Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print (Library of the Written Word - The Handpress World volume 23, 31)

Scholars of pre-modern literary culture rely almost exclusively on texts that have survived: mostly those that have reached the comparative safety of modern library collections. But the urge to record, catalogue and advertise the wealth of new publications in the age of print created an additional and valuable resource: book lists. Printers made lists of their available stock; owners catalogued their libraries; religious authorities drew up indexes of banned books; assessors inventoried collections and stock as part of the settlement of estates, or legal proceedings. This volume examines an array of such lists taken from a variety of European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The result is a wide-ranging re-evaluation of one of the most interesting and underused resources for early modern book history.Contributors include: Jürgen Beyer, Flavia Bruni, Gina Dahl, Cristina Dondi, Shanti Graheli, Neil Harris, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, Alexander Marr, Kasper van Ommen, Andrea Ottone, Leigh T.I. Penman, Benito Rial Costas, John Sibbald, Kevin M. Stevens and Malcolm Walsby. Scholars of pre-modern literary culture rely almost exclusively on texts that have survived: mostly those that have reached the comparative safety of modern library collections. But the urge to record, catalogue and advertise the wealth of new publications in the age of print created an additional and valuable resource: book lists. Printers made lists of their available stock; owners catalogued their libraries; religious authorities drew up indexes of banned books; assessors inventoried collections and stock as part of the settlement of estates, or legal proceedings. This volume examines an array of such lists taken from a variety of European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The result is a wide-ranging re-evaluation of one of the most interesting and underused resources for early modern book history. Contributors include: Jrgen Beyer, Flavia Bruni, Gina Dahl, Cristina Dondi, Shanti Graheli, Neil Harris, Justyna Kiliaczyk-Ziba, Alexander Marr, Kasper van Ommen, Andrea Ottone, Leigh T.I. Penman, Benito Rial Costas, John Sibbald, Kevin M. Stevens and Malcolm Walsby. "Scholars of pre-modern literary culture rely almost exclusively on texts that have survived: mostly those that have reached the comparative safety of modern library collections. But the urge to record, catalogue and advertise the wealth of new publications in the age of print created an additional and valuable resource: book lists. Printers made lists of their available stock; owners catalogued their libraries; religious authorities drew up indexes of banned books; assessors inventoried collections and stock as part of the settlement of estates, or legal proceedings. This volume examines an array of such lists taken from a variety of European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The result is a wide-ranging re-evaluation of one of the most interesting and underused resources for early modern book history"--Provided by publisher This volume examines a number of different book lists from a variety of European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It offers a wide-ranging re-evaluation of one of the most interesting and underused resources for early modern book history