We're in a ballroom, white tie and tails optional.

• Robyn Adams, "The Social Library: Reconstructing the Network of Early Donors to the Bodleian Library, 1600–20"

• Sam Brown, "Liber Arabicus: The Arabic Language in the Early Modern English Library"

• Alexander Samson, "Spanish Books in the Collection of Robert Ashley (1565–1641)"

A quick plug for our @rsaorg.bsky.social San Francisco '26 session on building and using early modern libraries

rsa.confex.com/rsa/2026/mee...

Saturday, 21 Feb, 2.30pm–4pm.

A Provincial Market in Second-Hand Books: Book Sales in Devon, 1688–1725 Abstract. Comparatively little is known about England’s early book-auction trade outside of London and the university towns, with few catalogues surviving

*small embarrassed voice*
A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s.
doi.org/10.1093/libr...

If there's anything more exciting than seeing a book you work on in an exhibition, it's surely being invited to talk about it. Very excited for this event next month!

📷 Lancelot Browne's annotated copy of Avicenna in Arabic at the @rcpmuseum.bsky.social exhibition, 'A body of knowledge'.

A screenshot showing information about the CELL panel at the Renaissance Society of America conference in February 2026, to be held in San Francisco. Session Title: Building Libraries, Reading Libraries: New Research from the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters Session Papers: 1. The social library: reconstructing the network of early donors to the Bodleian Library, 1600-1620 (Presenter: Robyn Adams) 2. Liber Arabicus: The Arabic language in the early modern English library (Presenter: Samantha Brown) 3. Spanish Books in the collection of Robert Ashley (1565-1641) (Presenter: Alexander Samson)

Ah, RSA time. You wants library history? We gots your library history.

Crossing the world without an interpreter: Arabic studies in England 1550-1640

I'm thrilled to be teaching a short course on Arabic Studies in Early Modern England with Prof. Alastair Hamilton at @warburginstitute.bsky.social next month. We'll need to meet a minimum number of bookings to run, so if you're interested, sign up asap! warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

St John's Cambridge Rr.7.15. Title page with ownership inscription crossed out messily.

Cambridge Whipple WS 570. Page with six lines of writing crossed out, and new ownership inscription added in.

Rare books people! Following some lively & productive discussion at the @livesandletters.bsky.social conference last week, I have a question: how would you describe inscriptions like these?

An Introduction to Archive Research Skills Join Heritage Researchers Dr Peter Mitchell and Dr Rachel Anderson for a practical, two-part course on mastering archival research skills.

Have you ever wanted to do historical research, but not been sure how to go about it? Join our heritage researchers @rach-anderson.bsky.social and @petermitchellnhsn.bsky.social in Oct for a specially curated course on finding your way through the archival maze: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-introdu...

Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration

So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!

Looking forward to delivering the first version of my work theorising the concept of provenance at this conference!

Built with books: shaping the shelves of the early modern library This 2-day symposium will explore the rich field of early modern library studies, inviting fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies to open up existing narratives and bodies of evidence...

The programme for this symposium has just been announced and it looks superb! Featuring @laurajcleaver.bsky.social alongside IES fellows and students.

Book now!

09 September 2025–10 September 2025, 9:30 am–6:30 pm

www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

Signage at the exhibition, hung on a light green wall. The title 'Getting the Measure of William Bedwell' is in the foreground.

A close up picture of the contents of a display case: an early modern document, churchwardens accounts, with signatures at the bottom. A label next to the manuscript enlarges part of the text, which is William Bedwell's signature

Me looking happy by one of the signs. I'm wearing a white vest top and black trousers.

📣 Exciting Bedwell news 📣 I’m thrilled to have assisted with a new exhibition at Bruce Castle Museum, ‘Getting the Measure of William Bedwell: Maths, Measurement and the Arabic World’. Top tip: pair your visit with a walk around the corner to see his church for full WB/early modern Tottenham vibes.

do read friend @jonnelledge.bsky.social's newsletter, it's got a nice little shout out to me and my obsession with bookwheels -- you can see the work that inspired the obsession at www.bookwheel.org

Deadline tomorrow!

Registration open! Excited about this roundtable bringing together the brains of @sameen-mohsin.bsky.social @kabcommons.bsky.social @worsted.bsky.social from @mrcwarwick.bsky.social & Ansar Ahmed Ullah from the Swadhinata Trust

19 May, 6-8pm, @rshc.bsky.social: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/changing-t...

We will be making sure none of the scholarly research we host goes uh missing long-term in the process, *but* there might be breaks in service while we carry this out, especially over Easter. See you on the other side 🤞

This doesn't effect our more recent projects, www.bookwheel.org, bookowners.online, or ebdo.org.uk, but if you use, say, the Francis Bacon Correspondence database, the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, or our projects on the early Royal Society, you might see some interruptions.

As part of that, we're working to migrate the website from the server it's currently sitting on to a shiny new one, learning quite a few new technologies in the process (hellooo containerization), remembering quite a few old ones (ugh php) and swearing every now and then under our breath as we go.

Hello all! In common with pretty much every other research institution, since the BL cyberattack we've been making sure our website livesandletters.ac.uk (and the research it contains) is good and safe.

Partial pillars A few days ago I was in a shop with a Narnia wardrobe.

I have a new post, about the alluring non-spaces in sketches: ofsmith.substack.com/p/partial-pi...

I was lucky enough to spend much of last year surveying Arabic manuscripts at the @nationaltrust.bsky.social and @britishlibrary.bsky.social, tracing the provenance of individual items and identifying trends across the collections. If you’d like to read more there’s a link to my report below!

We’re having a symposium at @livesandletters.bsky.social! Come and geek out with us over early modern libraries and the books that filled them. Abstracts due May 16th, full details here www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of... #bookhistory #earlymodern

Call for Papers: ‘Built with books: shaping the shelves of the early modern library’
Deadline 16th May 2025
9 –10 September 2025 at UCL, London

Detail from a Bible donated by Lady Mary Fermor and personally inscribed "The gifte of ye Lady Farmor" by Sir Thomas Bodley, Biblia in vulgar... (Venice: Soardi & Benali, 1517). Image credit: Bodleian Library, Oxford, B 18.5 Th.

Our project on early donations to the Bodleian Library meant that @drallotment.bsky.social and @annalujz.bsky.social spent many hours at the Bod working on provenance research, the fruits of which can now be found inside SOLO, the Bodleian's online catalogue.

ebdo.org.uk/2025/03/31/i...

We can't thank @annalujz.bsky.social enough for her work as the project postdoc, which, frankly, is an entirely inadequate description of the role she played.

Do you like humanities data? Do you like project documentation that goes into quite a bit of detail about what that data is/are*, the methodologies used, the decisions that were made, and the alternatives that weren't? Then hoo boy do we have the pdf for you!

*delete as appropriate

It is a tremendous data set, Anna and company! Congratulations on getting it out. The documentation alone is one of the best I have ever seen.

What better way to make our bluesky debut then sharing the news of our latest dataset release, from our Shaping Scholarship project about early donations of books, manuscripts and money to the Bodleian Library! Do download, play around, and get in touch!

www.ebdo.org.uk/data