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 [...]
Book fittings recorded on the Portable Antiquities Database My Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society earlier this year (19 March 2024) included details of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database: https://finds.org.uk/ My intention was to draw attention to this well designed and enormous database which might offer suggestions of how [...]
The Koopman Collection at the KB, The Hague Anyone interested in the French illustrated book or in modern artist’s books will enjoy the online presentation of the Koopman Collection at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands: https://collecties.kb.nl/en/koopman-collection With a focus on French literature and the book arts from [...]
AALT: Digitised documents from medieval and early modern England The website of the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT.html) is the result of a collaboration between the University of Houston Law Center in the US and The National Archives (TNA) in the UK, which was first drawn up in 2006. Its aim [...]
The CERL Thesaurus : naming the world of early modern Europe The CERL Thesaurus is one of the many resources made available by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. The linguistic diversity and the troubled history of Europe mean that there often are dramatic variations in names used for the [...]
A digitised card catalogue for Russian books One of the problems of using common databases such as OCLC/WorldCat when researching Russian books is their comparative incompleteness. Many titles simply aren’t listed at all. A free online resource I like to use is the old card catalogue of the National Library [...]
A union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World FIHRIST is the union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World, a collaborative project to map the manuscript collections housed in more than twenty participating institutions in the UK and Ireland. It is a fast-growing catalogue, with new holdings added regularly [...]
Priorities and Perils In this series celebrating and promoting digital resources that support book history, perhaps we should pause, take a minute’s silence, to reflect on the recent calamitous events at the British Library? I’m sure all readers will know that the BL’s website, services and e-resources went offline following [...]
