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Journal article
Silsilah Raja-Raja Brunei: The Manuscript of Pengiran Kesuma Muhammad Hasyim
This article presents an edition of a manuscript of the Silsilah Raja-Raja Brunei, “Descent of the rulers of Brunei,” from the collection of Muzium Negara, Kuala Lumpur. The transliterated Malay text is accompanied by an English translation and a complete photographic record of the 14-page manuscript, with an introductory essay....Gallop, Annabel Teh
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Journal article
Appraising, processing, and providing access to email in contemporary literary archives
The email of contemporary literary figures is ripe for research by scholars, and of broad interest to the general public, but can also present many challenges to cultural memory institutions that seek to appraise, process and provide access to this rich archival material. This article explores how five institutions across...Schneider, J. ; Adams, C. ; DeBauche, S. ; Echols, R. ; McKean, C. …
contemporary literary archives, machine learning, archival processing, natural language processing, and email preservation
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Journal article
A manuscript of poems by Robert Sidney: some early impressions
IN January of this year the British Library, with the aid of generous grants from the Pilgrim Trust and the Radcliffe Trust, purchased from an unrevealed source through Messrs. Sotheby's an autograph manuscript, now numbered Additional MS. 58435, comprising sonnets, pastorals, songs, and epigrams composed by Robert Sidney (1563-1626), Earl...Kelliher, Hilton ; Duncan-Jones, Katherine
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Journal article
The von Siebold Collection from Tokugawa Japan: 1. Dr Philipp Franz von Siebold's career in the Orient
BY 1867 the collection of Japanese printed books and manuscripts in the British Museum Numbered barely three hundred items whereas, for example, that of printed books alone in Hebrew ran to well over ten thousand. This relatively small collection of Japanese Materials in what were then two sections of the...Brown, Yu-Ying
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Journal article
Some occasional aspects of Johann Hermann Schein
IN 1973 the Department of Printed Books of the British Library, Reference Division, acquired a collection of some ninety separate pieces of occasional verse in Latin and German, mainly epithalamia, published in Leipzig between 1608 and 1630. Amongst these are four relating to the composer Johann Hermann Schein (born 1586,...Paisey, David
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Journal article
The original reconnaissance map for the Battle of Quebec
THE original reconnaissance report prepared by Major, later Colonel, Patrick Mackellar for General Wolfe prior to the battle of Quebec on Abrahams Heights has been known to historians since it was printed by Lieut.-Col. C.V.F. Townshend in 1901 in the Military Life of Field-Marshal George First Marquess Townshend from Townshend...Hudson, J. P.
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Journal article
An illuminator's sketchbook
ONLY a handful of the sketch- and model books compiled by artists during the Middle Ages have survived to the present day. In those which have come to light pictorial subject matter predominates, and it is often far from clear whether the book contains models for miniatures or whether it...Backhouse, Janet
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Journal article
The Codex Sinaiticus
THE Codex Sinaiticus of the Greek Bible, even though it has lost over 300 leaves, is still the earliest complete New Testament, and is the earliest and best witness for some of the books of the Old Testament. It was written in the first half of the fourth century, when...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
An unexpected effect of the change of calendar in 1752
IN 1752 in the backward country of Great Britain the calendar was eleven days out of phase with the sun. Midsummer Day (for the purpose of this article 22 June) fell on 11 June. That day could be described as 11/22 June. What happened in 1752 was that Britain caught...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
The Wyndham Payne Crucifixion
IT is to an American that we owe the only comprehensive study of English medieval painting. Margaret Rickert's Painting in Britain: the Middle Ages saw its first edition in 1954, and a second eleven years later, in the series The Pelican History of Art. The first edition made public for...Turner, D. H.
