Dr Sian Witherden is a rare books and manuscripts specialist who has worked in both special collections libraries and the antiquarian book trade. She has collected some resources for further reading to wrap up her series How to collate an early printed book.
Online Resources
Cambridge Digital Library – especially the collection of paper stocks in western medieval manuscripts
Digital Bodleian – especially the incunabula collection
Bonicoli, Louis-Gabriel and Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, ‘Antoine Vérard’s early printed books in the British Library’, British Library blog, posted 16 July 2018, accessible here.
Early Printed Books – a website created by Sarah Werner with resources for learning (see also her book Studying Early Printed Books, cited below).
The Folger Shakespeare Library website, especially:
Blake, Erin, ‘A briefing on brevigraphs, those strange shapes in early printed texts’, posted on The Collation on 14 September 2021, accessible here
Blake, Erin, ‘Uncut, unopened, untrimmed, uh-oh’, posted on The Collation on 23 August 2016, accessible here
‘DIY Quarto’, found under ‘Shakespeare in Print’, accessible here
GW (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke) – an online union catalogue for incunables.
ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) – an online union catalogue for incunables
Müller, Leonie, ‘Understanding Paper: Structures, Watermarks, and a Conservator’s Passion’, Harvard Art Museums website, accessible here.
The Needham Calculator – a digital tool for those interested in categories and types of fifteenth century paper, created by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
VisColl – an online visualisation tool for collation.
Further Reading
Barker, Nicolas, and Simran Thadani (eds.), John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, ninth edition (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2016), especially the entries for chain lines, collation, colophon, edition, endpapers, foliated, format, ideal copy, imperfect, paper, quarto, recto, sheet, signatures, stub, verso, and watermark.
Bowers, Fredson, Principles of Bibliographical Description, repr. with an introduction by G. Thomas Tanselle (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1994), esp. 457-62 but also more extensively at pp. 196-254.
Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Museum [British Library], 13 vols. (London, ’t Goy-Houten, 1963-2007).
Coates, Alan, et al., A Catalogue of books printed in the fifteenth century now in the Bodleian Library, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Descriptive Cataloguing of Rare Materials (Books) (Washington D.C.: Cataloguing Distribution Service, Library of Congress, 2011), pp. 135-39. Available online here.
Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography: The Classic Manual of Bibliography, repr. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 79-117.
Hellinga, Lotte, ‘Tradition and Renewal: Establishing the Chronology of Wynkyn de Worde’s Early Work’, in Kristian Jensen (ed.), Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (London: British Library, 2003), pp. 13-30.
Khalaf, Omar, ‘Memorae novissima: Caxton’s and de Worde’s editions of Earl Rivers’ Cordyal and the Macabre in a late medieval English Ars Moriendi’, in Alessandro Benucci, Marie-Dominique Leclerc, and Alain Robert (eds.), Mort suit l’homme pas à pas: représentations iconographiques, variations littéraires, diffusion des thèmes (Reims: ÉPURE, 2015), pp. 275-86.
Moran, James, Wynkyn de Worde: Father of Fleet Street, 3rd rev edn (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2003).
Tanselle, G. Thomas, Descriptive Bibliography (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2020), esp. pp. 190-214.
Werner, Sarah, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800: A Practical Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), esp. pp. 46-53.
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