Exploring the world of books at Oxford
Special Collections Exhibition | Taylor Institution Library | University of Oxford 14 – 26 June 2024 When we pick up a book, we often forget that as well as reading a text we are looking at an object. Unlike the relative intangibility of words, which dwell in our minds and memories as well as on …
Last week, we had the opportunity to have our session on ‘Caring for Collections’ and ‘Library Management’ at the charming Old Library at St Edmund Hall, an apt location given the date coinciding with the feast day of St Edmund. James Howarth, the librarian, first gave us an introduction on the early history of the …
By Charlotte Copeman Having spent the last five weeks building up our knowledge of manuscripts from paper, to ink, to assembly, to binding, last week’s Latin palaeography session finally brought us to the styling and construction of the letters and words themselves. Our crash-course began with Dr Laure Miolo introducing us to the three principal …
By Ksenia Dugaeva In our ‘Structures of the manuscript book’ seminar last week, we continued our foray into understanding how manuscripts come together – focusing in this session on the journey from sheet to codex to bound book. All of us browse, read, and generally handle books in our daily and academic lives, and a …
By Thomas Godfrey Understanding materiality can teach us a lot about a manuscript. Seeing as we will be looking at many manuscripts over the course of the year, we were granted the opportunity to get to grips with the fundamentals of how they are made. Through attending a workshop led by Andrew Honey, Robert Minte, …
In the first week of the History of the Book methods option, students and researchers gathered in the Taylor Institute Library to explore items from the special collections that challenge the very notion of the ‘book’. From the curious collection of printed and handwritten manuscript pages rebound in Arch.Fol.It.1478(1) where Petrarch’s ‘sonetti et cançone’ are …