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Journal article
Notes: An Italian imprint identified; Work in progress: Catalogue of German Books,1601-1700, in the British Library, Reference Division; Work in progress: Catalogue of Polish Books to 1800 in the Slavonic and East European Branch of the Reference Division of the British Library
It is hoped in this section to include notes on items of interest which members of the staff and readers have come across in the course of their work in the Library, but which either do not warrant a full-length article or are peripheral to their discoverer's interests.Rhodes, D. E. ; Paisey, D.L. ; Swiderska, Hanna
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Journal article
More light on sixteenth-century printing at Salamanca
No history of printing at Salamanca has yet been written. This may be partly due to the difficulties surrounding two of the principal incunable presses in the city, both of which are anonymous. In the first half of the sixteenth century, however, there are some extremely interesting links between one...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books.Dethan, L. Le R.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books
List of recent acquisitions for the Department of Printed Books.Brown, Sandra
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Journal article
Some illustrated Jain manuscripts
THE Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books has recently acquired several illustrated Jain manuscripts of great interest. The earliest is the Uttarddhyayanasutra, one of the four Mulasutras of the Svetambara Canon. The scribe provided no colophon: but the miniatures, in the Early Western Indian style, fix the date of...Losty, Jeremiah P.
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Journal article
Notes on the 1503 edition of Petrarch
THE first collected edition of Petrarch's Latin works to appear in Italy was printed at Venice by Simon de Luere for the publisher Andrea Torresano de Asula with two colophons dated respectively 27 March and 17 June 1501. There is no comment to be made on this edition, except to...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
The Malory manuscript
IN March 1976 the British Library purchased from the Warden and Fellows of Winchester College the famous manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory's English cycle of Arthurian tales, now numbered Additional MS. 59678. Almost immediately upon transfer to its new home the manuscript went on display in the Caxton quincentenary exhibition,...Hellinga, Lotte ; Kelliher, Hilton
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Journal article
The ruling as a clue to the make-up of a medieval manuscript
ADDITIONAL MS. 47678,' acquired by the British Museum in 1952, is an early ninth century Cicero manuscript written at Tours in Carolingian minuscules. It was still complete when it was at the Abbey of Cluny but only 39 leaves survive out of the 140 or 150 that it probably once...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
English Bookbindings added to the Department of Printed Books 1963 to 1974
THE most important acquisition of bookbindings during this period has unquestionably been that of the Henry Davis Collection. It is, indeed, far the most important gift of this nature that the Department has ever received, being almost the whole of one of the three great collections of bookbindings made in...Nixon, Howard M.
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Journal article
A Shakespeare allusion of 1605 and its author
SURPRISINGLY few critical notices of Shakespeare have so far been recovered from sources dating from his own lifetime; fewer than a dozen are known to survive, and all of these originate from more or less professional literary circles. The most famous is the schoolmaster Francis Meres's comment in Palladis Tamia...Kelliher, Hilton
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Journal article
Two missals printed for Wynkyn de Worde
The British Library has recently acquired two important and exceedingly rare editions of the Sarum Missal. These were produced in Paris in 1497 and 1511 for Wynkyn de Worde and others, and are fully described in the second and third sections of this article. The first section gives a brief...Rhodes, George D. ; Painter, Dennis E. ; Nixon, Howard M.
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Journal article
Note: Rosichino and Pietro da Cortona: a correction with notes on the printer Fabio de Falco
Note: Rosichino and Pietro da Cortona: a correction with notes on the printer Fabio de Falco.Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
An illustrated Persian text of Kalila and Dimna dated 707/1307-8
A MANUSCRIPT (Or. 13506) of Kalila and Dimna recently acquired by the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books (with the valuable assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, and the Mark Fitch Fund) is of the highest importance as providing for study a unique example of...Waley, P. ; Titley, Norah M.
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Journal article
Note: A hitherto unattributed German elegy on the death of Simon Dach, 1659
BY 1878, Sir Anthony Panizzi was dying. His biographer Edward Miller paints an affecting picture of his condition at that time: "Almost a complete cripple, half blind, he was but the wreck of the magnificent man he had once been. All he could manage was a short drive in the...Prescott, Andrew
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Journal article
The Napier papers
IN 1956 the Department of Manuscripts incorporated in its collections a series of papers of various members of the Napier family which had been bequeathed by Miss Violet Bunbury Napier, youngest daughter of General William Craig Emilius Napier. They commence with those of the Hon. George Napier, 6th son of...Blake-Hill, Philip V.
