Information

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

The Bibliographical Society decided in 2005 that it would use its website to offer space for bibliographical work-in-progress and additions and corrections to bibliographical reference works, especially those published by the Society. In 2006, the Society came to an agreement with the School of Advanced Study at the University of London to make use of the SAS e-Repository for storage of databases and other electronic documents. The Society’s Council invites both members and non-members of the Society to take advantage of these two facilities to offer electronic documents for publication on the web. We hope that this facility will be of particular use for work-in-progress, which can be updated as required.

The items currently available at www.bibsoc.org.uk are

• • Additions and corrections to recent volumes

• • British Armorial Binding Stamps

• • Bernstein, Memory of Paper database of Watermarks

• • English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century

• • Coffee-House Library Short-Title Catalogue

• • British Book Illustrations, 1604–1640

• • An electronic version of McKerrow’s Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices

• • Not in McKerrow

Armorial Binding Stamps

The Bibliographical Society in conjunction with the University of Toronto was pleased to announce in July 2012 the publication of an important new online reference work for book history. The British Armorial Bindings Data base, begun by John Morris and continued by Philip Oldfield, is now available on the web at http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/. This catalogue, which attempts to record all known British armorial bookbinding stamps used by personal owners to mark and decorate their books, reproduces over 3,300 stamps used between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, associated with nearly two thousand individual owners. Intended primarily as a tool to facilitate the identification of heraldic stamps, the database may be searched from many angles. Stamps may be searched by heraldic devices, such as arms, crest, mottoes etc. Owners can be found under their family name, their titular name, rank in the peerage, and by gender. The 12,000 books that provide the sources for the stamps, from libraries around the world, may be sorted by author and title, and individual libraries may be searched for their holdings of armorial bindings. The database will be useful to rare-book librarians, book historians, book dealers, students of heraldry, genealogists, and anyone with an interest in questions of provenance and the identification of coats of arms. The database has been created and hosted at the University of Toronto and is made available as a free public resource through the sponsorship of the Bibliographical Society.

THE ARCHIVES OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

The Bibliographical Society’s Archive is now at the Bodleian Library and can be used by scholars and by members of the Society. All researchers wishing to use the Archive must have a valid Bodleian reader’s ticket, but Members of the Society who are not otherwise eligible should bring to Bodleian Admissions their current signed Society’s Programme Card together with proof of identification.

A finding list of the contents of the archive is available on the society’s website (www.bibsoc.org.uk) and in the Special Collections Reading Room of the Bodleian Library; a full catalogue will be available in due course.

For enquiries email: enquiries.sc@bodley.ox.ac.uk

THE LIBRARY, VIRTUAL ISSUE

The Library announces the launch of an annual ‘Virtual Issue’, to accompany the journal’s four print issues every December. This virtual issue will comprise a retrospective gathering of key articles in a particular field that have appeared in the pages of The Library since the journal’s first appearance. These will be chosen by a guest editor, who will also supply an editorial reflecting on the field, its history, and its prospects, here and beyond. This virtual issue is available, free of charge to any interested reader, on The Library’s page on OUP’s website (http://library.oxfordjournals.org). The articles will remain freely available for three months, but the editorial permanently.

ONLINE ACCESS TO THE LIBRARY

The Library is now also available in online format, from Oxford University Press, via the web address http://www.library.oxfordjournals.org/. Access to the electronic...