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Journal article
A mysterious Italian newsletter of 1517
'MYSTERIOUS' seems to be the most appropriate word to describe a newsletter, printed on only two leaves in quarto, and purchased by the Department of Printed Books of the British Library in August 1981, since it has taken a year of continuous research and puzzled contemplation to reach a conclusion...Rhodes, D. E.
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Journal article
The Mainz indulgences of 1454/5: a review of recent scholarship
THE earliest extant piece of European printing from movable type with which an absolute date can be associated is a Papal Letter of Indulgence which bears the printed date 1454 and the handwritten purchase date 22 October 1454. Forty-nine other printed copies of this Indulgence are known, some unsold and...Ing, Janet
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Journal article
Alban Berg and the BBC
Edward Clark (1888-1962), who was a programme planner with the BBC from 1927 to 1936, had been introduced to Arnold Schoenberg after a performance of the latter's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande in Berlin in 1910. He was thereafter an ardent champion of the music of Schoenberg (whose pupil he...Chadwick, Nicholas
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Journal article
Was Jacques Le Forestier the printer of the Horae Ad Usum Sarum of 1495?
THE British Library and the Bodleian Library both own a copy of a Book of Hours for Sarum use dated 1495, but without indication of place of printing or printer's name. Two Gothic types are employed for the book, one measuring 113 mm, the other 63 mm for twenty lines,...Baurmeister, Ursula
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Journal article
The use of William Caxton's type 3 by John Lettou and William de Machlinia in the printing of their Yearbook 35 Henry VI, c.1481-1482
WILLIAM CAXTON'S Type 3, which was the second type used by him when setting up his business in Westminster in 1476, was a fresh casting of a sharply cut, well-aligned Gothic by Johan Veldener, a typographer then active in the Low Countries. It measures 135 mm over twenty lines. The...Partridge, W. J.
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Journal article
The development of the collections of the Department of Printed Books, 1846-1875
In June 1872 a special Sub-committee of the Trustees of the British Museum considered a report prepared by W. B. Rye, the Keeper of Printed Books, on the acquisitions system of his department. They expressed great satisfaction with it, but asked that a further report should be produced showing what...Harris, P. R.
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Journal article
An anonymous guidebook to Rome, 1677
FOR well over a century (perhaps for two centuries) the British Museum has owned a book of 192 pages in an unusually small format, 24mo, which has remained hidden and unnoticed in the general catalogue under the unobtrusive heading 'S., P. de''. The title is Nuouo metodo per acquistare brieuemente...Rhodes, D. E.
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Journal article
Bartolommeo Sanvito and an antique motif
A curious motif appears at the foot of the frontispiece of the celebrated copy of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, written and probably illuminated by Bartolommeo Sanvito, in the British Library (Department of Manuscripts, MS. Royal 14.C.III, fol. 2). This consists of a group of three putti, the...Evans, M. L.
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Journal article
Holywell House: a Gothic villa at St Albans
HOLYWELL HOUSE, when the Dowager Lady Spencer first came to live there in November 1783, was a small and rather run-down country house on the southern edge of St Albans: one of many properties inherited by John Spencer of Althorp at the death of his redoubtable and fabulously wealthy grandmother,...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
The library of the Royal Philharmonic Society
During the period from 1790 to the early 1830s, quite a number of organizations came into being in London to provide public musical entertainment of various kinds. The only one of them still active today is the Philharmonic Society, which was established in 1813 and received the title 'Royal' exactly...King, Alec Hyatt
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: selected acquisitions, mainly from the period 1979-1985 Map Library
A PREVIOUS article (British Library Journal, v (1979), pp. 181-97) provided partial coverage for the period 1968-78, with the promise of a further instalment to include those items which were unavoidably omitted. This article completes the listing for the earlier period, but can give only a partial account of acquisitions...Campbell, Tony
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Journal article
Obiya Ihei, a Japanese provincial publisher
Commercial publishing came of age in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Both at the beginning and at the end of this period there was a vogue for experimenting with movable type, but from the middle of the seventeenth century the burgeoning publishing industry relied almost exclusively on wood-block printing,...Kornicki, P. F.
