The Universal Short Title Catalogue
The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.
The project brings together data from established national bibliographical projects and new projects undertaken by the project team based in St Andrews, with partners in University College, Dublin. This new work builds upon the principles established by the St Andrews French Vernacular Book project, completed and published in 2007.
New work undertaken in St Andrews has created new bibliographies of Latin books published in France (FB volumes 3 & 4) and of books published in the Low Countries (NB). The project team will also collect and analyse information on books published in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Meanwhile, partners in University College, Dublin have created a bibliography of books published in the Iberian Peninsula (IB).
In 2011 this was brought together with information on books published in Italy, Germany and Britain to create a fully searchable resource covering all of Europe. This provides access to the full bibliographic information, locations of surviving copies and, where available, digital full text editions that can be accessed through the database. All told, this information will encompass approximately 355,000 editions and around 1.5 million surviving copies, located in over 5,000 libraries worldwide.
The USTC also hosts a series of conferences held annually in St Andrews in September. The project is also associated with the Library of the Written Word published by Brill, also the publishers of the printed bibliographies.
The USTC is funded via a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. A related project on medical books in the sixteenth century is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
We also have an occasional newsletter - "15/16". Archived editions are available here.
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 Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby initiated the field work for USTC 17 with a trip to libraries in Brussels and Antwerp.
The new survey of books published in the Low Countries, 1601-1650, will be a co-operative venture with the two established bibliographical projects, the STCN (Netherlands) and STCV (Vlaanderen). For the northern Netherlands work will consist of examining material in libraries outside the Netherlands. The survey of the 17th century southern Netherlands will require more fundamental work to incorporate materials published in the French-speaking Walloon towns and in Brussels.
During this first trip the USTC researchers concentrated attention on the fine pamphlet collections of the Royal Library in Brussels and in the Museum Plantin Moretus in Antwerp. Adopting the STCN fingerprinting system used in both established bibliographies will all USTC researchers working in remote libraries to differentiate pamphlets often published in several simultaneous editions. The first stage of this work in Belgium permitted the identification of around 150 editions not previously described in the national bibliographical projects as well as the logging of several hundred additional copies. Work will continue in Belgian Libraries in May.
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Dr Malcolm Walsby will be giving a paper at the École des Chartes in Paris on Friday 17 February entitled “Un portail vers le monde de la Renaissance: l’Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC)”.
The paper will be the first time that the USTC is demonstrated to a francophone audience since it went on line at the end of last year. Dr Walsby’s paper will be followed by a round table discussion with Jean-François Gilmont, Mireille Huchon and Magali Vène.
The event is co-organised by the Société Française d’Étude du Seizième Siècle (SFDES), the Atelier XVIe siècle of the Sorbonne and the École des Chartes. The event starts at 5pm.
The launch event was organised by Professor Annie Charon.
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Professor Andrew Pettegree has been elected a Vice President of the Royal Historical Society.
The Society, founded in 1868, is the foremost professional society in Great Britain representing historians, and it play an important role promoting and defending the scholarly study of the past. The membership of nearly 3,000 Fellows and members draws together individuals from across the world, engaged professionally in researching and presenting public history, whether in archives, libraries, museums or the heritage industry.
The Society aims to maintain professional standards within the discipline, and to represent the views of its membership to government bodies and to the public at large. The society is also an important historical publisher.
Professor Pettegree has previously served as an officer of the Society, when, as Literary Director, he took charge of the Society’s programme of publishing historical documents, the Camden Society.  In 2012 he will chair the panel of judges for the Gladstone Prize, which honours the best first book published in Britain on any topic that is not primarily British history.
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 The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) project group has won a further research grant worth £983,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This will allow the project group to continue its work charting the publication history of the first centuries of print.
Welcoming the new grant, project director Professor Andrew Pettegree commented: ‘We are tremendously encouraged to have this new expression of confidence from the academic community for the work being done here in St Andrews. It is particularly gratifying to have this news just before the USTC is launched on-line for the first time.’
