Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
18th November 2020
With the Boston book fair now behind me, I’ve now got time to focus on cataloguing some recent acquisitions and thought I’d share one with you. This is a rare eighteenth-century perspective view depicting a miniature contemporary library, complete with library users reading, discoursing, or simply admiring the shelves. Such Guckkastendioramen (or ‘peepshows’ as they […]
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11th February 2020
Also from Anglo-German Cultural Relations: a fine etching by Georg Balthasar Probst of Augsburg, one of the leading producers of perspective views in Europe, depicting the library at the University of Göttingen. The image was copied from one of the plates by Georg Daniel Heumann in the Wahre Abbildung der königl. Große Britan. und Churfürstl. […]
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22nd March 2016
This is a copy of Library script. A brief guide on how to master independently the handwriting used in libraries for the writing of catalogue cards, reader’s tickets etc., brought out in 1927 by the wonderfully-named publishers ‘Down with Illiteracy’. It’s a rare guide for Soviet librarians as to the best script to use in their official […]
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8th July 2015
This is the first edition of the first comprehensive library classification system to be published in Russia, and the first Russian guide to bibliographic description and catalogue production, an important text from the early years of the Imperial Public Library (now the National Library of Russia) in St Petersburg. ‘The pre-eminence among the world’s libraries of the […]
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