Rousseau’s tercentenary
As well as certain other events this year, 2012 marks three hundred years since the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher, composer, educational theorist and inventor […]
Continue reading »Category: Rare Books
Cambridge Science Festival at the University Library
Cambridge University Library is pleased to present two events for the 2012 Science Festival, to which you are warmly invited. The lectures are free, but […]
Continue reading »Sandars Lectures 2011-2012
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was instituted in 1895 with a bequest of £2000 left to the University by Mr Samuel Sandars of Trinity College […]
Continue reading »A very individual artist: Arthur Szyk and his world
The Library has recently received a generous donation of a copy of the very fine Passover ‘Haggadah’ illustrated by Arthur Szyk, the 20th century Polish […]
Continue reading »The original Miss Austen: celebrating the bicentenary of ‘Sense and sensibility’
This month marks the 200-year anniversary of Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and sensibility, which was published in October 1811 as an anonymous work, ‘by […]
Continue reading »A Cistercian Missal in Cambridge University Library
An article by Michael Carter on the Cambridge University Library copy of a Missal printed by Thielman Kerver in Paris, 1515 for the Cistercian rite […]
Continue reading »An Ottoman cosmography
The brown leather binding looks unremarkable enough, but within the Library’s rare books collection there is a volume, which once opened up, demonstrates a key […]
Continue reading »Detective work
A significant part of rare books cataloguing work is documenting ‘copy-specific’ information—previous ownerships, binding, decoration, or imperfections—about the book in hand. Identifying and describing this […]
Continue reading »“The most interesting objects”
Two recent acquisitions enhance our strong collections in natural history, anatomy and the history of collecting. The first is a catalogue of the natural history […]
Continue reading »Eighteenth-century English erotica for a discerning German wartime audience
The Rare Books Department has just purchased a rather unusual piece of First-World-War printing. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill […]
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