Topics will include the history of the book, early music, the history of Canterbury Cathedral Library and its collections.
In 1758 John Baskerville, a Birmingham printer and businessman, decided to launch a project to print a large folio Bible, of the sort needed for lecterns in churches, using a new typeface which he had designed. This new type had caused a great stir in 1757 when he used it to print an edition of the poems of Virgil on expensive wove paper.
Continue reading “Canterbury Cathedral Library’s five copies of the 1763 Baskerville Bible”By the year 1500, the printing industry was over forty years old and had spread to all the major centres of Europe. Many institutional libraries were starting to add printed books to their collections and were even discarding manuscript copies from their shelves in favour of the new ‘modern’ products of the printing press. It is not easy to document this process from surviving books as many must survive without any indication of their original owner, whether personal or institutional. It is still the case that relatively few British libraries have fully researched and made available the provenances of items in their collections, though this situation is slowly improving.
Continue reading “Printed books surviving from Canterbury medieval libraries”
(D. Stoker)
The Treasurer’s Book for 1676/1677 (CCA DCc/TB-13) has several records of payments relating to the Chapter Library which had been newly built ten or twelve years earlier. The half-yearly stipend for Arthur Kay the Library Keeper is recorded as £2–10–0 and that of his deputy John Sargenson as £1–0–0 (p. 61). Under the heading Expensae necessariae incertae (Necessary miscellaneous expenses, p. 77), Dr Peter Du Moulin, the Treasurer for that year, records for 19 January 1677 the payment of five shillings ‘For halfe yeares wages to ye woman that cleanseth ye Library’ together with a further two shillings ‘For mops & brooms &c for the Library’. There then follows a similar small payment of two shillings ‘For taking off the chains from the books’. Continue reading “Did Canterbury Cathedral Library chain its books in the seventeenth century?”
The Rev. Dr Thomas Coombe (1747–1822) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his father was health officer of the port of Philadelphia. He was educated at the Academy and College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) taking his bachelor’s degree in 1766 and master’s degree in 1768. The College’s founding president was Benjamin Franklin, a friend of Coombe’s father.
(Wiki Commons)
Thomas Coombe then travelled to England to seek ordination in the Church of England, staying for a time in London with Benjamin Franklin at his house at 36 Craven Street (near present-day Trafalgar Square) when Franklin was serving as the London agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly and then as Postmaster for the British North American colonies. Continue reading “From prison in Philadelphia to a canonry at Canterbury Cathedral”
Robert Hunt (c. 1568–1608) was vicar of Reculver from 1595 to 1602, at which date he moved to the diocese of Chichester to become vicar of Heathfield. He was probably born around 1568/69 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford (BA 1592; MA 1595). Continue reading “The Revd Robert Hunt of Reculver (Kent) and Jamestown (Virginia)”
Sir Hans Sloane MD, FRS, FRCP (1660–1753), was a celebrated 18th-century physician and scientist. He was a royal physician to Queen Anne, George I and George II, and President of the Royal Society from 1727 to 1740. He was also President of the Royal College of Physicians. More importantly (if that is possible) he accumulated one of the largest collections of books of his time, particularly strong in scientific and medical works. In his will, Sloane offered his collection to the nation on provision of £20,000 for his heirs which was much less than the real value of the books. Parliament accepted the offer and in 1759 his library became one of the founding collections in the library of the newly established British Museum, together with the library of Sir Robert Cotton and the Old Royal Library, given by King George II. Sloane’s contribution to this new national library has been estimated at about 50,000 volumes.
Continue reading “Two books from the library of Sir Hans Sloane”
David Shaw's blog 