The Care of Books
An Essay on the Development of Libraries and their Fittings, from the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century

A wide-ranging history of libraries which will interest academic historians and others interested in book culture.

John Willis Clark (Author)

9781108005081, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

488 pages, 164 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 2.5 cm, 0.77 kg

John Willis Clark, a noted academic and antiquarian, published this book in 1901 after completing his work on the architectural history of Cambridge. His carefully researched study (Clark personally visited and measured every building he described, and drew many of the illustrations), provides a wide-ranging account of the history of libraries from antiquity to the early modern period. Clark describes the buildings used to store books: churches, cloisters, and purpose-built libraries; the way collections were endowed, audited and protected; the development of library furniture, including lecterns, stalls, chaining systems and wall-cases; and the characteristics of monastic, collegiate, and private collections. The book is generously illustrated, and its approachable style means it will appeal not only to academic historians of libraries, but to a wider audience of those interested in books and reading culture, historic buildings and artefacts, and medieval, renaissance and early modern studies.

1. Ancient libraries
2. Christian libraries connected with churches
3. Monastic collections
4. The fittings of monastic and collegiate libraries
5. The stall-system in colleges, cathedrals and monasteries
6. The lectern-system in Italy
7. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the effects of the Reformation
8. The wall-system in Europe and Britain in the early modern period
9. Private libraries.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP]