History of Books, Printing, and Reading | History of Libraries
History of Books, Printing, and Reading
Find primary and secondary sources for the history of books, print culture, and readers.
- ABC for Book Collectors The 9th edition of John Carter’s classic is available in-print through UIUC. You can also access the 8th edition for free online as a PDF through the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, courtesy of Oak Knoll Press.
- Book History Annual journal devoted to the history of the book, broadly defined.
- Dawn of Western Printing: Incunabula
Online exhibition of incunabula based on the book Inkyunabura no Sekai (The World of Incunabula) written by Hiroharu Orita. - From Manuscript to Print: The Evolution of the Medieval Book
“The exhibition traces the history of the medieval book—its appearance, content, audiences, and forms—from the 9th to the 15th centuries.” - The Reading Experience Database (RED), 1450-1945 A digital humanities project collecting primary source evidence of reading by British subjects at home and abroad from 1450-1945.
- Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) SHARP is a global scholarly organization for historians of print culture. The library has a subscription to their journal, Book History, and the organization also offers a discussion list, SHARP-L.
History of Libraries
Find primary and secondary sources for the history of libraries.
- Davies Project at Princeton University Home of the searchable database ALB1876: American Libraries Before 1876, which identifies 9,800 libraries by type and provides data on location, date of founding and/or closing, and collection size. The Davies Project website also displays a variety of historic documents and photographs.
- Les classiques de la bibliothéconomie Digitized copies of a hundred classic French IS texts.
- Periodicals Archive Online [licensed for UI] An online index to periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. A unique feature of this index is that titles are indexed back to their very first volume, but the last ten years are omitted. More than 70 library science titles are covered, including Library Journal (1876-), Library Association Record (1890-), and American Libraries (1907-).
- Popular Resources for the Library History Round Table Includes semiannual bibliographies published by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association, as well as information about the round table and its programs.