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It is difficult to draw too many conclusions from a work
still in progress, however, a few points can be considered. The catalogue entries do not record the titles of
the books - this means there is work to be done in relating the entries to
modern catalogue entries; the old entries also tell us something of how
the librarians, and presumably the readers, of the late Seventeenth
Century referred to the books they used.
The 1691 entries are for single volumes - this means care must be given
to establishing the bibliographical status of the works constituting each
volume, and hence calculating the number of separate, individual
publications in the library.
It is not only the bibliographical details of the books which
constitute the interest of the library. Details on the provenance, cost,
size and binding of each work add to the sum of knowledge about the
context in which the Library functioned.
Likewise information on the use of the books would be interesting -
there is a wealth of information to be gleaned from the annotations, or
lack of them in the books.
Finally, the arrangement of the books on the shelves must, itself,
indicate something of the way in which knowledge was understood; or, to
look at it another way, the way in which it was deemed appropriate to
arrange knowledge.
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Close up of the spine and binding
of MS Gen1312-3 |
