This article examines the seventeenth-century private library of the Danish noblewoman Karen Brahe (1657-1736). Surviving intact, the collection's contents have been carefully catalogued, offering an entry point into the world of female book owners and users in earlier times. Through quantitative analysis of the digitally encoded bibliographic metadata of the library's catalogue of printed items, this article identifies large-scale patterns across the collection and demonstrates how female book owners in Denmark were connected through their reading to broader European book markets and networks, mapping the interplay between production, distribution, and reception that shaped the book ownership and intellectual life of women in the past.
This paper addresses the role of the invention of tradition in early library history writing and its influence on the subsequent discourse. 'The invention of tradition' is a phrase coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger to describe cultural practices that appear traditional but which are of comparatively recent innovation. Examples include neo-classical civic architecture, the symbolic construction of national identities, and the adoption of anachronistic rituals in essentially modern institutions. Hobsbawm and Ranger argue that invented traditions have an important social function in helping to foster cohesion, legitimising authority structures, and cementing social values by rooting contemporary institutions and social practices in a factitious past. This paper argues that early library history writing can be understood as an invented tradition that acted to validate the social function of libraries by appeal to the distant historical past. While library history lacks ritualistic and ceremonial aspects, it displays a similar ideological function in securing an ostensibly novel social institution against the authority of tradition. It first discusses the nature of invented traditions and their relevance to library history. The paper then analyses library history writing between 1859 and 1914, and its influence on subsequent library discourse. Finally the paper analyses the specific tension in the nineteenth century that gave rise to the invented tradition of early library history writing. The paper predominantly addresses the development on library services in Britain.
This paper discusses the library of the Swedish King Oskar II (1829-1907) and its uses for him as a private person and as head of state. It also discusses the transformation of this library from privately owned to an accessible library museum, archive and research facility. The major research questions concern the history of the library from its beginnings in 1853 until today, and its function as a legitimation tool for Oskar II as well as his descendants. In order to study the library, I have used object biography, a method originating in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, but which has several advantages within the framework of the history of libraries and collections as well. The article is based on the author's doctoral thesis in library and information science (LIS) at the University of Boras, Over djupen mot hojden: en biografi over Oskar II:s bibliotek ('Over the depths towards the heights: a biography of Oskar II's library').
This paper describes the origins and impact of Ireland's cross-border mobile library service, which began as a peace and reconciliation project and continues to serve communities along the border between Co. Donegal, Republic of Ireland, and Co. Derry and Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Through an oral history project with the long-time cross-border mobile librarian Denis Doherty, supplemented by literature review and interviews with library staff, this research demonstrates the ongoing success and evolution of the cross-border mobile library service, which has thrived beyond its original project term (2003-06) and continues to serve rural communities along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, particularly where branch libraries and school libraries are absent. The value of the service lies in the deep care demonstrated by library staff and the flexibility of the mobile library, from the early days of the peace process to addressing chronic loneliness two decades later.
Van Berkhey, Reader in Natural History at the University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic, was financially ruined around 1784-85, an event which led to the sale of his books and manuscripts and his natural history cabinet, which were widely dispersed. He had assembled a famous iconographical collection of over 6,000 drawings and prints of naturalia (many of which he had drawn himself), arranged according to the Linnaean system. These were sold by auction in 1785 as an entity, to an unknown bidder, for the cabinet of King Carlos III of Spain and then preserved in Madrid. This fact has become internationally known only recently. In his auction catalogue, Van Berkhey emphasised the importance of his extensive collection of original drawings of insects, which were models for the engravings in volume 4 of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus (published in 1765). About 200 insect drawings were fraudulently removed from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN) in Madrid around 1982, but in 2009 these were restored to the archive of the MNCN. During the eighteenth century new species were often described, especially by Linnaeus himself, from images in books or drawings, without the addition of illustrations. The Van Berkhey iconographical collection as a whole, still preserved in Madrid, could serve as an important source for solving taxonomic problems since it contains illustrations of new species, so-called iconotypes: if the real type specimen (the holotype) is missing, a good illustration of it can help.
