Rare Books in the History Faculty Library

Chürpfalzbaierische militair Etat, an 18th-century manuscript in the collection

This is a guest post from Clare Bristow, the HFL’s Graduate Trainee in 2010-11, on her final day:

Over the past year, I have been working on a project making an inventory of the HFL’s collection of antiquarian books, which are kept in closed stacks.  This involved looking through over 500 volumes and recording their bibliographic details and any features of interest such as provenance or annotations.

The HFL Rare Books blog is the outcome of this project.  It contains details of all the books, most of which are not on SOLO.  Here, you can browse the collection by author, date, publisher and place of publication, or use the tags to find books of a particular provenance.

The books are available for use by registered library readers – just ask a member of staff in the library, or contact us.

I hope the Rare Books blog will help to make readers aware of some of the uncatalogued gems in the HFL, and the varied backgrounds of the library’s collections.  This collection is particularly strong in British history, including long runs of parliamentary source material such as Journals of the House of Commons and Public General Statutes.

On a personal note, I would like to thank all the staff and readers who have made my year in the HFL so enjoyable and worthwhile, and wish all the best to next year’s Graduate Trainee.

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