Book sales catalogues now listed
In the course of our work as curators we receive hundreds of booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues every year, many now in digital form, but plenty […]
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The Pilgrims’ tale: the box that moved the Library
Eighty-seven years ago today, on 22 October 1934, George V arrived in Cambridge to open the new University Library. It was a day of huge […]
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The abandoned library
On 7 May 1921, a hundred years ago today, the University of Cambridge took a momentous decision. After decades of debate and controversy, it finally […]
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Grounds for enthusiasm: the University Library outside
The appearance mid-April of foodPark. in front of the UL is only the most recent innovative use of the grounds in a crisis. During World War II, the need to keep people fed and the […]
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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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‘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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M. R. James and the ghosts of the old University Library
‘Wisdom will not expect the men of my generation or of several later ones to leave without a sore pang of regret the old home […]
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Henry Bradshaw – his quaker connection
Post by Emily Perdue In my previous blog entry, I described a group of letters associated with William Allen, and other Quaker reformers, in the […]
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Giovanni Belzoni and his ‘Book of breathings’
In Ancient Egyptian culture, matters relating to death and the afterlife were of great significance, as both the body and the soul were believed to […]
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