Early European Print

Surviving examples of the earliest European printing are rare after over 500 years of use, abuse, neglect, obsolescence, accidents, disasters, wars, damp, the attentions of insects and rodents, and the recycling of material (paper, vellum, parchment) for other uses. The John Rylands Library holds one of the world’s most important collections of these rare treasures of early printing. Consisting of single leaf woodblock and metal plate prints, blockbooks (printed from wooden blocks) and books printed with moveable metal type (known as incunabula), the collection contains some of the earliest examples of Western printing.

Fifty of the earliest and rarest printed items have been selected to form the Early European Print collection in Manchester Digital Collections, the University of Manchester’s online platform for exploring images of a highly curated selection of heritage collections and research projects. Each item featured in the Early European Print collection has been fully digitised in high quality. A detailed bibliographical description has also been provided for each item, produced as part of the Library’s ongoing Incunabula Cataloguing Project. These give details, if known or conjectured, of the authors, titles, places of publication, names of printers, dates of production, along with copious notes drawing together historic and modern scholarship, and full descriptions of provenance, copy-specific features (such as illuminations, decoration, annotations, imperfections, sophistications, etc.) and bindings.