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.…
For this week’s how-to post, I’ve taken some inspiration from one of our quirkiest collections, that of the Reverend John Beveridge (1857-1943). Beveridge gifted his library and archive to the University in 1943, the…
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…
We have always referred to this manuscript (St Andrews ms32(o)) as the ‘book of wonders’ and indeed wondered what it was all about as it is lavishly and confusingly illustrated, packed with mysterious monsters and…
This week’s selection for the ‘Inspiring Illustrations’ thread speaks for itself and needs very little introduction. We have selected the 1650 printing of Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis, printed in two…
Francis Pringle’s copy of Poetae minores Graeci (1635) and Robert Balfour’s copy of Juvenal’s Satires (1552) The University Library Department of Special Collections has recently acquired two books from the working…
This week’s illustration post focuses on perhaps the most popular illustrated genre of the Renaissance: the emblem book. Emblem books were a genre developed in the early 16th century as digestible and curious works…
As 2013 promises to be an interesting year astronomically and we take to gazing at the stars again, I thought it would be good to turn our focus for this week’s blog to the heavens as well. I began my search for the…
Within our small, but perfectly formed, collection of ‘oriental’ manuscripts, is a fine copy of the Shahnameh, an epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010AD. Based largely (but not entirely)…
In every working library, each day sees a struggle played out between order and chaos. It’s a fact of life that however hard librarians work to impose order, opening the doors to users inevitably means that a measure…