Book History
While all print materials reveal—to the trained eye—something of their production, distribution, and reception, Bruce Peel Special Collections has numerous collections that are particularly useful to those who research the history of the book. One can learn a great deal about print culture by examining a range of printing formats from a 4,000 year-old cuneiform tablet to a nineteenth-century penny dreadful and from a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript to a twentieth-century artist’s book. In addition to some special items printed by pioneers like William Caxton (1422–1491) or Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), extensive collections of publications by several important presses—Minerva, Hogarth, Curwen, and Arion (to name a few)—offer important research opportunities for book historians. Beyond the print materials in Bruce Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta Library subscribes to numerous digital collections that offer a glimpse of primary documents that document the history of ideas and support the work of book historians in many different subject areas. While book history research today supports scholarship in almost every field of study—an interdiscipline that has moved well beyond its original borders—it is still possible to identify some key periodicals (such as Book History and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada) and foundational scholarship such as Robert Darnton’s “What is the History of Books?”
Suggested online resources include Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing, a recent story in University of Toronto Magazine, "We're Going to Print Like It's 1899" (25 Apr 2023), and the library of youtube recordings offered by University of Virginia's Rare Book School.
Collection Formats: 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st Century -- click to see other collections with this format
A cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia, dated approximately 2500 BCE (PJ 3725 C86 2500z).
Kimono-Kosode: A Decorative Study of the Kimono, an artists’ book by Carol Schwartzott (N 7433.4 S399 A6 K56 2001).
A facsimile of a tenth-century manuscript scroll of the Book of Joshua in Greek. The original scroll is in the Vatican library (ND 3358 J8 J655 1983 folio).
Facsimiles of horn-books (some of the earliest “books” made for children) included in Andrew White Tuer's History of the Horn-Book (Z 1033 H8 T9 1896 v.1-2).
This is an illuminated manuscript, a Flemish book of hours from the fifteenth century (BX 2080 C38).
A single leaf from a book printed by William Caxton at Westminster in 1480 accompanied by a 1933 essay on Caxton by Holbrooke Jackson. (Z 232 C38 C55 1933 folio).