Incunabula

Senate House Library has 134 15th-century books, or incunabula. The first of these came into the University Library as part of the founding collection, of the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, purchased by Baron Overstone and given to the University in 1871. The industrialist Sir Michael Clapham bequeathed the most recently acquired incunabulum, a 1486 copy of Jacobus de Voragine’s tremendously popular Legenda Aurea, in 2002. Almost half the incunabula come from named special collections: the De Morgan, Durning-Lawrence, Harry Price, Porteus and Sterling Libraries, and the Eliot-Phelips and Littleton Collections. A dozen or so come from two libraries which are now defunct, the London Institution and New College. Most of the rest are purchases, made between 1941 and about 1970.

The earliest incunabulum, printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, is Pablo de Santa Maria’s Scrutinium scripturarum and has been dated, on the basis of rubricator's date in the copy at Eichstätt, to not after 1470; the latest, included in the collection because Goff dated it to 1500, is Ferdinand V and Isabella I’s Leyes de Madrid, printed in Salamanca by Juan de Porras and now thought to have been published in about 1511. Two incunabula are unique, Bernat de Granollachs’s Lunarium ab anno 1491 ad annum 1550 ([Lyons: Johannes Siber, 1491]) and Coniuratio malignorum spirituum ([Rome: Eucharius Silber, ca. 1486-1487]); others are the sole copies in the United Kingdom.

During February and March 2008 a project was undertaken to catalogue the Library’s incunabula online. Full online catalogue records of the incunabula now provide access by author, title, or printer. The places of publication are indexed, as are the names of former owners. Full details of provenance, hitherto unrecorded, binding, and other copy-specific information are supplied, providing information about such diverse features as the 15th-century book trade and ownership over the centuries. Information about the cataloguing project is available here.

For a list of the Library's incunabula, please click here.

The Senate House Library incunabula have also been reported to the ISTC.

shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 020 7862 8470