Now available online here:
Ex Libris: What Can Books Tell Us About Their Owners?
Friday 22nd May 2015, 12:00-14:00 & 16:00-18:00
Magdalen College Old Library, entry via Summer Common Room (Cloisters Staircase 3)
No need to book, just drop in, feel free to bring friends or family.
Few people, when visiting someone’s house, can avoid the temptation of looking through their bookshelves. Studying someone’s collection, seeing which books they have chosen to buy, read, keep, and display, can tell you a lot about a person. What subjects are they interested in, are their collections tightly focused or wide-ranging? Are the books heavily used, or pristine copies that have never been touched? Have they annotated the books with their thoughts on the text? Are there notes saying where they got the books from, did they buy them or get given them?
Antiquarian books, from a time before mass production, can tell us even more. Medieval manuscripts, where books were often copied and decorated to order, contain a wealth of information about the person who commissioned them. Book bindings, on medieval manuscripts and on early printed books, can also tell us a lot about the owner who spent the money on binding them, and their priorities.
This exhibition aims to study the libraries of a wide range of people, from saints to scholars, cardinals to scientists, Elizabethan gentlemen to 20th-century South Africans, and examine them with the same basic question in mind: what can the books tell us about their owners?
Now available online here:
Ex Libris: What Can Books Tell Us About Their Owners?