Gilbert White spoke of his hopes that the Natural History of Selborne (1789) would inspire other 'stationary men' to join him in writing down their observations of nature in their immediate surroundings. In the north-east of England, Marmaduke Tunstall (1743-90) made a great effort in recording curious sightings near his estate at Wycliffe, interleaving his copy of Thomas Pennant's British Zoology with extensive notes. These notes are now in Canada, largely detached from their original context. An eight-volume transcript was completed by George Allan of Darlington following Tunstall's death. The notes were supplemented with additional illustrations, newspaper articles, and further observations and remain interleaved within a copy of the Zoology. This article follows a chronological approach detailing Tunstall's and Allan's connections to their local natural history community at the end of the eighteenth century, exploring the content of the two sets and their afterlife and demonstrating evidence that the transcript now at Windsor was used by Thomas Bewick in preparation for the History of British Birds (1797-1804).
Philip Miller's library was sold at auction in London in April 1774. Using the annotated auction catalogue and other contemporary sources, and after looking very briefly at Miller's life, this paper will focus on three aspects of the sale. First, it will describe the library and highlight the significant titles and authors represented therein. Secondly, it will look at two groups of purchasers: the members of the London book trade, and Miller's fellow naturalists and other collectors. This paper will examine what they were buying and how much they were spending. And finally, it will attempt to place this sale in the contemporary context of the London market for books.
The nineteenth century was plagued with slight variations of similar reference methods used to cite botanical authors in botanical publications. Abbreviations were used to condense names and sources to save on space in a manner that was still accessible. The first director of Kew Gardens, William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), used a distinctive notation style in his Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-40) with the goal of summarising all known plants found within British North America in the early to mid-nineteenth century. However, Hooker had never set foot on the continent and so was reliant on a network of correspondence to publish his work. Decoding the format of Hooker's plant entries within the Flora Boreali-Americana sheds light on how botanical science was researched, published, and consumed in the nineteenth century. Hooker's complete reliance on external contributors in a time when most of his contemporaries remained eager to prove their encounters with plants shifted the emphasis onto botanical collectors. While each named collector deserves their own essay investigating their botanical contributions, this article aims to lay the groundwork for research into untold stories of those communities of people who participated in botanical science as residents, travelling botanists, local seed sellers, physicians, etc. Deciphering the meaning and purpose of botanical notation provides a first step in unravelling the sexist historicisation of botany, which credits the male armchair botanist for the work of his network made up of diverse nationalities, classes, and genders.
An examination of the material pasted into early books collected by Francis Douce reveals that the collector had a high degree of familiarity with his collection and was able to return to places within it to add and revise material. Although scholars like Lucy Peltz have attempted to distinguish bibliographical practices such as filing for retrieval and extra-illustration, many of the different sorts of intervention displayed in Douce's collection - the insertion of pictures, loose leaves, and sales catalogues - occupy an intermediate space between these two practices. Additions can be interpreted as illustration of the text into which they are pasted or as material filed for later retrieval. While, in some cases, the collector's annotations reveal one or the other motive behind his practice, many more cases are indeterminate and could be interpreted as fulfilling either role, or indeed both simultaneously.
This article argues that descriptions of business grey literature are inadequate and do not take into account the vast scope of such materials, particularly those generated by large, long-established multinational corporations and government agencies. Using the IBM Corporation's activities as a model, a broader definition is proposed with a framework that can be used by scholars, librarians, and archivists to understand this class of publications.
The big house library in Ireland was on a precarious footing in the early twentieth century. Successive sales assisted the demise, or diminishment, of the houses' book collections. Libraries were often the first country house collections to be sold, in Britain and Ireland, when money troubles arose. The contents of country house libraries thereby entered the field of what the American industrialist and book collector A. Edward Newton (1864-1940) termed 'the book-collecting game'. A 1920 catalogue of the library at Springhill, Co. Londonderry, formerly home of the Lenox-Conynghams, provides a snapshot of their historic library in the decades immediately prior to the National Trust acquiring the property. Mina Lenox-Conyngham (1867-1961), compiler of the catalogue, played a key role in both the dispersal and the preservation of Springhill's book collection. This article analyses and contextualises this catalogue, attempts to discern a strategy regarding collection integrity, and concludes by asking 'what was Mina's game'?
Library statistics predating the 1870s, although rudimentary by modern standards, are nevertheless worthy of scholarly attention. Despite the shortcomings of early library statistics, we can profitably enquire into the ends they served in the pre-professional era, how these ends differed across nations, and how they evolved over time. This contribution traces the development of library statistics in nineteenthcentury Western Europe and North America, beginning in 1823 with an encyclopaedia article by the German librarian Friedrich Adolf Ebert and ending with the American Bureau of Education's seminal report on public libraries from 1876. The article explores cross-cultural connections between statistical contributions on libraries in the nineteenth century as well as highlighting differing and evolving national approaches to library statistics and their uses during this period.
