'The time wore on towards midnight. ... The ringers grasped their ropes. "Go!" The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower' (Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors). 📷 Grantham Guildhall, NYE 2025

Whether you call it Twixmas, Crimbo Limbo, or Down Days: the final days of the year are - unarguably - the perfect time spend reading. Two-and-a-half centuries ago as now.

Final post in the Tolkien series: his edition of the medieval ‘Ancrene Wisse’ – a medieval book of instruction for anchorites: begun in the 1930s, delayed by ‘The Silmarillion’, finally published in 1962.

Tolkien's FIRST book – and a bibliographical curiosity to boot. We've just listed a 1922 first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's A Middle English Vocabulary (his very first publication), bound with Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose. The twist? This copy has a title-page variant…

Catalogue announcement! J.R.R. Tolkien: Scholar. A Journey through the World of Middle English. (And for me, a return to my origins in English Language and Literature, the subjects I studied when I first entered higher education.)

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

The first internet message was sent from UCLA fifty-six years ago 🌐 Watch PBS SoCal's "Lost L.A." host Nathan Masters visit UCLA Library Special Collections with internet pioneer, Prof. Leonard Kleinrock to see the logbook firsthand: www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-l... @uclasamueli.bsky.social

Mind has been officially blown by seeing Saturn and its moon Titan through the Mills Observatory Victorian 10" Cooke telescope. WOW! Every time I've visited before, the clouds have come too, but not today! This old technology still works perfectly with a clockwork tracking mechanism. Stunning 🥳👌 🔭

Autumn visit to Woolsthorpe Manor, birthplace of Sir Isaac Newton. In my previous life as a scholar of the history of alchemy, I would not have imagined that Newton’s school and the library he used as a child would be a 5 minutes’ walk from my office one day.

A wee bit of news. news.sky.com/story/fascin...

Celebrating archival collections in Cambridge and beyond, join us for the 2025 Sandars Lecture Series by Joan Winterkorn MBE. 11 & 12 November, 5-6pm. 🎟️ Book your free tickets: https://loom.ly/Du7jSUs

How wonderful is this rare proof of a 'lost' Kelmscott? William Morris' wood-engravings cut from Edward Burne-Jones's drawings, for Morris's 'The Earthly Paradise' - an abandoned edition - printed in 1974 by the Rampant Lions Press for Clover Hill editions, as 'The Story of Cupid and Psyche'.

Our Conservation team enjoyed hosting a visit from Moriki Papers last week! We shared how we use Japanese paper in our studio and learned about the art of Japanese papermaking. #CULConservation #BookConservation #PaperConservation #JapanesePaper #PaperRepair #Papermaking

Sad news. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The RSL today marks the 200th anniversary of its incorporation with a Royal Charter ✒️ In celebration, Cambridge University Library @theul.bsky.social has digitised a selection of archive materials which they are making public today for the first time: cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/...

🎺 The 2025 Participatory Research Projects we funded via @ukri.org #ResearchEngland have come to a close. First up: Botanical Wisdom: art, medicine and nature in Muslim societies Read the blog ⤵️ #participation#research#GLAM#botanicalart #muslimmedicine www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/blog/botanic...

🚨 Funding Alert! 🚨 Are you passionate about book history, bibliography, or book arts? Check out this funding opportunity to support events in your community! 📖✨ 📅 Deadline: 3 November – Don’t miss your chance to apply! Learn more & apply today 👉 bibsocamer.org/events/funding-opportunities

What a wonderful achievement! #archives

How extraordinary to have the first vial of the vaccine. Interesting, too, that the collecting project began in early March 2020, before the lockdown began. A swift and far-sighted response. Thank you!

It was too cloudy to see the lunar eclipse tonight, so here’s some fun diagrams of eclipses from a 13th century astronomical compilation, now @bodleian.ox.ac.uk MS. Arch. Selden. B. 34, f. 47v 🌘

Booker Prize Bindings 2025 Designer Bookbinders UK The six Fellows this year are: Glenn Bartley, Stuart Brockman, Hannah Brown, Sue Doggett, Angela James and Tom McEwan. (1) Image: 2024 bindings www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1...

Liebe Follower, ich bin auf der Suche nach antiquarischen Büchern des (eher entlegenen) Autors Maximilian Josef von Oer aus dem 19. Jahrhundert. Die einschlägigen Seiten im Netz habe ich schon abgesucht. Wer weiß etwas? Bitte gern teilen.

For International Dog Day: T.E. Lawrence with dogs. From Clare Sydney Smith's 'The Golden Reign. The Story of my Friendship with "Lawrence of Arabia"' (1949).

I found a cool Shakespeare document, but why was it missing in the first place? www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/s... [1/4]

Just listened to this, then visited @amybateman.bsky.social’s online gallery of Forty Farms pictures - fantastic!! Moving, captivating & utterly illuminating.

