This is what buried treasure looks like in a library: This book, which is a collection of two perfectly respectable but not very rare tracts by Vatican Librarian Agostino Steuco, has acted as a vessel, a treasure…
Around a month ago Liza DeBlock (one of our MLitt in Book History students) pulled from the shelf this very interesting book during her regularly scheduled bibliography lab hours: This third edition of Keckermann’s…
A few months ago, while walking the stacks of our 17th century collections, a copy of Andrea Morosini’s folio Historia Veneta (1623) caught my eye. Normally, when trolling stacks of early printed books for something…
On the 15th of May, Hermine Lefebvre, USTC/ENSSIB intern for 2014, completed a wonderful cataloguing project which has seen all of St Andrews’ 17th century editions of Athanasius Kircher added to the online catalogue.…
I’ve been doing some work in the stacks lately with our interns and have been focusing some attention on our 17th century reserve collections (around 5,ooo volumes) which remain largely uncatalogued. This collection is…
This June, the Department of Special Collections launched Lighting the Past, a project to catalogue the 150,000 books not currently represented in the University Library’s catalogue, SAULCAT, or in larger databases…
In 1893, King Chulalongkorn ordered the first printing ever of the Tipitaka (or, “the three baskets,” the Pali canon which forms the doctrinal foundation of Theravada Buddhism) which had previously only existed in…
Earlier this year, Howard S. Mott, Inc. brought to our attention a book from their stock which would fit our collection very nicely. The book in question was the very rare and fragile printing of Sir R.L. Playfair’s An…
Last weekend marked the close of another cataloguing project: bringing all of the records for our incunabula collection (pre-1501 printed works) up to a full level of description and to provide full indexed access to…
Last year I was working on this item from our Typograhpical Collection and stumbled upon the present conundrum. Featured above is the title page to a supposed 1786 Edinburgh printing of James Hutton’s “Theory of the…