Provenienz braucht Referenz

Abstract Marks that readers leave in books are instructive documents with regard to what readers did with them, how they came in contact with them, and how those books have come down to us. These traces reflect past readers’ attempts to relate to their act of reading while also establishing references to the texts themselves. In retrospect, historians can understand books as mobile vitae, that is, as products created not by an author alone, but also by a network of references that the physical volumes acquired along their transmission history. References of this kind can also help us understand why and how certain books we are interested in today have become objects of our interest.