Electronic Publications on the Web

The Society decided in 2005 that it would use its web site to offer space to bibliographical work-in-progress and to 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 hope that members and non-members of the Society will take advantage of these two facilities to offer electronic documents for publication on the web. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please contact the Chairman of the Publications Subcommittee via the address found on the home page .

John Dee's Library Catalogue: additions and corrections

The original edition of Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson's edition of John Dee's Library Catalogue was published by th e Bibliographical Society in 1990 and has been out of print for some years. Since then, further discoveries of books and manuscripts from Dee's library have been made and more work has been done on the interpretation of the entries in the Catalogue.

Original version: October 2006. Latest update: March 2007. Format: PDF. Size: 135Kb

The London Book Trades: A Bibliographical Resource

The London Book Trades (LBT) database is a Microsoft Access file developed by Michael L. Turner, which currently contains entries for just over 30,000 individuals active in the London book trades from the introduction of printing to around 1830. Emphasis is placed on recording specific events in each individual's life, and on recording the inter-relationships, both familial and professional, within the trade. The database provides a snapshot of work in progress at a given time. Updated versions will be stored regularly.

The Society, in cooperation with the Oxford Bibliographical Society, intends to convert the database to a web-based format to enable easier on-line consultation and to facilitate collaborative work to edit and augment the database.

Stored in the Society's e-repository hosted by the Institute of English Studies.

English book owners in the seventeenth century

David Pearson offers this list as work in progress to construct a reference source on seventeenth-century English book owners, based on various kinds of evidence. It does not seek to cover Scottish and Irish owners, unless they were predominantly English-based. The aim is to focus on collections which were at least partly, if not entirely, formed within the seventeenth century and the list includes people who died between 1610 and 1715. The author hopes that the list may already have enough data to be useful in various kinds of ways, and that it will stimulate responses and ideas as to how it should be developed.

Original version: January 2007. Latest update: January 2007. Format: MS Word. Size: 903Kb

Ronald B. McKerrow. Printers' & Publishers' Devices in England & Scotland 1485-1640. London : Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the Chiswick Press, 1913.

With the agreement of the Bibliographical Society, the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) has produced a digitised version of McKerrow's Devices .

The file can be consulted on the web site of the Royal Library, Copenhagen , which undertook the digitisation work on behalf of CERL. http://www2.kb.dk/elib/bhs/mckerrow//intro.htm

The individual images of the devices are also available as links in the entries for each bookseller or printer in CERL's Thesaurus of names of persons, places, owners, etc. for the history of the printed book up to c. 1830. http://www.cerl.org/web/en/resources/cerl_thesaurus/main

Use the “Imprint names” menu to search for a printer or bookseller.

Not in McKerrow The Bibliographical Society invites contributions of references and images of devices which were not recorded by McKerrow. An unrecorded device of Henry Jacobi is found in the Diurnale Sarum (1512; STC 15861.7). It is similar to (but not the same as) Siberch's device McKerrow 57. See: Hope Johnston, 'Catherine of Aragon 's pomegranate, revisited', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society , XIII, 2 (2005) 153-173; p.162 and plate 4a.   (Image reproduced with permission of Lambeth Palace Library).

Coffee-House Library Short-title Catalogue
Markman Ellis, Queen Mary, University of London
This short-title catalogue lists in alphabetical order 387 printed items (books, pamphlets,
maps, printed music) with provenance endorsements indicating ownership by a coffeehouse
in the eighteenth century.  For discussion of the libraries and coffee-houses associated with
these items, see the article ‘Coffee-House Libraries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London' in the March 2009 issue of The Library .