The project, which will continue under the joint direction of Professor Pettegree and Dr Malcolm Walsby, will allow for the appointment of three postdoctoral fellows and two doctoral studentships. The grant, which will extend the work of the project from 2012 to 2016, will provide for the USTC to continue its coverage into the seventeenth century, doubling the size of the database to around 700,000 editions. By extending the survey from 1600 to 1650, it will offer a full view of the first two centuries of print, a period in which print finally came of age as a mature and independent means of communication and information exchange. The early 17th century was a particularly dramatic time of explosive growth for print in northern Europe and the project will reflect this in increasing attention to pamphlets, broadsheets and the first newspapers.
The USTC goes live on line on 22 November. Details of the launch events can be found here.
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Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World
28-30 June 2012
The Early Modern Book world was characterised by great variety, but also by fierce competition. Many printers and publishers responded by developing a highly specialised output, utilising skills and expertise that gave them a vital commercial edge, and deterred potential rivals. Books that required specialised typefaces (music and Greek texts) were inevitably the preserve of a small number of firms; but others took advantage of the sophisticated European distribution network to develop an international reputation for specific genres. The production of Books of Hours was dominated by a few Parisian firms; in 1541 Georg Joachim Rheticus would carry the precious manuscript of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus 1,000 kilometres across Europe to find a printing centre (Nuremberg) capable of doing it justice. But much less well capitalised firms could also find their niche in the new genres that underpinned the market: almanacs, calendars and news.
This conference is the latest in the sequence hosted by the St Andrews Book project group, and the first since the launch of the Universal Short Title Catalogue with its unique subject search facility.
Interested scholars are invited to submit papers for consideration on any aspect of book specialisation in the early modern period. A title and one paragraph synopsis should be sent to the organisers at the address given (sam223@st-andrews.ac.uk). Papers should be given in English. A volume based on papers given at this conference will be published in the Library of the Written Word with Brill.
The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is 31 January 2012.
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22-23 November 2011.
 The St Andrews project group is pleased to announce a scholarly colloquium to coincide with the launch of the Universal Short Title Catalogue: a bibliography of books published in Europe and the Americas before 1601.
The colloquium will hear presentations from the Director and Project Manager of the USTC, Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, and from four distinguished experts of early print: Ann Blair (Harvard), Ian Maclean (Oxford), Angela Nuovo (Udine) and Alexander Wilkinson (Dublin). All speakers will have had advance access to the USTC database.
The event begins with a launch reception at Lyon and Turnbull, Broughton Place, Edinburgh on Tuesday 22 November, in the presence of representatives of the national book communities represented in the USTC.
The colloquium will be accompanied by exhibitions by conference sponsors Proquest, Brill and Antiquarian Bookseller Christopher Sokol. Music at the launch event will be provided by the Edinburgh Renaissance Band.
The cost of attendance is £70 (£40 to registered graduate students). The cost covers the colloquium with coffee and a buffet lunch. All participants will also receive an invitation to the reception at Lyon and Turnbull.
The colloquium will take place on Wednesday 23 November at the New Club, Prince’s Street, Edinburgh.
Registration is online. Registration is now open, and closes on 31 October 2011.
On-line Registration
USTC_Colloquium_Poster
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 Warm congratulations are due to project associate Natasha Constantinidou on her appointment to a lectureship at the University of Cyprus.
After PhD work at the University of Edinburgh Natasha Constantinidou joined the Universal Short Title Catalogue project group as a research analyst in 2009. Since then she has done invaluable work for the project, particularly in resolving issues in the rendering of Greek titles. This substantial group of books poses particular challenges for printed and on-line catalogues, and Natasha’s work has been crucial in bringing coherence and consistency to our treatment of this crucial area of print innovation in the 15th and 16th centuries. Natasha is also one of the organisers of the forthcoming conference in St Andrews, Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, and a prospective editor of the subsequent volume of proceedings.
Natasha joins a growing roster of scholars who have moved to positions in the European and North American academic world after work with the project. We wish her every success in her new responsibilities.
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This week the project team welcomed distinguished Belgian bibliographer Jean-François Gilmont to St Andrews. During the course of his visit the project concluded an agreement to exchange data between the USTC and Glimont’s own project, GLN 15-16.
