jamesgray2

Early last week, on 16 &17 November, incunabula expert Falk Eisermann visited St Andrews to give a two-day workshop on early printed books in Europe. Dr Eisermann is head of the incunabula division at the Berlin State Library since 2007 and enjoys an outstanding reputation amongst scholars of early printed books.

Dr Eisermann works through on of St Andrews’ copies of the 1481 Koberger edition of Duns Scotus with the workshop attendants.

The workshop, entitled Illuminating Incunabula – What we can learn from early printed books, addressed various issues such as describing incunabula, finding information in catalogues and online tools and – most importantly – working with rare books in hand. The workshop brought together 15 participants who learned about terminology and digital tools for the work with incunabula. St Andrews holds around 160 of these early books printed before 1501 and the library has finished cataloguing all items…

This is a collaborative post by Brooke Palmieri and Daryl Green and can be found cross-posted on both of their blogs (8vo and Echoes from the Vault)

This whole thing started when Brooke pulled back a bookplate and revealed Hartmann Schedel’s very neat hand-writing…

In August 2011 Brooke Palmieri [BP] wrote an entry over at her blog, 8vo, about a discovery she made while cataloguing a book for Sokol Books Ltd: an unassuming copy of an incunable on the authority of the pope that turned out to have been owned and heavily annotated by one of the premier among chroniclers and bibliophiles of the 15th century, Hartmann Schedel (best known for his “Nuremberg Chronicle”).  The discovery dovetailed with the release of Sokol’s Catalogue 59, where it caught the attention of Daryl Green [DG], Acting Rare Books Librarian (Rare Books Cataloguer at the…