New exhibition: history.rcp.ac.uk/exhibitions/... It has lots of books in it. Lots of books that I like and have lots of say about.

'Later he settled on a job in the British Library cataloguing rare books for 23 years. … Something about the rare manuscripts appealed to him … "I had history in my hands, it was a fantastic job," says George.' Soho George. Artist. What a story! www.mylondon.news/news/nostalg...

Sir Joseph Banks was so convinced of this cookbook's merit that he sent his own chef, Henry Osborne, to assist - so William Kitchiner's "The Cook's Oracle" (here the 1822 edition) has 10 recipes of puddings eaten by Banks! More information: www.typeandforme.com/index.php/20... Happy Tuesday!

Snapshot from above my desk. Happy Saturday!

Summer's essence, captured as only the private press can. . . . A limited edition print tipped into Matrix 8 - just one of the very cool (?hot) things I get to work on.

Penn has set up a message board to collect tributes to Peggy Brown's influence on generations of medievalists: www.kudoboard.com/boards/FNm1Y... #MedievalSky

It's #InternationalCatDay and we're celebrating with this purrfect noble steed! This fearsome feline is part of the bookplate of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (1844 – 1925), a British caricaturist and political cartoonist. Would you ride this beast into battle?

Look what I got to see! Fab gardening exhibition at @britishlibrary.bsky.social, closing on Sunday. Objects pictured are loans from @linneansociety.bsky.social (Darwin’s vasculum, seed packet prob. from Captain Cook’s 2nd voyage, Caribbean art) and the Guildford Museum (Gertrude Jekyll’s boots).

W.B. Yeats was a poet, playwright + key force in the Irish Literary Revival. He is also famous for his relationship with suffragist, activist, and actress Maud Gonne. The digitized materials provide insight into his imagination + writing process. Access them: findingaids.bc.edu/repositories...

My MA thesis was on Yeats and the Tarot. I am still thrilled to see newly digitised Yeats material nearly a quarter of a century later!

The new BL website is up! www.bl.uk

190 mss, over 7000 pages of medieval medical recipes, 42000 new images, 7700+ texts, new cataloguing, imaging and conservation treatments - oh my! We're so pleased to have been part of Curious Cures Congrats to @theul.bsky.social and everyone who worked on it 🎉👏👏 www.lib.cam.ac.uk/stories/curi...

'Ebbe Reading.' (1920) Christian Krogh's straightforward style of painting made him one of the leading figures in the transition from Romanticism to Naturalism in Norwegian art. He influenced many artists, including Anna and Michael Ancher, and gave inspiration to Edvard Munch.

#31DaysOfNYJA, Day 23: Anne-Marie Kolk, Miss International Contact Lenses, meets reporters at the Overseas Press Club. ("Miss International Contact Lenses," Photo taken #OnThisDay in 1959, NY Journal-American Photographic Morgue @ransomcenter.bsky.social) norman.hrc.utexas.edu/nyjadc/ItemD... 🗃️📜📷🔍

We don’t sell books by the metre. But we advise on collection development, which can result in the addition of dozens of carefully selected books to shelves. The approach is, of course, completely different. How about you? Have you ever bought books in bulk? www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

Today is #WorldBrainDay 🧠 This Woodcut illustration is from Cerebri Anatome (c.1664) by Thomas Willis, the father of #neuroscience. The term #neurology first appears in this book. He also discovered the Circle of Willis, an important anatomical structure that provides blood to the brain.

Third post here and already off-topic? No - the beauty about being an antiquarian bookseller is that I get to see fabulous exhibitions all the time as part of my continuing education! NB: Kettle’s Yard’s Mari Mahr / Lili Brik exhibition - now closed - was extraordinary! So lucky to have caught it.

I'm so thrilled to have this published! Starting from a chat over lunch at @girtoncollege.bsky.social, James Wade & I chipped away at this & have made some fascinating discoveries. The actual article should be published later today. In the meantime, more here: www.cam.ac.uk/stories/song...

“Lovely book … I am reading it from the beginning, some every night, slow & light & lifted” (Dylan Thomas)
 A tiny insight into what’s on my desk at the moment: Vernon Watkins’ “The Lady with the Unicorn”, 1948. Watkins worked at Bletchley Park during the war but kept writing poetry throughout. 1/3

So enjoyed this bio, published in 1963. Stevens spent much of his life in London, supplying the British (Museum) Library with American books, building private collections of Americana in the US & relieving @theul.bsky.social & @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social of their duplicates.

We're advertising two artist's residencies at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print. Please share! www.thinicepress.org/research/pri...

#BookHistory #GLAMS

Delighted we were able to support the BL to save for the nation five exceptional medieval mss from Longleat House - Including an unparalleled volume for the study of Hebrew in medieval England, comprising a trilingual Hebrew-Latin-Old French dictionary, glossed Hebrew Psalter, & Hebrew grammar.