The London Book Trades Database The Bibliographical Society has just launched a redesigned version of the London Book Trades Database. The original LBT database was the work of the late Michael Turner at the Bodleian Library, assisted by a number of collaborators, drawing particularly on the archival resources of [...]
AGORHA: connecting book and art history The online portal AGORHA, developed by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, comprises a suite of thematic databases bringing together digitised documents, archival sources, and biographical records relating to individuals, collections, and institutions in France. Although AGORHA is not conceived primarily as a tool [...]
The Catalog of Distinctive Type (1660-1700) If, like me, you spend a lot of time worrying about who printed what in later seventeenth-century England, then the Catalog of Distinctive Type (CDT), compiled by Christopher Warren and Sam Lemley of Carnegie Mellon University, will be an invaluable resource. It has long [...]
Medieval Libraries of Great Britain In the spirit of the renewed year, one renewed Bodleian resource is sure to delight those interested in medieval libraries: the newly re-released Medieval Libraries of Great Britain database. MLGB, as it is now commonly known, aims to list every manuscript and printed book associated [...]
Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) Visitors to museums, galleries, libraries and churches may have observed that books appear frequently in medieval and Renaissance art. Paintings, sculptures and stained glass provide insights into how books were used, but also how they were perceived. Depictions of books within books have [...]
The (Partial) Return of the Bodleian Broadside Ballads Something about broadside ballads has recommended them as subjects for digital resources. As popular, ephemeral publications they have always promised to yield more in the aggregate than singly, while the apparent simplicity of digitizing a broadside, a single sheet printed on one side [...]
Shakespeare portal There is no paucity of Shakespeare bibliography but, even if you are fully immersed in the field, you may still find one e-resource useful as a portal bringing together a lot of information and providing easy avenues for further research. It is the Shakespeare Census, edited by Adam [...]
The Einbanddatenbank A Key Resource for Identifying German Bookbindings of the 15th and 16th Centuries The Einbanddatenbank, hosted by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, provides access to collections of rubbings held in large German libraries. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin holds the Schwenke-Schunke Sammlung; the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart has the [...]
Buntpapier: Beschreibung, Terminologie, Abbildungen [Coloured paper: description, terminology, illustrations] https://provenienz.gbv.de/Portal:Buntpapier Decorative papers used in the book trade is an area of book history and bibliography that offers the most ambiguity in catalogue and metadata descriptions. Each country or region has different names for different techniques, and no one tool has [...]
The Return of ESTC For many members of the Bibliographical Society, the loss of the ESTC was one of the most keenly felt consequences of the cyber-attack on the British Library in 2023. After a few months the Print & Probability website at Carnegie Mellon University came to the rescue [...]
Cambridge Bookbinding 1450-1770 Cambridge has been a centre of book-making for as long as it has maintained a university. Over one hundred named bookbinders are known to have worked there between the 15th and 18th centuries, and, although examples of their work have travelled far and wide, many others have [...]
Lewis Carroll Resources Lewis Carroll (1832—1898) is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), its sequel Through The Looking Glass (1865) and his poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark. Carroll’s creative output was enormous: a noted mathematician, he published on linear algebra, probability and the study of election under [...]