GLN 15-16 is a bibliography of all works published in Francophone Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchâtel) before 1601. It offers a comprehensive and fully searchable survey of all books published in one of Europe’s most dynamic zones of print. For Jean-François Gilmont it represents the culmination of a lifetime of informed engagement with the book history of Calvin’s adopted home-town. A unique feature of the database is that one can search with or without ghosts – editions previously attributed to Geneva, which Gilmont has now authoritatively disproved.
During the course of the visit project manager Dr Malcolm Walsby was able to share with our guest a false Lyon imprint not previously recognised as Genevan. This edition will now be added to GLN. Gilmont moved on from St Andrews to Aberdeen, where he will inspect some of the small residue (about 200 items) of Genevan editions that he has not yet seen.
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Andrew Pettegree was this week honoured with the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan prize for his book, The Book in the Renaissance. The prize is awarded annually by the Renaissance Society of America for the most notable book in the field of Renaissance Studies.
The prize was awarded to Professor Pettegree at a ceremony at the society’s annual meeting in Montreal. Speaking for the prize jury Professor Deborah Parker said of the Book in the Renaissance:
This magisterial work offers a substantially new perspective on the dawn of printing and the beginnings of publishing as a commercial activity. Although the story begins, as most histories of printing do, with Gutenberg’s technical innovations, the perspective on his achievement and later important developments in printing is highly original. Nothing less than a reconstruction of the industry, this study illuminates beautifully the intricate web of commercial, religious and cultural issues that surround the printed word.
The scope of the book is immense: Pettegree charts publishing initiatives in places as diverse as Wittenberg, Sweden, Bohemia, Constantinople and the New World. He moves with ease from an account of Erasmus’s and Luther’s clever manipulations of the medium to the importance of news ballads and pamphlets on natural phenomena to the technical demands of reproducing music staves. The study is full of insights into the business interests of printers, business models, and the rise of the newspaper, the latter subject traced through Pettegree’s perusal of thousands of edicts, broadsides and pamphlets. In this work, he was aided by the digital archive, the Universal Short Title Catalogue, the project of which Pettegree is the director.  Darnton-like in the acuity of its observations, this book has the sweep, learning and importance that makes The Book in the Renaissance a most deserving winner of this year’s Gordan prize. Please join me in congratulating Andrew Pettegree.
In accepting the prize Andrew Pettegree paid tribute to St Andrews book project team, whose work substantially underpins the research of his book. The Book in the Renaissance, which has sold over 5,000 copies since its publication in May 2010, will be published in a paperback edition in September. |
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We are pleased to announce that registration for Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print is now open. The Third Book History Conference will be taking place in St Andrews, on 7-9 July. The conference will discuss book inventories and catalogues in manuscript and print, between the 15th to the 18th century (see description below) with confirmed papers on printers’ and booksellers’ lists, private collectors, discussions of the fate of specific items, the collections of religious institutions. It will cover areas from the Baltic to Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Spain, France, Germany, and the British Isles.
It has become customary in documenting the world of early printed books to rely primarily on surveys of survivors: that is, books that have weathered the buffeting of history to reach the comparative safety of modern library collections. Most national bibliographical catalogues are aggregates of the holdings of library catalogues; faute de mieux these are taken to offer a reasonable account of the original output.
But the urge to list, catalogue and advertise the wealth of the new printed book culture was just as strong in the first age of books. Printers made lists of their available stock; owners proudly catalogued their libraries; assessors inventoried collections and stock as part of the settlement of estates, or legal proceedings. In an age of religious discord, censorship required the publication of lists of forbidden books (though at the risk of advertising their contents); book-sellers’ shelves, private and public libraries were examined for forbidden material.
These various classes of lists contain indispensable material on various aspects of the 16th century book trade: on cost, retail pricing, second hand values, binding and library practice. They allow the reconstruction of lost or dispersed libraries. They also document many thousands of titles and editions that have now disappeared altogether.
For more details contact Natasha Constantinidou: Natasha.Constantinidou@st-andrews.ac.uk or nac21@st-andrews.ac.uk
Conference website
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