Caxton 550 On 1 October the Bibliographical Society published the first half-dozen of a series of short videos celebrating the 550th anniversary of William Caxton's establishing his printing press in Westminster. The videos have been created by colleagues from libraries in the UK and around the world, introducing [...]
The Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library One of the jewels in the crown of Cambridge University Library is the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection. It is the world’s largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts, comprising the massive contents of the storeroom for discarded books [...]
Baskerville's punches Cambridge University Library’s historical printing room holds a rich collection of typographical artefacts, some of which – including over 3000 original punches used to produce John Baskerville’s type in the eighteenth century – are on deposit from Cambridge University Press & Assessment. The punches are at the centre [...]
England’s Immigrants 1330-1550 England’s Immigrants 1330-1550 is a fully-searchable database containing the names of over 64,000 people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. It is the result of a major [...]
Heidelberg historic literature – digitized Heidelberg historic literature – digitized is the front end for Heidelberg University’s digital resources, providing remarkable access to a huge variety of digitised content: books printed before 1900, archival materials relating to the University, charters, papyri, and manuscripts of all periods. There is plenty of [...]
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 [...]
