To celebrate the first meeting of the Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana (the St Andrews Lectura Dantis) of this academic year, I spent a bit of time… Read More »52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations, Week 21: images inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy
This very pretty little prayer book was probably part of a book of hours originally; these contained simplified versions of church liturgy to facilitate private… Read More »52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations, Week 16: the Office for the Dead with other devotional works
This week’s illustration post comes straight out of a very close-knit circle of Renaissance Italian humanists working in the 16th century, however the story begin… Read More »52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations, Week 9: Piero Valeriano’s menagerie of symbols (Hieroglyphica, 1556)
The summer is a busy time of year for new acquisitions here at St Andrews. As our fiscal year winds down and extra money is… Read More »New Acquisition: the first printed edition of Corpus agrimensorum Romanorum (1554)
This week’s binding post is one of the true treasures of the Rare Books collection here at St Andrews: the first edition of the Ostrog… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 44: contemporary binding of the Ostrog Bible (1581)
This week’s binding post is a heavy-weight from the Alchemy Collection. It is found on the 1561 Officina Frobeniana printing of Georg Agricola’s De re… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 43: a 16th century metallurgy bound by a 19th century professor
Earlier this week, our Muniments Archivist, Rachel Hart, was browsing our early print collections for images of Easter for another publication. You can imagine my… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 41: gorgeous early 16th century French clasps
This week’s binding feature is one of four incunabula held in the George Hay Forbes Collection. This week, as I was wrapping up cataloguing of… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 40: a stunning 16th century pigskin and medieval manuscript half binding
This week’s binding feature is indeed a bit of a Frankenstein. I came across this item while working through the large folio incunabula shelves and… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 36: a 16th century Frankenstein-esque binding
This week’s binding post caught my eye as I was reshelving some items. As you can see in the picture above, this book stands out… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 30: 16th century Hebrew text bound in a leaf of a 12th or 13th century manuscript
This week’s fantastic binding is hard to miss when your sifting through the stacks of 16th century Italian books. Most of our books in the… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 28: A 16th century classic beautifully rebound in the 19th century
Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. This book caught my eye as I was pulling some items from the incunabula section because… Read More »52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, Week 26: A 15th century edition of Josephus bound in near contemporary reverse sheep with a cover title inside a horn window
