The three main auction and dealer catalogs containing Buxheim manuscripts are: 1) the 1883 Carl Förster auction catalog, 2) the 1884 Ludwig Rosenthal sales catalog Nr. 40 (XL), and 3) the 1884 or 1885 Ludwig Rosenthal sales catalog Nr. 41 (XLI). The 1883 auction catalog lists 452 manuscripts, Rosenthal XL lists 195, and Rosenthal XLI lists 232, for a combined total of 879 manuscripts. The Rosenthal catalogs do not contain duplicates of each other, but the two sales catalogs do list at least 89 manuscripts that are duplicated in the 1883 auction catalog. This presents us with a total of some 790 unique manuscripts listed in these three catalogs.
Of the 468 manuscripts listed in this website’s manuscript catalog by location, some 142, or roughly a third, can be positively identified with a corresponding entry from the 1883 auction catalog produced by Carl Förster. This leaves a great many of the 452 entries under “Handschriften” in that catalog still unpaired with a currently existing manuscript.
The Ludwig Rosenthal catalog number XL of 1884, which commemorated 800 years of the founding of the Carthusian order, contains another 195 items identified as Buxheim books (out of 1372 total entries). Of these 195, 88 have so far been identified with extant manuscripts, 107, or somewhat more than half, have not.
Rosenthal’s catalog number XLI, undated but from either 1884 or 1885, contains 232 entries for Buxheim manuscripts, 120 of which can be identified with extant manuscripts and 112 of which cannot.
The following presents the 500+ catalog entries from the auction catalog of 1883 and the Rosenthal catalogs XL and XLI that still do not have an identifiable extant manuscript partner, with the hope that more of these entries can be identified and linked to current manuscripts.
This task is unfortunately made more difficult by the fact that the folio counts of the catalogs are not always accurate, that is they tend to undercount the actual number of folios or pages in a given manuscript. In addition, some of the original manuscripts were dissected before being offered for sale. Finally, we know that a number of manuscripts extant today were not offered for sale in the auction catalog. These were most likely acquired en masse by Ludwig Rosenthal, and many of them appear subsequently in his great 1884 and 1885 antiquarian catalogs.
Both Sigrid Krämer (1989) and Paul Ruf (1932) list a number of auction and dealer catalogs containing Buxheim manuscripts. Some of these can now be identified with located manuscripts, but the current location of around 50 entries cannot. These are shown here under the most recent listing in an auction or dealer catalog.