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Journal article
Julian Marshall and the British Museum: music collecting in the later nineteenth century
In the second volume of Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians which appeared in 1880, there is a descriptive list of private music libraries in the British Isles. First, understandably enough, is the Royal Music Library at Buckingham Palace; the next two libraries listed are those of Sir...Searle, Arthur
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Journal article
The Curzon Collection
Through the generosity of Dr Peter Curzon and Mr Fritz Curzon the British Library has recently acquired an extensive collection of annotated scores, notebooks, and other papers of the late Sir Clifford Curzon. The working scores amount to some 300 items. Nearly all are printed editions, but there are a...Neighbour, O. W.
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Journal article
'The grammar of research': some implications of machine-readable bibliography
Research into the history of man's culture and his institutions has always been conducted with procedures which have a basic grammar. Upon that basic grammar scholarship has developed, since Poliziano, ever more complex routines as the raw materials for research have proliferated. The provision of these raw materials has been,...Alston, R. C.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Selected acquisitions April 1983-March 1984: English books 1501-1800
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: selected acquisitions April 1983-March 1984: English books 1501-1800.Archibald, Jean ; Jannetta, M. J.
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Journal article
Matthew Prior's last manuscript: 'Predestination'
Until now the only known manuscript of Matthew Prior's unfinished poem, 'Predestination', has been the copy written in the fine italic hand of his secretary, Adrian Drift, which is labelled 'Brouillon of a Poem Began at Wimpole in August 1721. Transcribed From the Authors Papers since his Death.' It was...Wright, H. Bunker ; Croft, P. J.
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Journal article
A Chaucer from Chief Justice Coke's collection
The sixteenth-century books acquired by the British Museum Library from Holkham Hall included Chaucer's Workes, printed by John Reynes in 1542 (SFC 5070). This volume belonged to Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke and is no. 861 in his Library Catalogue. L. H. Horstein showed that this actual copy was quoted...Hassall, W. O.
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Journal article
Benito Monfort, 1716-1785: a tentative list of holdings in the reference division of the British Library
Benito Monfort is the last of the three best-known printers in eighteenth-century Spain to be considered in this series of articles. He is generally thought to be the most gifted of a group of printers centred in Valencia and in a wider context he is regarded by some as not...Whitehead, H. G.
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Journal article
Modern bookbindings added to the Department of Printed Books, 1974-1983
The British Library's collection of twentieth-century bookbindings has not received much publicity, overshadowed as it is by the unrivalled collections of bindings from the past. When Howard M. Nixon wrote about the English and foreign bookbindings added to the Department of Printed Books between 1963 and 1974 most emphasis was...Foot, Mirjam M.
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Journal article
A newly discovered leaf of 'The Sforza Hours'
IN 1894, twenty-three years after the discovery of the Sforza Hours (BL, Add. MS.34294) and shortly after its presentation to the British Museum, Sir G. F. Warner, in his monograph on the manuscript, drew attention to a letter from the Milanese illuminator Giovan Pietro Birago. Neither the date nor the...Evans, M. L.
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Journal article
Fragment of an unpublished essay on printing by William Camden
THE known facts concerning the origins of printing from movable type in western Europe have been ably gathered and assessed by recent scholars and there is a large measure of agreement among them, but the information available to William Camden in the sixteenth century is interesting both where it agrees...Dunn, R. D.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Polish books
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Polish books.Swiderska, H.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982.McKendrick, Scot
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Journal article
The Elgar sketch-books
A major gift from Mrs H. S. Wohlfeld of sketch-books and other manuscripts of Sir Edward Elgar was received by the British Library in 1984. The sketch-books consist of five early books dating from 1878 to 1882, a small book from the late 1880s, a series of eight volumes made...Willetts, Pamela
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Journal article
Terra incognita: the Beudeker Collection in the map library of the British Library
The name 'Beudeker Collection' or 'Beudeker Atlas' commemorates the eighteenth century Dutchman who compiled these twenty-four large folio volumes, bound ingold-tooled white vellum, placed at Maps C.9.d.1-11, e.1-13. Each volume contains an average of a hundred to a hundred and fifty leaves, on to and between which large single or...Simoni, Anna E. C.
