The Caxton Celebration of 1877 commemorated the 400th anniversary of William Caxton's production of the first book printed in England. It centred on an exhibition in the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) of Caxton's and other incunabula, together with significant artefacts in the later history of typography, printing and binding. The organisation of the celebration involved many of the great and good of Britain, Europe and the United States, from librarians and bibliographers to writers, musicians and statesmen. A leading light was William Blades (1824-90), whose...

This two-volume work, originally published in 1705 and now reissued in John Nichols' edition of 1818, was one of the earliest examples of autobiographical writing in English. John Dunton (1659 1732), a highly eccentric bookseller and publisher, was also responsible for one of the first periodicals in London, the Athenian Gazette, which invited its readers to submit questions on any topic, to be answered by the Athenian Society, a group of learned men (in fact, Dunton himself and some cronies). However, he was not a practical businessman, and the death of his wife and his own illness led to...

Philip Luckombe (1730 1803), printer, author and shell-collector, published this work in 1771. (He had published a shorter version, A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing, anonymously in the previous year.) Born in Exeter, he learned the printing trade there, and became a freeman of the city in 1776, but moved to London, where he wrote travelogues and several books on printing, edited dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and became an authority on shells. The first part of the book is concerned with the history of printing, including the various charters issued to the...

University Librarian at Cambridge from 1867 until his death, Henry Bradshaw (1831 86) had inherited from his banker father an important library of Irish printed books and pamphlets assembled in the early nineteenth century. Having added to it, Bradshaw generously presented the collection to the University Library in 1870, and it has been expanding ever since. Published in 1916, this three-volume catalogue was compiled by the bibliographer Charles Edward Sayle (1864 1924). The works listed here, numbering more than 8,000 items and dating from the early seventeenth century through to the late...

University Librarian at Cambridge from 1867 until his death, Henry Bradshaw (1831 86) had inherited from his banker father an important library of Irish printed books and pamphlets assembled in the early nineteenth century. Having added to it, Bradshaw generously presented the collection to the University Library in 1870, and it has been expanding ever since. Published in 1916, this three-volume catalogue was compiled by the bibliographer Charles Edward Sayle (1864 1924). The works listed here, numbering more than 8,000 items and dating from the early seventeenth century through to the late...