Cambridge University Library Special Collections

History of Cartography online

Posted on 5 August 2011 by Anne Taylor

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 […]

Chinese, Japanese, Maps, Near and Middle Eastern, South Asian

William Bedwell: the tribulations of an Arabist

Posted on 26 July 2011 by Catherine Ansorge

William Bedwell was an Arabic scholar and mathematician born in Great Hallingbury, Essex, in 1563. He is sometimes known as the father of Arabic studies […]

In the spotlight, Manuscripts, Near and Middle Eastern

The riddle of the Syriac double dot: it’s the world’s earliest question mark

Posted on 22 July 2011 by Special Collections

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 […]

Manuscripts

Historic Hong Kong

Posted on 12 July 2011 by Rachel Rowe

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, […]

In the spotlight, Photographs, Royal Commonwealth Society

Books and Babies

Posted on 7 July 2011 by John Wells

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 […]

Exhibitions

Eighteenth-century English erotica for a discerning German wartime audience

Posted on 28 June 2011 by Ed

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 […]

German, Rare Books, Recent acquisitions

Darwin’s personal library put online

Posted on 25 June 2011 by Special Collections

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 […]

Digitisation

‘A sapper’s letters to his mother’ II

Posted on 20 June 2011 by John C.

Hugh Pearson distinguished himself as Director of Surveys in Sudan between 1905 and 1922, mapping huge tracts of little known desert, forest, marsh and waterways. […]

Archives, In the spotlight, New on Janus, Photographs, Recent acquisitions, Royal Commonwealth Society

Celebrating Hopkins and biochemistry

Posted on 13 June 2011 by Zoe

On Friday afternoon it was my very great pleasure to attend the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the Nobel Prize winning biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland […]

Archives, New on Janus

Rose Book-Collecting Prize winner 2010-2011

Posted on 6 June 2011 by Special Collections

The winner of this year’s Rose Book-Collecting Prize is Basie Bales Gitlin of Pembroke College, for his collection of salesman’s samples, ‘Canvassing books’. Read the […]

Uncategorized