[Thanks to William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.]
I am pleased to announce a major acquisition of a collection of sixteenth-century annotated books from the English bookseller Roger Gaskell. Ann M. Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Harvard College Professor, encouraged this acquisition. She is the author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010). Professor Blair writes:
I am thrilled about the opportunities afforded by this new acquisition of annotated books. Each of these 18 volumes offers unique insight into the reading and thinking of early modern Europeans across an unusually broad range of genres—including classical and school texts, medical and scientific works, but also collections of letters and vernacular works which were less often annotated. I am eager to make use of them in my research and in my courses in book history where students are often interested in how a text was read in its time—annotations like these offer some of the best evidence there is for recovering mentalities of the past.
The collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes includes a wide variety of texts, including school texts of Cicero and Juvenal, Greek texts of Aristotle and Hesiod, and scientific and medical texts by authors such as Euclid, Galen and Celsus. The collection also includes texts which are not frequently found in annotated copies, such as Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools and the letters of Konrad Gesner. A pdf of the collection is available here, but be warned it is extensively illustrated and in color and so does take some time to download.
