The five hundred years from the 1450s to the 1950s represent an extraordinarily rich quarry for evidence of incunabula sales, collecting, and use. What book lists reveal about publishing and reading habits in late-fifteenth-century Venice, how a Scottish librarian went about acquiring incunabula during World War II, and the international workshop connections glimpsed through early Hungarian bindings are among the topics explored in this volume. Library professionals aim spotlights on French plague tracts, Deventer as a printing place, the use of incunabula in learned societies in the nineteenth century, and incunabula collecting by monks and universities in England and Scotland.
Anette I. Hagan, MTh, PhD, National Library of Scotland, is Rare Books Curator for early printed collections to 1700, chapbooks, and pre-1900 Gaelic and Scots collections. She has published monographs, co-edited volumes and articles in philology, theology and book history.
List of Figures Abbreviations Notes on Contributors
Introduction Anette Hagan
Part 1: Continental Case Studies
1 Early Printing along the IJssel: Contextualising Deventer’s Success as a Centre of Incunabula Production Laura Cooijmans-Keizer
2 Jacques Le Forestier, Thomas Le Forestier and Early Medical Printing in Rouen Elma Brenner
3 The Quaderneto of Padua: A 1480 List of Incunabula for Sale Ester Camilla Peric
Part 2: Incunabula as Objects
4 Hungarian Bookbindings of the Incunabula Period Andrea Vilcsek
5 Bindings and Provenance: Evidence from Contemporary Oxford Bindings on the Early Printed Books of the Last Monks of Durham Sheila Hingley
6 ‘An Imperfect Copy’: Avicenna’s Canon de medicinae in the University of Aberdeen Jane Pirie
Part 3: Collecting
7 Incunabula from a Sixteenth-Century Donation to Lincoln College, Oxford: Reconstructing a Private Library and Its Afterlife Sarah Cusk
8 The Place of Incunabula in Early Modern Scottish Libraries Elizabeth Henderson
9 Augustus De Morgan’s Incunabula Karen Attar
10 An Astronomer’s Incunabula: The Library of Edmond Herbert Grove-Hills Sian Prosser
11 The National Library of Scotland’s Acquisitions of Incunabula during World War II Robert L. Betteridge
Figure Credits Cumulative Bibliography Index
Book historians, Special Collections libraries and archives, conservators and book binders, academics and students at all levels of book history and provenance, incunabula specialists, antiquarian book enthusiasts and collectors.