"The [Senate House Library] Palaeography Room has around 60,000 index slips compiled by the French scholar Seymour de Ricci (1881–1942) as part of a project to list the manuscripts of Britain and Ireland which he began in 1934. This enormous project – an ambitious companion work to his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada published between 1935 and 1940 – was, perhaps unsurprisingly, left incomplete at the time of de Ricci’s death. The index was first acquired by the Institute of Historical Research, which had provided some support for the project in a grant to pay de Ricci’s secretarial expenses, and given to the Paleography Room in 1953. It still provides today’s manuscript scholars with a valuable if little-known tool, especially in provenance research."
