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49 - Mining the archive: a guide to present and future book-historical research resources

from III - SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
Michael Suarez S. J.
Edited by
Michael F. Suarez, SJ  and
Michael L. Turner
Michael F. Suarez, SJ
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Michael L. Turner
Affiliation:
Bodleian Library, Oxford
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Summary

Students of book history working in the period that this volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain investigates – from the definitive end of the Printing Act (1695) to the more imprecise advent (c.1830) of the book as an industrial object produced and financed by specialist commercial publishers – are fortunate in the wealth of bibliographical and book-historical scholarship at their disposal. The more than 2,000 items comprising the bibliography of this history speak volumes about the richness and diversity of what has already been written, so that any scholar contributing so much as a photon to our illumination might say with Newton, ‘If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ In this brief chapter, I would like to gesture toward some of the resources – primary in several senses – for the conduct of book history, 1695–1830, and to highlight some archival research projects that most need to be conducted. Such a highly attenuated survey, tendered in the hope of stimulating further undertakings, must perforce be indicative rather than exhaustive.

Undoubtedly the most fundamentally important resource for bibliographical and book-historical research in the eighteenth century is The English shorttitle catalogue (ESTC). ESTC is sometimes usefully supplemented by The hand press book database, produced by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL). As the sole extant online union catalogue for European hand-press books produced c.1455 to 1830, its reach into the early decades of the nineteenth century is especially welcome. Similarly, the broad scope and chronological range of WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog, makes it highly useful.

Keywords

book-historical researchBritish and Foreign Bible Societybibliographyprint productionSociety for Promoting Christian Knowledge
Type
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The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain , pp. 849 - 859
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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