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Journal article
The Sir Arthur Phayre Collection of Burmese manuscripts
IN 1886 the British Museum acquired approximately eighty Burmese manuscripts, now located at Or. 3403-80. These manuscripts formed part of the collection of Sir Arthur Purves Phayre, one of the most distinguished of Burma's early administrators. Phayre's life spanned the formative years of British colonial rule in Burma. He left...Herbert, Patricia M.
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Journal article
Oriental material in the reference division of the British Library
THE Oriental material housed in the three Library Departments of the old British Museum and the Science Reference Library which now constitute the Reference Division of the British Library is much larger and more comprehensive than is generally realized.It is by no means limited to printed books only but includes...Gaur, Albertine
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Journal article
The von Siebold Collection from Tokugawa, Japan: 2. certain features of the Collection
IN December 1867, fourteen months after the death of Dr. Philipp Franz von Siebold, his eldest son Alexander approached the British Museum about the sale of an extensive range of Japanese materials which his father had acquired during the extraordinary career described in the previous article. Negotiations went on for...Brown, Yu-Ying
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Journal article
The British bindings in the Henry Davis gift
WHEN Henry Davis, C.B.E. died on 10 January 1977 the majority of his magnificent collection of bookbindings joined those already on exhibition in the British Library. The Gift, which comprises approximately 800 decorated bookbindings and 260 reference books is too extensive and too varied to receive proper justice in a...Foot, Mirjam M.
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Journal article
Illustrated German broadsides of the seventeenth century
THE seventeenth century was the great age of the illustrated broadside in Germany, where its suitability as an instrument of propaganda was exploited to the full. Engravings, varying in quality from crude to excellent, with images sometimes simple and direct, sometimes of the complex symbolism which is a Baroque commonplace,...Paisey, D. L.
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Journal article
The French Revolution collections in the British Library
IN 1899 there was printed 'by order of the Trustees of the British Museum' a small edition of a modest guide entitled List of the contents of the three collections of books, pamphlets and journals in the British Museum relating to the French Revolution. Its compiler was G. K. Fortescue,...Brodhurst, Audrey C.
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Journal article
Two Stanley Spencer letters from Salonika
THE most memorable experience which twentieth-century British painting can provide is a visit to Stanley Spencer's masterpiece, the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire. An inscription in the chapel explains that the paintings 'are the fulfilment of a design which he conceived whilst on active service' and these scenes of...Waley, D. P.
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Journal article
Cowley and 'Orinda' autograph fair copies
ABRAHAM COWLEY'S elegy 'On the Death of Mr. Crashaw' was his tribute to a fellow poet with whom he had exchanged verses at Cambridge and whom he had later befriended in exile at Paris where, according to Anthony Wood, he presented the destitute Crashaw to Henrietta Maria. The elegy has...Kelliher, Hilton
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: acquisitions, Slavonic Division
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: acquisitions, Slavonic Division.Swiderska, H.
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Journal article
Correspondence from The Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of St. Andrews
Correspondence from The Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of St. Andrews.Watson, J. Steven
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Journal article
Two sixteenth-century Italian devices
THE two devices here discussed have nothing in common except that they are both Italian of the sixteenth century, occur in books in the British Library, and have not been satisfactorily explained or identified hitherto. Much work remains to be done on Italian printers' and publishers' devices, and indeed there...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
Letters of Robert Briffault
ROBERT BRIFFAULT (1873-1948) was a prolific and influential writer in the years between the two world wars. He achieved international fame as a novelist, with the publication of Europa in 1935. It was a first novel, portraying the decadence of western European society. In its sequel, Europa in Limbo (1937),...Searle, Arthur
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Journal article
The paved court theatre at Somerset House
B.L. LANSDOWNE MS. 1171 is a collection of careful drawings of early English stages equipped with various kinds of scenery. All but one have been identified, however tentatively, and among them are what have hitherto been accepted as the earliest detailed designs for an English scenic stage - that erected...Orrell, John
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Journal article
The Cuttack Mission Press and Early Oriya printing
REFERENCES to early printing in the distinctive script of Oriya, the Indo-Aryan vernacular of Orissa, the region of India to the south-west of Bengal, are very scarce indeed.The attention of scholars has naturally enough tended to focus upon Bengal in the context of early printing in northern India, especially in...Shaw, Graham W.
