A Noble Fragment

The 42-line Gutenberg Bible (1450-1455) is one of the most valuable books in the world. Of a print run that may have numbered between 160 and 180, only 49 copies have survived, complete or “substantially” complete – an important distinction, as it turns out.  Fragments from another sixteen or so Bibles survive, copies that were …

Grolier Club Library receives its second Digitization Grant from METRO: William Stannard’s The Art Exemplar (London, 1859?)

The Grolier Club Library is pleased to announce it has received a 2019 Digitization Funding Award from METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council) in the amount of $2290 to digitize its copy of William Stannard's The Art Exemplar (London 1859?). This is the second Digitization Funding Award received by the Club from METRO in the …

Bartolo of Sassoferrato’s Super prima parte Digesti novi (1478)

I am pleased to announce my guest post, written for the Early Modern Female Book Ownership blog, about an inscription documenting an early modern woman’s ownership of one of the Grolier Club Library’s incunables.

My thanks to Martine van Elk for inviting me to contribute!

Meghan Constantinou

Early Modern Female Book Ownership

By Meghan Constantinou, Librarian, The Grolier Club

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  Fig. 1. Bartolo of Sassoferrato (1313-1357). Super prima parte Digesti novi. Venice: Nicolas Jenson, 1478, leaf a2r. Grolier Club Library, Call no. *34.15VeniJ541478Folio. Photograph by Meghan Constantinou.

At the Grolier Club Library, we were pleasantly surprised to discover an inscription documenting ownership by the English Restoration poet, Rachel Jevon (bap. 1627), on our copy of Bartolo of Sassoferrato’s Super prima parte Digesti novi, printed by Nicolas Jenson in 1478 (ISTC ib00216000). The inscription was discovered by John Lancaster while recording provenance details of the Club’s copy in CERL’s Material Evidence in Incunabula database (MEI). The database is searchable by gender, as well as many other facets. [1]

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  Fig. 2. Bartolo of Sassoferrato (1313-1357). Super prima parte Digesti novi, leaf a2r (detail). Photograph by Meghan Constantinou.

Rachel Jevon, born to a clergyman in the Diocese of Worcester in 1627…

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The Book Peddlers of France

Nowadays many of us take for granted how easy it is to get a book -- we head to the local library, hop on the subway to go to our favorite store, open up a browser to order something online, and in a matter of hours or a few days we have a new book …

American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) Archive Established at the Grolier Club

The Archives Committee of the American Trust for the British Library and the Grolier Club Library are pleased to announce the completion of the processing of the records of the American Trust for the British Library. The archive consists of 6 boxes of materials (6 linear feet) of the business records of the ATBL, and …

One dynasty, three names

For one hundred years, a modest dynasty of imprimeur-libraires printed, published, and sold books in Paris with three generations of women at its core. The story of this family shows, first, how women often played hidden roles in the print and book trade, occasionally revealed when a widow inherited the firm, a son-in-law took over, …

Aristocratic Identity Erasure in the Private Library Catalogue of Madame la duchesse de La Vallière, ca. 1787

The private manuscript library catalogue of Anne-Julie-Françoise de Crussol d’Uzès, duchesse de La Vallière (1713-1797?) documents a fairly typical eighteenth-century French aristocratic library, composed of mainly contemporary literature in small formats on a wide range of topics (history, travel, novels, etc.). The catalogue does, however, bear one curious feature that has interested me since I …