Canada
British Columbia
Vancouver
University of British Columbia
UBC Library Digital Collections includes early material, such as Andrew McCormick Maps and Prints and Japanese Maps of the Tokugawa Era
Ontario
Toronto
University of Toronto
The landing page for the University of Toronto Local Digital Special Collections includes such early material as Anatomia 1522-1867: Anatomical Plates from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection
Denmark
Kongelige Bibliotek
The Royal Library has digitized many rare books in their collection: the landing page Digital Facsimiles of Rare Books in the Royal Library has links to the full facsimiles: note that there are separate landing pages for Danish books and for foreign books
The Wayback machine currently (March 2018) allows access to the Danish-language only collection of Danish bookbindings, Danske Bogbind
France
Paris
Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, includes early books (as well as later print, manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings...) It can be searched from the home page, or you can use the overview landing pages; Livres (French language only) is a good place to start for early print
Germany
Göttingen
Gutenberg Digital is an older site offering access to a complete digitization of the Göttingen copy of the Gutenberg Bible
Munich
Munich Digitization Centre
The Munich Digitization Centre has many ongoing digitization projects. For early books, go to Old Printings. From this point, most of the text is in German. There are links to the Start Page of each project described; again, you will find that most of the text is in German, but there are many full-text digital facsimiles available through these various projects. One is a collection of Blockbooks
Japan
National Diet Library
Incunabula: Dawn of Western Printing is a useful basic overview of the development of print, with images
UK
Aberystwyth
The National Library of Wales
The Digital Gallery: Printed Material landing page connects to full digitizations of many early printed Welsh books, including Yny lhyvyr hwnn (1546), the first printed Welsh book, and the Welsh Bible of 1588
Cambridge
Cambridge University Library
The Cambridge Digital Library includes some earlier printed material, such as a collection of Spanish Chapbooks
St John’s College
The Highlights from the Collections landing page includes images from early printed books, organized chronologically
Edinburgh
Edinburgh Napier University Library
The Edward Clark Collection illustrates the development of the printed book, from the 15th century onwards
Edinburgh University Library
Ars Anatomica: Imaging the Renaissance Body, focuses on the Anatomy of Vesalius and its influence. The image galleries are accessed via LUNA
Incunabula is a LUNA collection of images from early printed books in the University collection
The Shakespeare collection includes images from early editions, again organized through LUNA
National Library of Scotland
The Digital Gallery includes links to many digital projects featuring early printed material. See, for example, First Scottish Books, which features full facsimiles of the Chepman and Myllar prints, the 9 earliest books printed in Scotland; or the Morall Fabillis of Esope, printed in 1571; or Scottish Decorative Bookbinding, which is organized by date rage
The Scottish Booktrade Index does not have pictures, but it is very useful to researchers working on the history of print in Scotland
Glasgow
University of Glasgow Library Special Collections
Alciato at Glasgow links to full digitizations of 22 editions of the emblem-books of Andrea Alciato (1492 - 1550)
French Emblems at Glasgow links to full digitizations of 27 sixteenth-century French emblem books
The Glasgow Broadside Ballads site includes images and sound files. Note that this is quite an old site
The Virtual Exhibitions page includes links to many exhibitions related to The History of the Book
London
British Library
The British Library Database of Bookbinding is a searchable database with thousands of images of bindings from the BL collection
The Collections Care blog often contains information about projects relating to manuscripts and early printed books
The Maps and Views blog includes maps from manuscripts and early printed books
Treasures in Full: Caxton’s Chaucer includes full digitizations of the 1476 and 1483 printings of the Canterbury Tales
Treasures in Full: The Gutenberg Bible offers access to complete digitizations of two copies of this text
Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto offers access to complete digitizations of 107 copies of 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto
Turning the Pages includes pageable facsimiles (not all complete) of both manuscripts and printed books. Highlights from the world of print include The Diamond Sutra, which is the earliest printed book, printed in 868
King’s College London
The Special Collections Online Exhibitions page includes many exhibitions related to early printed books and the history of the book
Manchester
The Rylands Collection in the University of Manchester includes many images from early printed books (as well as from manuscripts, maps, photographs and so on). The collection is presented using LUNA, and is not particularly easy to search - the results are often a hodgepodge, unless you know what you are looking for. You can click some of the sample searches on the landing page, but it is best to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the links to View the Rylands Collection using LUNA
