‘Picture This #4’—John Speed map of Cambridgeshire
The map of Cambridgeshire from the Library’s copy of John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine is the fourth image in the University’s […]
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 »History of Cartography online
Since the first volume appeared in 1987 the University of Chicago’s History of Cartography series of monographs has become a standard and authoritative reference work […]
Continue reading »William Bedwell: the tribulations of an Arabist
Bedwell was an Arabic scholar and mathematician born in Great Hallingbury, Essex, in 1563. He is often known as the father of Arabic studies in […]
Continue reading »The riddle of the Syriac double dot: it’s the world’s earliest question mark
Manuscripts written in Syriac, an ancient language of the Middle East, are peppered with mysterious dots. Among them is the vertical double dot or zawga […]
Continue reading »Historic Hong Kong
Six spectacular photographic panoramas of Hong Kong, taken c. 1900, were recently painstakingly conserved by Nicholas Burnett and colleagues at Museum Conservation Services at Duxford, […]
Continue reading »Books and Babies
Most displays in the Library’s main Exhibition Centre draw on Special Collections materials to some degree, but few of them have included quite such a […]
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 […]
Continue reading »Darwin’s personal library put online
Notes and comments scribbled by Charles Darwin on the pages and margins of his own personal library have been made available online for the first […]
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