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 [...]
Fragmentarium: Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments Inspired by the Council’s Choice for January 2025 (Digital Scriptorium), I would like to highlight another online resource for the study of medieval manuscript culture. Fragmentarium, begun as a trial project in 2015, is a consortial portal and database that ‘enables libraries, collectors, researchers [...]
Seized Books! An online exhibition. I am delighted to recommend the Seized Books online exhibition, even if it may seem a shameless opportunity to promote my own institution, Senate House Library. Senate House Library was bequeathed the collection of Jonathan Cutbill (1937-2019), one of the founder members of Gays the [...]
Digital Scriptorium As a new Council member, I’d like to highlight the Digital Scriptorium as an increasingly indispensable portal into North American repositories of medieval and early modern manuscripts. It has the potential to become a national union catalogue, with 15,000 records from 37 member institutions’ collections currently available and [...]
