Category: Rare Books

Christmas cookery in the University Library

Posted on 15 December 2015 by Liam Sims

Cookery books are not, as one might expect, a modern phenomenon. Before Nigella, Delia and the great Fanny Cradock taught us all how to make […]

Christmas, Collectors and collecting, Incunabula, Manuscripts, Rare Books, Special Collections

Collecting for the University Library

Posted on 11 December 2015 by Special Collections

This guest post is written by Cliff Webb, a generous donor to the Library in recent years. Since leaving Cambridge I have spent some 40 […]

Collectors and collecting, Rare Books, Special Collections

Cambridge connections: Trinity Hall and the University Library

Posted on 3 December 2015 by Liam Sims

About sixty years before the University had its own purpose-built library, William Bateman (Bishop of Norwich) founded Trinity Hall in Cambridge. It remains one of […]

Collectors and collecting, Incunabula, Library history, Rare Books, Special Collections

‘A day of great triumph’ – the Lord Mayor’s Show at 800

Posted on 13 November 2015 by Liam Sims

On Saturday 14 November the annual spectacle of the Lord Mayor’s Show, which started life eight centuries ago in the year of Magna Carta, will […]

Rare Books, Special Collections

His Royal Favour: the Books that Built the Library

Posted on 1 October 2015 by Emily Dourish

The University Library’s latest exhibition looks in detail at the formation and arrival in Cambridge of the Royal Library, a collection that has been at […]

Collectors and collecting, Digital Resources, Exhibitions, Library history, Manuscripts, Rare Books, Special Collections

Rupert Brooke: 100 years on

Posted on 28 September 2015 by Liam Sims

The latest exhibition to occupy the Library’s Entrance Hall cases concerns Rupert Brooke, who died a century ago this year (23 April 1915) and was […]

Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Collectors and collecting, Exhibitions, Manuscripts, Rare Books, Special Collections

‘Plots upon the stage’: Restoration drama in the University Library

Posted on 3 August 2015 by Liam Sims

In the 1980s the Library acquired two significant collections of seventeenth-century literature: the Brett-Smith collection of Restoration drama and the Verney collection of political and […]

Collectors and collecting, Exhibitions, Library history, Rare Books, Special Collections

Decorated paper wrappers in the University Library

Posted on 29 July 2015 by Liam Sims

There are many beautiful books in the University Library, from illuminated medieval manuscripts to illustrated private press books of the nineteenth-century. In addition to the […]

Collectors and collecting, Italian, Rare Books, Recent acquisitions, Special Collections