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Journal article
John Denham: new letters and documents
IT was inevitable that the fundamental divisions made in English society by the Civil Wars should affect the ranks of the poets and playwrights, and unsurprising that the former largely and the latter almost entirely would adhere to the king's party. Not that, from our more distant vantage-point at least,...Kelliher, Hilton
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Journal article
Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the library of Sir Sydney Cockerell
I THINK that the first article by Derek Turner that I ever read was his list of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts which had belonged to Eric Millar (1887-1966) in an offprint from The British Museum Quarterly sent to me by Mrs June O'Donnell. I read it through and through, bewitched...Hamel, Christopher de
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Journal article
The Cranbrook papers: stray letters from a politician's archive
THE main body of the papers of the Conservative statesman Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, 1st Earl of Cranbrook (b. 1814, d. 1906), were deposited by the 4th Earl in the Suffolk Record Office at Ipswich (Ref. HA 43; NRA report 1182); these papers were drawn upon by his son A. E. Gathorne-Hardy...Smith, Robert A. H.
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Journal article
Acquisitions in the Department of Printed Books, 1935-50, and the effects of the war
THE great period of expansion in the Department of Printed Books which occurred in the third quarter of the nineteenth century has been described in an earlier article (British Library Journal, x (1984), pp. 114-46). After 1886/7 the purchase grant was cut from the former figure of £10,000 p.a., and...Harris, P. R.
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Journal article
John Bagford, bookseller and antiquary
JOHN BAGFORD was born in London, lived his sixty-five or sixty-six years there, and was buried in the city in May 1716. From at least 1686 until his death, he was at the centre of the London book trade, involved both in the dispersal of existing collections and the formation...Gatch, Milton McC.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: notable acquisitions 1975-1985: Italian books 1501-1600
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: notable acquisitions 1975-1985: Italian books 1501-1600.Rhodes, D. E.
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Journal article
The account book of a Marian bookseller, 1553-4
MS. EGERTON 2974, fois. 67-8, preserves in fragmentary form accounts from the day-book of a London stationer who was active during the brief interval between the death on 6 July 1553 of Edward VI, whose regents allowed unprecedented liberty to Protestant authors, printers, publishers, and booksellers, and the reimposition of...King, John N.
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Journal article
An annotated copy of Goldsmith's Life of Nash, 1762
To some it may seem extravagant for a library already endowed with four copies of a book knowingly to acquire a fifth. The copy of the first edition of Oliver Goldsmith's Life of Richard Nash (London, 1762), recently purchased by the British Library will, however, for students of the author,...Jannetta, M. J.
