Special Collections

This is a page from a book written by a statesmen discussing the possibility of a concubine becoming an Empress in the Han Dynasty.

4 1/8 inches x 5 3/8 inches, 30 lines, double columns. This 13th Century manuscript is from a liturgical book similar to portions of the modern missal. The small initial letters with their neat outlines and the predominance of bronze-gold and blue are unmistakably French in origin.

5 1/2 inches x 7 5/8 inches, double columns, 50 lines each. Written on fine vellum in a small, contracted gothic script with marginal decoration in red and blue, ca. 14th century. The Sentences is a theological work which made Peter Lombard (1100-1160) famous.

Italian, 5 1/2 inches x 7 1/2 inches, 17 lines, on vellum. The round, gothic hand of the scribe suggests a humanistic influence.

Italian, 9 1/2 inches x 13 inches, double columns, rubricated and illuminated initials and matted.

Contains the "Sermones" of Simon de Cremona.

Folio, printed in Ulm by Johann Zainer. Printing this book just over a year after setting up shop as Ulm's first printer, Zainer still expresses a sense of marvel in its colophon when he declares that it was produced not with a quill but with cast letters. Printed and illuminated bible with large painted initial with rubricated letters, on heavy hand-made paper.

Anton Koberger's two-volume edition as the ninth Bible to be printed in High German and was estimated to have had a print-run of 1500, an unusually high number for the time. Koberger included more than one hundred large woodcut illustrations. Koberger had cut two new german types for his Bible and is said to have run 24 presses to print it. The edition of between 1000 and 1500 copies was available in three forms: completely uncolored; rubricated and colored simply in green, ochre and purple; or rubricated and colored in a wide variety of colors and gold leaf. This leaf is the second of the three forms: colored simply in green, ochre and purple.

In Latin. Printed by Anton Koberger. The "picture book of the ages" and one of the most well-known books of the incunabula period.

Two leaves: One with 53 lines, double columns, printed on vellum, rubricated and badly faded and one with 50 lines, double columns, printed on vellum and rubricated. Small gothic, red and black ink.

From Infortiatum de Tortis, a large, law book printed by Baptista de Tortis in Venice in 1495.

First illustrated edition, printed and illustrated by Johann Gruniger in Strassburg. Brilliant woodcuts on nearly every page with red and blue rubricated initials. 8 inches x 12 inches.

Two conjugate leaves in French with rubricated initials.

7 inches x 10 1/2 inches. Penciled in on the bottom verso: "Wynken de Worde, Lives of the Fathers, 1516." 1516 The Sanctilogium of Kohn Tynemouth as revised by John Capgrave was published by Wynken de Worde as the Nove Legenda Angle, and includes page one of fifteen new 'Lives' of St. Walstan. This could be a leaf from that work.

6 inches x 8 inches, with woodcut attributed to Urs Graf (ca. 1485-1527). Written in pencil on verso: "M.D [?] Ures 1517 Bro. William Woodcut by Urs Graf."

This is a leaf from the first edition of the first English Bible printed by authorization of the King. "Dyvers learned men" under Miles Coverdale labored nine years upon translation and printing. It was published under auspices of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Printed in London, 1539.

London. Printed in English with the Latin text printed alongside the outside edge in a narrow column of roman type. 6 inches x 8 inches.

Old English black letter and mellow English paper. Thomas Godfrey, John Reynes, Jon Kingston, George Bishop: printers of the early editions of The Canterbury Tales.

7 1/2 inches x 11 inches. Small folio; printed in black letter. The Geneva Bible was the primary Bible used by Shakespeare and the Puritans and was taken by the Pilgrims to the New World.

German or Dutch. 3 3/8 inches x 4 3/8 inches, 16 lines; red and black.

Printed by Benjamin Franklin's press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.