The Stationers’ Company records are the most important existing source on the history of the English book trade.  The microfilm edition reproduces records spanning from 1554 to 1920 and is supplemented by a printed guide by the Company’s archivist.  These records contain a wealth of information about the Company’s activities, including membership and financial records and copyright registers for printed books.  The records provide quantitative data about the output of the London book trade as well as details about the lives and careers of printers, publishers, and other members of the Company.

Researchers can access the microfilm records in Special Collections’ reading room during our normal operating hours.

Old books can be evidence of the creation and reception of texts we take for granted today. Take for example works by Greek philosophers like Aristotle. Though they’re standard readings for philosophy and history of civilization courses, they were unavailable throughout most of the Middle Ages. Only with the rediscovery of older Greek manuscripts during the Renaissance did Aristotle’s complete works become known to European thinkers. Renaissance scholars had to learn Greek and edit the manuscripts for wider readership through the new medium of printing. So an examination of early printed editions gives today’s scholars an idea of how these texts were transmitted, standardized, and translated in the decades after their rediscovery.

1518 Latin edition of Aristotle annotated by several scholars

These old books also indicate how people used books. Scholars often try to track down the provenance, or ownership history, of rare books. Signatures, bookplates, library catalogues, and auction records can show who owned a given book at the time of its publication and across the centuries, providing important clues about book ownership, readership, and collecting in different times and places. Furthermore, many old books show traces of their earliest readers, who underlined words and passages, marked important points, took notes, and cross-referenced or indexed their texts. William H. Sherman’s Used Books: marking readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) is an interesting study of how Renaissance readers were taught to read and study their books, and how marked-up books provide evidence of scholars engaging with the texts they read.

Victorian Bible with gauffered edges

Booksellers and book owners through the centuries have often embellished the inside and outside of their books; for example, with fine bindings, decorative bookplates, or marbled endpapers. The fore edge (the outer, unbound edge of the block of pages of a book) has provided artists and artisans the opportunity to decorate books. Through October 31, Special Collections will display several examples of decorated fore edges from the rare book collections in an exhibit entitled “On the Edge: European Decorated Books.”

The exhibit is located in the Special Collections reference room, 1120 HBLL.  It features examples of painted fore edges from the 17th to 19th centuries, including paintings which can only be seen by fanning out the pages of the book, and examples of gauffered edges, books with gilded edges which have then had a design stamped into them with a heated tool. 

As you enter the Harold B. Lee Library, take a stroll through the main floor. Pass the circulation desk and the Information Commons and you’ll see a glass-enclosed study area called the Honors Reading Room. Lining the back walls of the Reading Room are some large framed images of books — beautiful books, all from L. Tom Perry Special Collections.

These photos constitute a quick pictorial history of the book, from early written records like cuneiform tablets to the modern fine press movement. Take a moment to stop by and look at these images, or take advantage of the quiet place to study (you don’t need to be an Honors student to use the Reading Room).

This is an edition of Renaissance scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’ paraphrase of Aristotle’s Ethics, dated May 1502. This book marks the first appearance of the name of Henri Estienne (or Henricus Stephanus), the patriarch of a distinguished family of printers, famous for the high quality of their scholarship as much as for the fine productions of their presses. BYU actively collects the work of Estienne, his sons, and grandsons, with approximately 540 titles among our holdings. This newest addition to the History of Printing collection captures the beginning of the Estienne dynasty.

The colophon of Lefèvre d’Etaples’ Artificialis introductio per modum epitomatis in decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis states that the book was “completed in the mother University of Paris by Wolfgang Hopyl and Henri Estienne, partners in the art of printing, on 7 May 1502.” It also notes that the book is for sale “at the Rabbits’ Press near the school of canon law.”