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Journal article
Deciphering the Cotton Genesis miniatures: preliminary observations concerning the use of colour
THE Cotton Genesis (British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B. VI) was written and illuminated at some point during the period of the fourth to sixth centuries AD, and very badly charred in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. Since 1979 I have been recording all the decipherable features of the...Wenzel, Marian
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Journal article
Richard Garnett as censor
DURING the 1890s the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum was beset by problems of censorship, most of them arising from complaints of libellous statements in library materials, and one of them actually resulting in litigation. The mere thought of being taken to court distressed the officers of...McCrimmon, Barbara
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Journal article
An addition to the bibliography of Nantes
PRINTING began at Nantes with an isolated venture in 1493, when on 15 April an otherwise unknown printer named Etienne Larcher completed an edition of Jean Meschinot, Les Lunettes des princes, Vingt-cinq ballades. Commemoration de la passion. Of this exceptionally rare incunable the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has two incomplete...Leevers, Joanna
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Journal article
W. R. S. Ralston (1828-89): scholarship and scandal in the British Museum
ONE of the best-known members of staff in the British Museum in the late 1860s and early 1870s was William Ralston Shedden Ralston, an expert on Russian life and literature who was both a translator for, and a friend of, Ivan Turgenev. Ralston was respected in the Museum for his...McCrimmon, Barbara
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Journal article
The structure of English pre-conquest Benedictional
A FORM of liturgical manuscript which particularly interested Derek Turner was the benedictional. In his edition of the pontificals in BL, Cotton MS. Claudius A. III he made an important contribution to the study of this type of service-book, providing in his introduction a useful account of their nature and...Prescott, Andrew
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Journal article
The embroidered binding of the Felbrigge Psalter
MANY fine medieval manuscripts are exhibited in the British Library's Grenville Library, but one of the most unusual is the Felbrigge Psalter (Sloane MS. 2400), which was probably written and illuminated in Northern France in about the middle of the thirteenth century. At some time the manuscript came to England...Wallis, Penelope
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Journal article
W. H. Auden's Poems of 1928
IN April 1987 the Modern British Section of the British Library acquired a rare and important copy of W. H. Auden's Poems of 1928. This was Auden's first published work, privately printed by his fellow poet and undergraduate Stephen Spender during the Oxford summer vacation.Leevers, Joanna
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Journal article
The Tilliot Hours: comparisons and relationships
THE provision of a new catalogue for the Yates Thompson manuscripts now in the British Library, taking into consideration the many advances in scholarship which have taken place since the collector himself issued his original catalogues at the beginning of the century, was among the major ambitions which Derek Turner...Backhouse, Janet
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Journal article
The Evanion Collection
IN 1895 the British Museum's Department of Printed Books acquired a collection of ephemeral material relating to the nineteenth-century entertainment world and contemporary life in general. It was purchased from a man who had been a moderately successful conjuror and ventriloquist but now in his old age had fallen into...Harland, Elizabeth
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Journal article
A skeleton in the cupboard: James West and the Portland Papers
IN an earlier article in this issue (pp. 123-33), Clyve Jones has surveyed the main collections which make up the archive of Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford. Another small group of strays which is worth noting are the letters to Oxford and his son's father-in-law, John Holies, Duke of...Harris, Frances
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Journal article
An unrecognized Spanish edition of Poliziano's Silvae
ANGELO Ambrogini, born in 1454 and universally known as Il Poliziano from his birthplace of Montepulciano in Southern Tuscany, wrote four Latin poems which go under the collective title of Silvae. Of these, Manto was first published in Florence in 1482; Ambra was printed without date, also in Florence, probably...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Recent acquisitions: Slavonic and East European Collections: three Polish pamphlets on Pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Sevi
IN 1669 the press of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev published a substantial book Messyia pravdyvyi Isus Khristos [The true Messiah Jesus Christ] and in 1672 the Ukrainian version was followed by the Polish, Messiasz prawdziwy. Its Orthodox author, Ioannykii Haliatovskyi (Joanicjusz Galatowski), Rector of the Kiev Academy...Alsop, J. D.
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Journal article
Stefan Zweig's copy of Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer (1873)
IN 1908 Stefan Zweig was given a copy of the first edition of Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer; the volume now forms part of the Zweig Collection in the British Library.Michaelides, Chris
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Journal article
The making of a collection: Burmese manuscripts in the British Library
THE Burma manuscripts collection in the British Library by virtue of its size, range of material, and state of preservation constitutes the most significant collection of manuscripts to be found outside Burma. It numbers over 1,000 manuscripts, of which approximately 800 are in Oriental Collections and 350 in the India...Herbert, Patricia