Ancient books made available online
by Cambridge University Library

World-class archive of pre-1501 books
made public for the first time

A TREASURE TROVE of ancient books that includes a copy of the Gutenberg Bible (see image below) and the first printed edition of Homer’s works is to be made available worldwide by Cambridge University Library.


[Pictured: Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in Europe from moveable metal type (Mainz, c. 1455).]

The full details of the Library’s celebrated collection of incunabula will be made available online thanks to a $427,000 (c. £300,000) grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

Incunabula are early (pre-1501) printed books - the word actually means swaddling clothes or cradle and was adopted to describe books printed in the first infancy of printing.

Very few records of the Library’s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue, which means that they are often invisible to scholars and students - both in Cambridge and around the world.

Noted medieval historian and author Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London said: “These earliest printed books were the product of medieval craftsmanship, but they also reflect new - often humanist - trends in learning and reading. Religion and politics, poetry and science are all to be found in these early books. Hence the project will have a major impact by offering new opportunities for scholars and others.”

Over the next five years the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which anyone, anywhere around the globe, can access through its own Newton catalogue, or via links from other databases and catalogues.

The stars of the Library’s incunabula collection include the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in Europe from moveable metal type (Mainz, c. 1455), the first printed edition of Homer’s works (Florence, 1488), the first book to contain italic type printed by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1500) and several unique editions of William Caxton.

The story around these books can be as interesting as the books themselves.

Legend has it that the Gutenberg Bible was handed to the then Librarian Alwyn Schofield out of the blue one morning in the 1930s, when an old man turned up at the Library door in a taxi saying he had an old bible to donate to the Library. The man turned out to be Arthur Young, retired lawyer and member of Trinity College. His gift of 340 books is probably the most valuable from any private individual in the Library’s history.

Elsewhere a rare Book of Hours, printed on vellum by Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, is inscribed by Henry VIII’s future wife Catherine Parr and her family.


[Pictured: illuminated copy of Dio Chrysostomus, De regno (Venice, 1471). Photos courtesy of Cambridge University Library.]

Sometimes, it is the beauty and craftsmanship of the illustrations that grab our attention, such as the lavishly illuminated copy of Dio Chrysostomus, De regno (Venice, 1471) (see image above), or the hand-coloured copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, illustrating in 1,809 woodcuts, the history of the world up to 1492 (Nuremberg, 1493).

University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “We are delighted to be able to create high quality, searchable records for these rarest of books and share them via the Internet with readers around the world.”

Cambridge University Library

For more than 650 years the University Library has been central to the support of teaching and research at Cambridge. More than eight million books and periodicals, one million maps and many thousands of manuscripts occupy more than one hundred miles of shelving, which extends by a further two miles every year. The Library collections vary hugely in age and content. Chinese oracle bones from the second millennium BC can be found alongside the latest online scientific journals; illuminated decorations in medieval manuscripts can be studied as originals and as digitised images delivered over the Internet.

Highlights of the University Library’s special collections include the papers of Isaac Newton, an archive of Charles Darwin’s correspondence, archives of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society and a copy of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, the earliest European example of a book produced using moveable type.

As a legal deposit library since 1710, the Library is entitled to acquire a copy of each book and journal published in the UK and Ireland, which results in a rich and diverse collection providing future scholars with the raw materials for research in many fields.

With 2 million of its volumes on open shelves, readers have the largest open-access collection in Europe immediately available to them.

An exhibition space at the University Library makes a selection of its outstanding collections available for view to the public. Information about current and forthcoming exhibitions can be found at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions. Advancing by Degrees, the current exhibition, celebrates 800 years of the history of the University of Cambridge, with documents, images and artefacts from the University Archives illustrating different aspects of university life over the centuries: www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/800/

Andrew Mellon Foundation:
www.mellon.org

Cambridge University Library:
www.lib.cam.ac.uk

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