Bancroft Incunabula Database on the Web!
The Bancroft Library recently mounted searchable database of the Incunabula Collection. Bancroft is one of twenty-five libraries accounting for seventy-five percent of incunabula holdings in the United States.
The Incunabula Collection comprises more than 430 titles printed before 1501. The word "incunabula" is Latin for "swaddling clothes," as these works are from the infancy of European printing, set and printed by hand from moveable type.
Bible. Latin. Vulgate. Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1478 (f.j). Note the monkey in the lower right corner. |
Incunabula reflect the transitional phase between the manuscript and print traditions. The study of incunabula gives insight into the origins of a tradition that has vastly affected the course of human culture and development, and reveals much about the life, customs, and tastes of the educated during the Renaissance. The collection includes philosophical, theological, scientific, mathematical, historical, legal, and literary works. Some incunabula are represented in the collection by leaf books, that is, modern books about a particular pre-1501 work, such as the Gutenberg Bible printed at Mainz about 1454, or the Chronicles of England printed by William Caxton in 1480, containing one or more leaves from the original. In addition, there are collections of original leaves from German, Italian, and western European incunabula, described by Konrad Haebler, noted historian of incunabula, as well as a miscellany collection of unidentified original leaves, and a selection of modern facsimiles and photographic reproductions of other significant incunabula, and early type faces. |
Incunabula are important not only for their content, and who produced them under what circumstance, but also for their physical characteristics, reflecting both their manner of production, their distribution, and who owned them. Some volumes have manuscript notes known as marginalia, or significant woodcuts, such as a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493, with a specially colored woodcut indicating ownership by the volume's patrons, Seybald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister. Some are in their original bindings, such as a monastic binding reflecting use in a monastery or convent, others are in modern bindings by such firms as Rivière. Others in armorial bindings reflect former ownership, such as King Louis XVI of France. The collection also includes an example from the earliest known printing press operated by women, the nuns of the convent of Sanctus Jacobus de Ripoli in Florence.
Bible. Latin. Vulgate. Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1478 (f.iiij). Jesus appears seated in the lower right corner. |
Many of the works come from the library of James Kennedy Moffitt, a graduate of the University of California, class of 1886, for 36 years a University Regent, as well as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Crocker National Bank of San Francisco. Several volumes are from the collection of John Henry Nash, one of the leading typographers of California. Another portion comes from the library of Charles Kay Ogden, noted linguist and originator of Basic English. Other volumes came through purchase and gift, most notably from the collector of Italian humanist manuscripts Charles William Dyson Perrins, the Dante enthusiast George John Warren 5th Baron Vernon, the San Francisco attorney Alfred Sutro, the medievalist James Westfall Thompson of the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, and Charles Atwood Kofoid, head of the Zoology Department at Berkeley. The database may be searched by author, title, bibliographic references (detailed descriptions in published catalogs such as the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke), subject (key word), and call number, as well as a series of special indices: |
The Incunabula Database can be found on The Bancroft Library web site at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/incunabula . The collection is open for research and student use, although permission of the Rare Books Curator is required for the use of all original items.
—Patrick J. Russell
Principal Cataloger Emeritus
Photographs by Dan Johnston
Volume 20
Spring 2002
Table of Contents
From the Director: Bancroft's New Building?
Students Examine Original Documents
