Samuel Pepys (1633 1703) was a student of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and bequeathed his personal library of 3000 volumes to the College on condition that the contents remained intact and unaltered; they remain there, in his original bookcases, to this day. In the early twentieth century, a project to produce a complete catalogue was begun, and four volumes were published between 1914 and 1940. Volume 4 describes the books about shorthand which Pepys an enthusiastic practitioner himself - methodically collected, and had bound in five volumes. Over the centuries, various specialists had...