Up-to-date collections of resources can be found at A Compendium of Resources and EarlyPrintedBooks.com.
Unless otherwise noted, all online resources below are open access.
Catalogs and digital text collections:
- Hamnet: Folger Library Catalog: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/
- English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC): http://estc.bl.uk
- Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC): http://www.ustc.ac.uk/
- Early English Books Online (EEBO): http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home (subscription only)
- Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP): http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/
- British Printed Images to 1700: http://www.bpi1700.org.uk/index.html
- English Broadside Ballad Archive: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/
- Shakespeare Quartos Archive: http://www.quartos.org/
- Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://www.bnf.fr
- Gallica (the digital collections of the BnF): http://gallica.bnf.fr
- La biblioteca complutense (Universidad Complutense Madrid): http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/ayuda/27938.php
- Colección digital dioscórides: http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/atencion/24063.php
- El Buscón (Biblioteca Nacional de España): http://www.bne.es/es/Catalogos/ElBuscon/
- Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, University of Pennsylvania (SCETI): http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/ (includes the Furness Shakespeare collection and the Schoenberg manuscript collection)
Primary research tools:
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB): http://www.oxforddnb.com/ (subscription only)
- Transcripts of the Stationers’ Registers, 1554-1640 and 1641-1708: http://clio.cul.columbia.edu:7018/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=6177070 and http://clio.cul.columbia.edu:7018/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=6177199 (links to pdfs of the volumes in Arber and in Eyre and Rivington)
- British Book Trade Index (BBTI): http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/
- London Book Trades: http://lbt.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
- McKerrow, Dictionaries of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557-1640: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015014765203
- Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1641-1667: http://archive.org/stream/adictionarybook01plomgoog and 1668-1725: http://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofprin00plomiala
- Contents of British Literary Book Trade (1475-1700), eds James Bracken and Joel Silver (Gale Research, 1996) (if you have access to the subscription service Gale Literature Resource Center, the contents of all volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography are there)
Other useful resources for studying early modern books:
- The Atlas of Early Printing: http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
- ABC for Book Collectors: http://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/29-abc_for_book_collectors.html (link to pdf of the 8th edition of John Carter’s book, revised by Nicholas Barker)
- CERL Thesaurus: http://thesaurus.cerl.org/cgi-bin/search.pl (from the Consortium of European Research Libraries; a great resource for working out printers’ names and their many variants)
- Web Resources for the Rare Books Cataloguer: http://lib.nmsu.edu/rarecat/ (from RBMS; includes helpful links for rare books researchers as well)
- Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME): http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/ (open access, with advanced functions limited to subscribers)
Help with Latin:
- Latin Place Names: http://www.rbms.info/committees/bibliographic_standards/latin/index.html (from the Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries)
- Glossary of Common Latin Terms Found in Imprints of Early Printed Books: http://www.rbms.info/committees/bibliographic_standards/latin/glossary.html (from RBMS/BSC)
- Enigma: Unpuzzling difficult Latin readings in medieval manuscripts: http://ciham-digital.huma-num.fr/enigma/ (but also useful for Latin printed incunables)
- Cappelli’s Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations: http://www.hist.msu.ru/Departments/Medieval/Cappelli/ (in Italian, however see also this English translation of Cappelli’s Elements of Latin Abbreviation in Medieval Paleography: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/1821/3/47cappelli.pdf)
Researching bookbindings:
- David Pearson et al, Preservation Advisory Centre: Bookbindings (British Library, 2010): http://www.bl.uk/blpac/pdf/bookbindings.pdf (good introduction to basic binding structures and terms)
- Folger Bindings Image Collection (Folger Shakespeare Library): http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/BINDINGS~1~1
- British Library Database of Bookbindings: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/
- University of Iowa Libraries Bookbinding Models: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/binding/
- British Armorial Bindings: http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/ (U Toronto; not easy to search but chock full of provenance goodies)
- Roberts and Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Library of Congress, 1981): http://cool.conservation-us.org/don/don.html
Resources on paper:
- Timothy Barrett, “European Papermaking Techniques, 1300-1800”: http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php (University of Iowa, part of the awesome Paper Through Time project)
- Chancery Papermaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-PmfdV_cZU (also from Tim Barrett)
Resources on hand-press printing:
- Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or, The doctrine of handyworks applied to the art of printing (an 1896 reprint of the 1683): http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008411043
- Fertel’s La science pratique de l’imprimerie (1723, digitized by Gallica): http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1325424/f9.planchecontact
- Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie (1751–1772), as in its digital form from U Chicago/ARTFL: http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ and http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.23:8.encyclopedie0513 for the letterpress printing section; you can also read (and contribute) to English translations through U Michigan’s project http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/
- Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1787, digitzed by HathiTrust): http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001160990
Sites useful for teaching foreign emblems:
- http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/
- http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/
- http://www.italianemblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/
- http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/