| Rare Book Room | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Location | California, United States |
| Established | 2006 |
| Other information | |
| Website | www |
Rare Book Room is an educational website for the repository of digitally scanned rare books made freely available to the public.
| Rare Book Room | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Location | California, United States |
| Established | 2006 |
| Other information | |
| Website | www |
Rare Book Room is an educational website for the repository of digitally scanned rare books made freely available to the public.
Starting around 1996 the California-based company Octavo began scanning rare and important books from libraries around the world. These scans were done at extremely high resolution using high-quality equipment, with some pages at over 200MB each. They were sold by Octavo as commercial products on CD-ROM.
In 2006 the "Rare Book Room" website was created which contains the complete collection in medium to medium-high resolution freely available to the public through a web browser or as a PDF file. Some high resolution versions are still being sold by Octavo through a separate website. As of 2007 over 400 books have been scanned. [1]
The repository includes books by:
It includes most of the Shakespeare Quartos [18] from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland, as well as the First Folio from the Folger Library. It includes Library of Congress copies of Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, [19] and other rare editions: a Gutenberg Bible of 1455, William Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Sidereus Nuncius , [20] the first printing of the United States Bill of Rights, and Magna Carta . [21]
The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2, etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third edition published.
Aldus Pius Manutius was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his enchiridia, which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon.
Sidereus Nuncius is a short astronomical treatise published in Neo-Latin by Galileo Galilei on March 13, 1610. It was the first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope, and it contains the results of Galileo's early observations of the imperfect and mountainous Moon, of hundreds of stars not visible to the naked eye in the Milky Way and in certain constellations, and of the Medicean Stars that appeared to be circling Jupiter.
John Edward Warnock was an American computer scientist, inventor, technology businessman, and philanthropist best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke in 1982. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company. Although he retired as CEO in 2001, he continued to co-chair the Adobe Board of Directors with Geschke until 2017. Warnock pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communications.
Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multiple pages of text were printed to form the individual sections of a book. An octavo is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets on which 16 pages of text were printed, which were then folded three times to produce eight leaves. Each leaf of an octavo book thus represents one eighth the size of the original sheet. Other common book formats are folios and quartos. Octavo is also used as a general description of the size of books that are about 8 to 10 inches tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. These terms are discussed in greater detail in book sizes.
Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published.
Giulio Cesare la Galla (1571–1624) was a professor of philosophy at the Collegio Romano in Italy.
The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo. Beginning with the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, contributions to the “revolution” continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton’s work over a century later.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
The Merry Devil of Edmonton is an Elizabethan-era stage play; a comedy about a magician, Peter Fabell, nicknamed the Merry Devil. It was at one point attributed to William Shakespeare, but is now considered part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Selenographia, sive Lunae descriptio was printed in 1647 and is a milestone work by Johannes Hevelius. It includes the first detailed map of the Moon, created from Hevelius's personal observations. In his treatise, Hevelius reflected on the difference between his own work and that of Galileo Galilei. Hevelius remarked that the quality of Galileo's representations of the Moon in Sidereus nuncius (1610) left something to be desired. Selenography was dedicated to King Ladislaus IV of Poland and along with Riccioli/Grimaldi's Almagestum Novum became the standard work on the Moon for over a century. There are many copies that have survived, including those in Bibliothèque nationale de France, in the library of Polish Academy of Sciences, in the Stillman Drake Collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto, and in the Gunnerus Library at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Albumazar is a Jacobean era play, a comedy written by Thomas Tomkis that was performed and published in 1615.
The term "folio" has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way; second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books; and third, it is an approximate term for the size of a book, and for a book of this size.
William Simon Jacques, nicknamed the "Tome Raider" by the media, is a serial book thief who has been twice convicted after stealing hundreds of rare books worth over £1 million from libraries in the UK. He was jailed in May 2002 for four years, and again in July 2010 for three and a half years.
Nick Wilding is a British-born American historian. He became internationally known after exposing as a forgery a copy of Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” that purportedly included Galileo’s own watercolors of the moon.
Thomas Pennant Barton was an American diplomat and bibliophile who is primarily remembered for the collection of books by and relating to William Shakespeare and English drama that he amassed between 1834 and 1869. Four years after his death, Barton's collection was acquired by the Boston Public Library, where it has remained ever since.
Henrietta Collins Bartlett was an American bibliographer, Shakespeare scholar, and creator of the first modern census of Shakespeare's published drama. She has been called "one of the foremost bibliographers of her time," despite working in a scholarly field in which "the overwhelming majority has been male."
A Knack to Know a Knave is a 1592 play closely associated with the principal performers Edward Alleyn and William Kempe. The play is a comic morality tale designed to highlight the talents of the celebrated clown Kempe, and is known from one text, itself arguably a memorial reconstruction. The author is unknown, though the involvement of Robert Greene has been suggested, as well as George Peele and Thomas Nashe. Recent scholarship has argued for a Shakespearean connection. On the basis of traditional literary-critical analysis and digital textual methods, Darren Freebury-Jones has proposed that the case for Robert Wilson's authorship of A Knack to Know a Knave is compelling. The play gives an insight into the nature of Elizabethan theatre during Shakespeare's time and the relationship between playscript and extemporised comedy.
Baldassarre Capra was an Italian scientist who disputed Galileo Galilei's claim to priority of the discovery of Kepler's Supernova and also claimed to have invented the proportional compass, accusing Galileo of plagiarism.
Paul Needham is an American academic librarian. From 1998 to 2020, he worked at the Scheide Library at Princeton University. A Guggenheim Fellow and Bibliographical Society Gold Medallist, Needham has delivered the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford. His focus is on incunabula, the earliest printed books in Europe.