Oxford
Bodleian Library
The Broadside Ballads Online is a searchable database of thousands of ballad sheets, scanned from microfilm. The site uses the ICONCLASS system for image searching
Digital Images from the Bodleian Library Special Collections includes much early printed material, including Blockbooks
USA
California
University of California at Santa Barbara
The UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive currently contains images of over 6700 broadsides. This is an ongoing project
Colorado
University of Colorado at Boulder
Once Upon a Time is a collection of images from the historical and illustrated fairytales collections
Connecticut
New Haven
Yale University, Beinecke Library
The Beinecke has a huge digital collection. You can search from the Beinecke Digital Collections landing page, which will also direct you to highlights. The Collections Highlights page allows you to filter by curatorial area. Highlights related to early print include the Cary Playing Card Database and an exhibition called Starry Messenger: Observing the Heavens in the Age of Galileo
Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Digitized Book of the Week archives from the Library includes several early books, as well as a great deal of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century material. Note that in most instances, the links will take you to Archive.org
Indiana
Bloomington
University of Indiana at Bloomington
The Exhibitions landing page of the Lilly Library points to many exhibitions with content related to early books, as for example 4000 Years of Miniature Books
South Bend
University of Notre Dame
The Online Exhibits page points to several exhibitions with images from early books, including the now very old, but still very useful, Renaissance Dante in Print
Maryland
National Library of Medicine
The Digital Collections include full digitizations of many early printed materials. Note that you can filter by date to quickly find early materials. Interesting objects include a 1494 printing of the Malleus maleficarum, an early treatise on witch-hunting
The Online Exhibitions landing page includes many exhibitions relating to early printed materials. See, for example, Historical Anatomies on the Web
Turning the Pages Online includes digitizations of several interesting early printed books, which can be viewed in pageable facsimiles or as image galleries. Note that this is an older collection, technologically speaking
New Jersey
Princeton University Library
The landing page for the Online Exhibitions associated with the Firestone Library includes several exhibitions related to early books; for example, see Hand Bookbindings is an exhibition of several hundred images from Special Collections
New York
The Jewish Theological Seminary Library
The Digital Collections landing page includes links to many projects to digitize manuscripts and printed books and pamphlets relating to the history of Judaism; see, for example, Rare Books in the Sylvia and Harry Rebell collection
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library Virtual Exhibits landing page points to many exhibitions featuring early print; see for example Reading Pictures: Sixteenth-Century European Illustrated Books; or Translation Necessarie: The King James Bible at 400
University Park
Pennsylvania State University
The Digital Collections landing page allows you to search or to browse the collections. Early print-related highlights include The English Emblem Book Project
Texas
Austin
University of Texas at Austin
The Harry Ransom Center has an online exhibition devoted to The Gutenberg Bible, including a pageable facsimile (this is an older exhibition, technologically speaking, so the images are quite small)
Dallas
Southern Methodist University
The Bridwell Library Digital Collections landing page points to several items related to early print; see for example Fifteenth Century Printed Books (note that not all search results include images)
The Exhibitions landing page points to several exhibitions relating to early print, particularly with respect to the Bible; see for example The First Four Centuries of Printed Bible Illustration
Washington, DC
Folger Shakespeare Library
The Digital Collections offer thousands of images from materials related to Shakespeare, including early print, theatrical materials, and book bindings. This is a LUNA collection, and so can be difficult to search
Library of Congress
The Digital Collections includes images from old books and maps (as well as from newspapers, photographs, and manuscripts)
The Exhibitions landing page points to current and past exhibitions, some of which relate to early print, as for example A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books
Smithsonian Institution
The Digital Library of the Smithsonian Libraries includes thousands of items. Books Online links to full digitizations of thousands of books, many of them old. The Digital Library: Natural and Physical Sciences page links to many wonderful exhibitions, some with videos as well as images. The Galaxy of Images page offers 15,000 images from the collections
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