Me, famous young man bookseller and famous young woman bookseller, snow, snowy trees behind.

Self and colleagues after Stuttgart last-night dinner. This weather is very exciting for us.

This 1552 translation of Justinian by Sansovino, for Day 19 of our Advent Calendar of Continental Books, has been sumptuously bound in contemporary red velvet with traces of an elaborate embroidered design in gold thread, almost certainly for presentation to the dedicatee, Cosimo I de’ Medici.

Light through the arched Reading Room windows at night time, seen through a window, with reflections of books from inside the Library above.

North Wing reflections @theul.bsky.social, Late Duty Librarian.
#AlphabetChallenge #WeekWforWindows 📷 #photography

Beneath this beautiful Parisian fanfare binding for Day 2 of our Advent Calendar of early European books is the 1570 Plantin Book of Hours, one of only six known copies printed on vellum 😍

This portrait of pioneering printer and bookbinder T.J. Cobden-Sanderson of the Doves Press – born #otd in 1840 – lives in our Human Sciences department. The beautiful typeface pictured here is the Doves Type, the punches and matrices for which Cobden-Sanderson infamously threw into the Thames.

Everyone has bad days, even Coleridge, who, in a fit of despair, planned to 'bid farewell forever' to poetry at the age of twenty-two. This unpublished autograph letter marks a key moment of transition in the poet's life. bit.ly/Q-Coleridge2...

An agéd St Peter with his keys. A woodcut initial from Nicholas de Lyra’s commentary on the Gospels and Epistles, printed at #Venice in December 1494 and since 1913 @theulspeccoll.bsky.social: Inc.5.B.3.97[1711].

🕰️ This beautifully printed collection of 71 shorter works by Thomas Aquinas was published 535 years ago #onthisday.

📖 THOMAS AQUINAS; Antonius PIZAMANUS, editor. Opuscula [with a life of St Thomas].Venice, Hermannus Liechtenstein, 7 September 1490.

The Internet informs us that today is #InternationalBaconDay … they did mean English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), right?

You've heard of Faust & Werther, but did you know that Goethe was also the author of a play about a throuple? Written at the age of 27, Stella (1776) ends with Stella, Cecilia, and Fernando finding love in 'one home, one bed, and one grave'. bit.ly/Q-Goethe-G1181

Fun ways to spend your bank holiday:
- Cooking for friends and family (note: cooking friends and family generally frowned upon)
- Stealing a large pig and replacing it with a pig-shaped decoy
- Glaring at cyclists who don't stop at red lights
- Having a night on the town

A page of text in different types. Duodecimo.

Typographical chaos. Sondershausen, 1700.

In his diary in 1896, member of @theul.bsky.social staff Charles Sayle called this portrait ‘quite the most marvellous piece of engraving of the period that … I have seen’.

Silk, embroidery, enamel, silver filigree, and more ... which of these lovely little bindings is your favourite?

How it started / how it's going ...

Chonky manicule in my copy of St Jerome’s ‘Epistolæ’ (Letters), printed at #Venice in 1496 by Johannes Rubeus Vercellensis.

1548 woodcut initials featuring dog-walking, hair-pulling, spanking, music-making, and what seems to be a very dramatic book club ...

A black and white archive photograph of a man with a beard and cap. He has a backpack and a walking cane. There is a dog beside him and small stone steps leading out of the photograph. A large arched gate is behind him.

Picture the scene.

It's 1901. It's Paris. You make a bet with some friends that you could walk around the world, funding the entire trip by selling postcards featuring photos of YOURSELF. You set off.

This is the story of Charles Millot. Read it now at: orkneyarchive.blogspot.com

Beautiful bookplate of the queer American poet & activist Elizabeth Wade White (1906-94), in a work of philosophy by Giovanni Domenico Roccamora (Rome, 1668). Born in Connecticut, White moved to Dorset in the 1930s, to meet Sylvia Townsend Warner & her partner Valentine Ackland. (1/2)

Happy St Swithin's Day!  According to tradition, today's weather will continue for the next 40 days and 40 nights: 'St Swithin's Day, if it does rain / Full forty days, it will remain / St Swithin's Day, if it be fair / For forty days, t'will rain no more'. We're hoping for a bit more sunshine ...

A view of Cambridge University Library taken from Old Schools.

Cambridge University Library, seen from the Old Schools. A view we all love!

Tan calf gilt binding with a lot of brass furniture. On a round table.

Plates and wheels on the bottom sides and edge of an enormous antiphonal, Madrid 1827. Seen at @quaritch1847.bsky.social. Outing with our London Rare Book School group.

Did you know that Jorge Luis Borges mentions us in his 1940 story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? To this day we continue to encounter visitors who have come across Quaritch through Borges, eager to see our shop (and our famous catalogues) for themselves …

Sir Thomas More died 490 years ago on 6 July. Our catalogue Nowhere (Utopia literally meaning 'no place'), a selection of utopias, dystopias, and imaginary voyages, celebrates the legacy of his monumental 1516 Utopia. Browse the catalogue: bit.ly/Q-Utopia2025

Red and gold binding of Scintilla-altaris | Primitive devotion in the feasts and fasts of the Church of England' by Edward Sparke [G35.S6]

📚 This gorgeous binding is for a copy of 'Scintilla-altaris | Primitive devotion in the feasts and fasts of the Church of England' by Edward Sparke who was a chaplain to King Charles II. While the outside is wonderful, what lies just inside is even more special.

[G35.S6]

👇

A sneek peek of our June roundup of new acquisitions, featuring tales of chivalry & naughty novels, Marian books &missionary books, prayerbooks & anti-Protestant propaganda, and patterned papers, manuscript waste, and much more. Sign up to receive our catalogues: bit.ly/Q-stayintouch

👋 Coucou, tout le monde! We will be at the Paris Rare Book & Graphic Arts Fair this week (12–15 June) at Stand B8, with a selection of books guaranteed to boost your joie de vivre: bit.ly/Q-Paris2025

A pair of happy birds sitting in the margin of Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicæ (Lübeck, 1475-76). In the library of the Earls of Sunderland at Blenheim Palace, sold in 1882 to @quaritch1847.bsky.social, from whom likely bought by William Morris. Now @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Inc.1.A.14.1[1013.1-2].

E. M. Forster died #OTD in 1970. I have a book from his library, ‘Mount Eryx & other diversions’, on travel in Sicily & Italy, inscribed to him by the author Henry Festing Jones. Complete with postcard of a dashing Italian chap. Sold after Forster’s death by the Cambridge bookseller Heffer for £12.