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Journal article
Deterioration in leather bookbindings - our present state of knowledge
DETERIORATION in leather and the mechanism by which deterioration proceeds has been a subject for investigation by the British Leather Manufacturers' Research Association over a number of years. Leather is widely used, not only for clothing, upholstery, and bookbinding, but in industry for machinery drive belts, hydraulic seals, etc. and...Haines, Betty M.
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Journal article
Patrick Cary: a sequel
To place the recently acquired manuscript of Italian poems attributed to Patrick Cary more exactly in context and to dispel any doubts concerning his authorship I should like to bring together some scattered information. I should also like to discuss further sources regarding the last few years of his life.Willetts, Pamela
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Journal article
Learning to read: Friedrich Gedike's primer of 1791
IN a culture still as firmly based as ours on written language, it is hardly possible to overestimate the importance to the individual and to society of the skill of reading. It gives a degree of power, through access to recorded information, from the simple signals of everyday life to...Paisey, David
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Journal article
Notes on some manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes
IN one of the scrap-books of the notorious collector John Bagford (1650-1716), which are now part of the Harleian collection, is preserved a hitherto unnoticed leaf from a manuscript of Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. It is a single parchment leaf (Fragment 90, MS. Harley 5977), mounted on a guard,...Green, R. F.
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Journal article
Pietro Bembo's L'Histoire du Nouveau Monde
THE third volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio's Delle Navigationi et Viaggi was first published in Venice by Giunti in 1556.' It included an account of the first Spanish descent to the River Amazon made during 1542. This account was written by Gonzalo Hernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), and sent...Norvell, Lyn
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Journal article
Italian City and regional statutes 1473-1600, in the British Library
WITH the purchase in September 1974 of the printed statutes of Bologna, a book which was completed shortly after 28 February 1475, the British Library increases its holdings of the products of the first press in Bologna, that of Baldassare Azzoguidi, from fourteen to fifteen out of a total of...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
Foreign bookbindings added to the department of printed books from 1963 to 1974
IN volume 1, number 2 of The British Library Journal I discussed some of the English bindings acquired by the Department of Printed Books since 1962. This article followed others on acquisitions from 1941 to 1950, from 1952 to 1962, and in 1962, which appeared respectively in the British Museum...Nixon, Howard M.
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Journal article
NOTE: William Godwin's 'Damon and Delia'
The British Library has recently acquired this early novel by William Godwin of which no copy was hitherto known to be extant. It is known that Godwin wrote three novels in 1783-4; his manuscript autobiographical notes, quoted by C. Kegan Paul in William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (1876), record...Archibald, Jean
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Journal article
A Khamsa of Nizami dated Herat, 1421
THE Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books has recently acquired a Persian manuscript (Or. 13802) dated Herat, 824 (1421), which is illustrated by miniatures of considerable interest and importance, both stylistically and historically. The work consists of 794 folios containing the five poems (Khamsa) of Nizami (d. 1203) written...Titley, Norah M.
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Journal article
Innocence and experience in the poetry of Andrew Marvell
ANDREW MARVELL is the most enigmatic of English writers. Aubrey tells us that he was merry and cherry-cheeked, but that he would not drink in company, keeping, nevertheless, some bottles of wine in his lodgings 'to refresh his spirits and exalt his muse'. Nearly all the poems on which his...Lord, George De F.
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Journal article
Joseph Timothy Haydn, of Dictionary of Dates fame: 'a long and laborious life, writing chiefly for the publishers'
'Is it for this', Robert Hurton's melancholy scholar asks, 'we rise so early all the year long, leaping (as he saith) out of our beds, when we hear the bell ring, as if we heard a thunderclap? If this be all the respect, reward, and honour we shall have ....Myers, Robin