A Rare Books Advent Calendar: 1st December
Some of you will remember the extremely popular “Victorian Christmas” Advent calendar, posted on these pages in December 2012, which drew exclusively on nineteenth-century material […]
Continue reading »Author: Special Collections
Cambridge Bibliographical Society talk, 20 November 2013
Professor David McKitterick (Librarian and Vice-Master at Trinity College Cambridge) will give a paper on ‘What is the use of books without pictures? Empty space […]
Continue reading »Gordon Duff Prize 2014
The Gordon Duff Prize is an annual competition open to members of the University of Cambridge for an essay on any one of the following […]
Continue reading »Of hammers, bouts and bets: a guest post by Jaap Harskamp
An intriguing catalogue concerning the London auction of the possessions of prizefighter Tom Sayers (1826–1865) Being closely associated with the exploration and extension of the […]
Continue reading »Festival of Ideas
Special Collections staff are once again taking part in the University’s Festival of Ideas, a public engagement initiative that celebrates the arts, humanities and social […]
Continue reading »Rose Book-Collecting Prize 2014
Cambridge University Library is delighted to open this year’s competition for the 2014 Rose Book-Collecting Prize, which offers students the chance to win £500 by […]
Continue reading »Donation to digitise Japanese treasures
Treasures from the University Library’s Japanese Collections are to be digitised and made freely available to a global audience, thanks to a gift from Professor […]
Continue reading »Cambridge’s criminal past revealed in centuries-old court records
Adultery, libel, bribery, attempted murder: Cambridge University’s criminal underbelly has been exposed after painstaking research on its Vice-Chancellor’s Court records from the sixteenth and seventeenth […]
Continue reading »1513–2013: Il Principe is 500 years old
The year 2013 marks the quincentenary of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe, one of the most widely read political writings of all time. The Italian Collections […]
Continue reading »The longitude problem: 300-year-old archive opened to the world
It was the conundrum that baffled some of the greatest and most eccentric experts of the 18th century—and captivated the British public during an era […]
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