Thomas Attwood Walmisley’s Installation Odes
The University has a long standing tradition of performing music on the occasion of the installation of a new Chancellor (rather topical, now we are […]
Continue reading »‘Picture This #4’—John Speed map of Cambridgeshire
The map of Cambridgeshire from the Library’s copy of John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine is the fourth image in the University’s […]
Continue reading »Detective work
A significant part of rare books cataloguing work is documenting ‘copy-specific’ information—previous ownerships, binding, decoration, or imperfections—about the book in hand. Identifying and describing this […]
Continue reading »“The most interesting objects”
Two recent acquisitions enhance our strong collections in natural history, anatomy and the history of collecting. The first is a catalogue of the natural history […]
Continue reading »History of Cartography online
Since the first volume appeared in 1987 the University of Chicago’s History of Cartography series of monographs has become a standard and authoritative reference work […]
Continue reading »William Bedwell: the tribulations of an Arabist
William Bedwell was an Arabic scholar and mathematician born in Great Hallingbury, Essex, in 1563. He is sometimes known as the father of Arabic studies […]
Continue reading »The riddle of the Syriac double dot: it’s the world’s earliest question mark
Manuscripts written in Syriac, an ancient language of the Middle East, are peppered with mysterious dots. Among them is the vertical double dot or zawga […]
Continue reading »Historic Hong Kong
Six spectacular photographic panoramas of Hong Kong, taken c. 1900, were recently painstakingly conserved by Nicholas Burnett and colleagues at Museum Conservation Services at Duxford, […]
Continue reading »Books and Babies
Most displays in the Library’s main Exhibition Centre draw on Special Collections materials to some degree, but few of them have included quite such a […]
Continue reading »Eighteenth-century English erotica for a discerning German wartime audience
The Rare Books Department has just purchased a rather unusual piece of First-World-War printing. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill […]
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