A delight in Turkish: E. J. W. Gibb and his library
Elias Gibb was a rather private and reclusive man of scholarship, but his contribution to Turkish studies in the form of translations and discussions of […]
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Word & image in a sixteenth-century prayer book
We all put things in books. Whether it’s bookmarks (old train tickets, receipts or some other bit of paper no longer required), related ephemera (magazine […]
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The man who knew everything! The letters of John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861)
175 years ago John Stevens Henslow started lobbying for a Botanic Garden in Cambridge. After twenty years of effort, his work bore fruit and led […]
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An epic from a tiger’s library
Among the many beautiful and fascinating manuscripts in the Library’s Islamic collection is one particularly magnificent copy of the famous Persian epic poem, the Shāhnāma or […]
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A Mycological Book Collection
Nathan Smith, runner-up in the 2019-20 Rose Book Collecting Prize, writes about his collection of books on fungi. For information on entering the 2020-21 Rose […]
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A Georgian Music Book
This guest post is by Francis Knights, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, whose research interests include musical history, instruments and performance practice from the 16th to […]
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A little manuscript in disarray: Add. 4085
This guest post is by Suzette van Haaren, a PhD student at the Universities of St Andrews and Groningen. She is writing her dissertation on […]
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‘Thousands of little loose papers without any order at all’: Material signs and afterlives in the UL’s earliest Arabic acquisitions
In the second in a series of guest posts by UL researchers, Samantha Brown shares her work on the materiality and afterlives of the manuscripts […]
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Some Islamic manuscripts from Africa
In among the very varied items which constitute Library’s Islamic manuscript collection there is a small number of texts originating from the Saharan and sub-Saharan […]
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Erotica comes to Cambridge
When one thinks of the great collections which Cambridge University Library has built up over its six centuries, erotic literature is probably not very near […]
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