DJShaw: new Project history page

2026-03-18T09:23:57Z

new Project history page

New page

The ultimate origin of this project lies back in the nineteenth century with the work of the British Museum Library’s incunabulist Robert Proctor (''An Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum: From the Invention of Printing to the Year 1500'', 1898). In addition to his catalogue of all the Museum’s fifteenth-century printed books, Proctor embarked on a related catalogue of the Library’s post incunables, i.e. those books printed between 1501 and 1520, as Part Two of his ''Index''. He had only completed the first part of this (German books 1501–1520) before his unexpected death in 1903.

Work on Part Two of the Index was eventually taken up by Colonel Frank Isaac, a Voluntary Assistant at the British Museum Library. Isaac completed entries for Italy, Switzerland and Eastern Europe which were published in 1938. He then worked on France 1501–1520 which went to press in 1939. Proof galleys survive for about two-thirds of the book. Work ceased on the outbreak of war and Colonel Isaac died in 1943.

In the mid-1970s, staff at the new British Library considered reviving the French volume and I was asked to undertake a revision and completion of the volume, working from Frank Isaac’s surviving papers. It was decided that the Proctor/Isaac format was too restrictive. The example of the entries in the British Museum Catalogue of fifteenth-century printing and H.M. Adams’s recent catalogue of sixteenth-century continental books in Cambridge libraries suggested that fuller title and imprint transcriptions and signature collations would make the catalogue more useful, together with a re-assessment of the typographical information. Work proceeded, slowly, with boxes of slips accumulating with fuller entries and with separate analytical slips indexing each type face and device, with the aim of providing stronger evidence for dating and attributions for unsigned books.

By the year 2000, the completed slips were being typed up into a word-processor as work on each French printing town was completed. Plans for an eventual printed volume had been abandoned. A database was created with records in a specially modified MARC format which would permit offering data to other catalogue projects. Work on another long-term project, a bibliography of editions of the Satires of Juvenal, had developed from a word-processor file to a publicly available MediaWiki application. This seemed a suitable way to proceed for the French post-incunables.

The MediaWiki software provides extensive indexing capabilities for the various categories involved: printers, booksellers, types, devices, towns, countries, etc. Software was written to convert the MARC records into MediaWiki pages. The various parts of the wiki have been enhanced with images of devices and typefaces and additional pages built for the indexes. The wiki originally ran on my own web server. It now has a permanent place on the Bibliographical Society’s wiki farm.
<p align=right>March 2026</p>

Project history - Revision history

DJShaw: new Project history page