Special Collections

Current Project

Senate House Library holds many foreign books from the sixteenth century, acquired by gift and purchase. Classics, theology and history are especially well represented, and there are also works of philology, vernacular literature (for example, Dante, Ariosto and Petrarch), law, mathematics, natural science and medicine. Significant printers and printing dynasties are represented, such as the Estienne family in France, the Aldine printing press in Italy, Johann Herwagen in Basel and Christophe Plantin in Antwerp.  Some of the books have noteworthy provenance: for example, several from the library of the Greek historian George Grote (1794-1871), one of the foundation collections of Senate House Library. Several titles are recorded on COPAC, the union catalogue of major British university and research libraries, only in one other copy, or not at all.

Projects over the past decade have enabled the online cataloguing of all sixteenth-century books either written in English or published in Great Britain in any language, and of other sixteenth-century books in named special collections. The Library is now cataloguing its remaining sixteenth-century foreign books online to make them accessible to users, with catalogue records appearing on our own online catalogue, COPAC and, in course, the CERL Heritage of the Printed Book database of books published in Europe to about 1830 held in major European and North American research libraries. The ability to search books by printer or by former owners, not available via the old card catalogue, complements searches by author, title, or subject and assists research.

Recent Project

M. S. Anderson Collection of Writings on Russia Printed Between 1526 and 1917

This collection of approximately 1,800 items in western languages collected between 1964 and 2004 by Matthew Smith Anderson, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics was donated by the the Trustees of Professor Matthew Anderson in 2008. The collection was catalogued and made available to researchers in 2008-9. Items from the collection have already been used for exhibitions and teaching purposes.

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