded.
On a large batch the work is done before you see any of it. The deposit is what makes that reasonable for both of us. On the free two-book trial there is nothing to pay at all.
Failed queries, dead servers, thin records — that is my cost of production, never yours.
Florin Valentin Marin — founder, among the books.
My name is Florin Valentin Marin. For twenty-five years I worked as an antiquarian bookseller — handling, cataloguing and selling rare and old books. I also collect military history; my own shelves hold more than five hundred volumes on Napoleon alone.
The identification problem is the one I kept running into personally. Books arrive, and before anything can be sold or catalogued, each copy has to be placed: which edition, which issue, which state. It is slow, it doesn't get faster with practice, and it is the reason stock waits.
So I built the thing I wanted. Scripta Mundi reads the description as it stands, queries the library catalogues, and returns a verdict with the source named. The research is accelerated by AI, but the AI is not the authority: a library record is. Where there is no record, there is no identification.
That refusal was the hardest part to build and it is the part I'd defend. A system that always answers is a system that sometimes invents.
Watch the presentation film
Pick two from your own shelves — the harder the better. You'll get the identification back within 24 hours, with every record linked. If either book comes back unidentified, you've learned something about your material and it cost you nothing.
Or write directly: contact@scripta-mundi.com
