book history resources

A brief list of open-access resources for studying early modern book history, with a preference for British history. Updated November 4, 2019.

catalogs & digital collections | vocabulary & glossaries | Latin | book trade | bindings | paper | printers manuals | videos

catalogs and digital collections

• English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC): items published in English or in the British Isles and North America from 1473–1800; includes links to EEBO & ECCO & sometimes other digitizations
• Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC): books published in Europe up through 1600 (click the “Search USTC-16 & 17” option to extend into the 17th century); includes links to digitized copies where applicable.
  • For a full list of the national union catalogs that form the basis of USTC, visit the list of catalogs at EarlyPrintedBooks.com. It is sometimes easier and the data more reliable if you go straight to them instead of through USTC.
• The Heritage of the Printed Book Database (HPB): a collection of catalog records from European and North American libraries of books printed in Europe between 1455 and 1830; context and help
• Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP): all sorts of metadata about playbooks not found in other resources, including ability to search by stationer and paratextual features
• Early English Books Online (EEBO): (subscription only! If you don’t otherwise have access, a very reasonable RSA membership will get you in) digitized microfilms of items published in English or in the British Isles and North America from 1473–1700; don’t confuse this with EEBO-TCP, which are the searchable transcriptions from Text Creation Partnership
  • “Working with EEBO and ECCO”: my pdf worksheet on what they are and how they remediate texts http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6J96G
• British Printed Images to 1700: images of prints and book illustrations primarily from the British Museum and related resources
• British Book Illustrations: 17th-century book illustrations from the Folger and organized through Iconclass
• English Broadside Ballad Archive: images and transcriptions of primarily 17th-century English ballads, along with recordings of extant tunes
• STCV (Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen): books published in Flanders before 1801
• Bibliothèque nationale de France and Gallica: BnF catalog and digital collection
• La biblioteca complutense and Colección digital dioscórides: Universidad Complutense Madrid catalog and digital collection
• El Buscón and Biblioteca Digital Hispanica: Biblioteca Nacional de España catalog and digital collection
• Hamnet and Luna: Folger Shakespeare Library catalog and digital collection
• Shakespeare gets his own subset, because that’s how much there is:
  • BL’s 147 copies of pre-1642 quartos: includes contextual essays
  • Shakespeare Quartos Archive: 32 copies of the 5 pre-1642 Hamlet quartos, imaged and transcribed
  • Early printed Shakespeare at the Folger: a list of resources for Shakespeare’s Works, including links to early quartos and F1 and F2
  • First Folios: I maintain a catalog of (22 and counting) digitized First Folios; tl;dr use the Bodleian’s
• see also my list of open early modern digital collections

book vocabulary and glossaries

• ABC for Book Collectors: link to pdf of the 8th edition of John Carter’s book, revised by Nicholas Barker; the place to start for accessible definitions of book terms
• Rosenthal, Dictionary of Abbreviations: link to pdf; abbreviations used by German and Italian book dealers
• Standard citation forms: identifying the short-hand names used in citation fields in catalog records; eg, what is Goff? (from RBMS, the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association)
• Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials: intended for catalogers, but useful for understanding using catalogs (RBMS)
• Web Resources for the Rare Books Cataloger: a newly redone collection of links from RBMS, geared toward catalogers but helpful for researchers, too
• Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME): (advanced functions limited to subscribers) a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, and glossaries from 1455 to 1757

help with Latin

• Latin Place Names: Latin place names in pre-1801 imprints and their vernacular equivalents (RBMS)
• Glossary of Common Latin Terms Found in Imprints of Early Printed Books: exactly what is says (RBMS)
• Enigma: “Unpuzzling difficult Latin readings in medieval manuscripts” but also useful for Latin printed incunables
• Cappelli’s Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations: in Italian, however see also this English translation of Cappelli’s Elements of Latin Abbreviation in Medieval Paleography (pdf)

book trade

• Transcripts of the Stationers’ Registers, 1554-1640 and 1641-1708: links to scans of the volumes in Arber and in Eyre and Rivington, via HathiTrust
• British Book Trade Index: names and brief biographical and trade details of people who worked in the book trade in England and Wales and who were trading by 1851
• Scottish Book Trade Index: names, trades and addresses of people involved in printing in Scotland up to 1850
• McKerrow, Dictionaries of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557-1640: scan at Internet Archive
• Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1641–1667 and 1668–1725: scan at Internet Archive; the 1641–1667 volume can also be searched as a wiki
• Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses: The History of the House of Plantin-Moretus: put online in full by DBNL; also includes information on how printing worked
• The Atlas of Early Printing: interactive map showing the spread of printing 1450–1500
• CERL Thesaurus: forms of imprint places, imprint names, personal names and corporate names as found in material printed before the middle of the 19th century
• printer’s devices subset
  • McKerrow’s Printer’s & Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland, 1485-1640 (Internet Archive scan)
  • MAR.T.E.: devices from 17th-century Italy
  • Printers’ Devices of the Ancient Book Section of the Library of the University of Barcelona
  • Collection of printer’s marks at Linda Hall Library

bindings

• David Pearson et al, Preservation Advisory Centre: Bookbindings (British Library, 2010): (pdf) good introduction to basic binding structures and terms
• Roberts and Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Library of Congress, 1981): online version of the classic
• Folger Bindings Image Collection (Folger Shakespeare Library)
• British Library Database of Bookbindings
• British Armorial Bindings: not easy to search but chock full of provenance goodies
• University of Iowa Libraries Bookbinding Models: models of bookbindings from various periods and places; not a lot of context, but useful in conjunction with other sources

paper

• Timothy Barrett, “European Papermaking Techniques, 1300–1800” (University of Iowa, part of Paper Through Time): best introduction you’ll read on how paper was made during this period
• Erin Blake, “Learning to ‘read’ old paper” (Folger’s Collation blog): a good quick account of how to recognize laid paper and wove paper
• Gravell Watermark Archive: database of over 8500 watermarks found in paper made between 1400 and 1835

printers manuals

• Sometimes you want to hear from the horse’s mouth and that can mean reading early printer’s manuals. Over on EarlyPrintedBooks.com, I keep a list of facsimiles of such manuals, including Moxon and the Encyclopédie .

videos

• Sometimes the best way to understand something is by watching how it’s done. Over on EarlyPrintedBooks.com I keep a list of videos related to book-making for these purposes, including information on intalgio printing, making type, and paper making.