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This article discusses a book about Hernando Colón's library and his book collection. The book provides information about the books he inherited, the books he purchased, and his interest in small ephemeral publications. It also explores the connections between merchants and the New World, Colón's efforts in cartography, and the organization of his library. The article mentions the detailed instructions Colón provided for accessing his library after his death and describes the disputes and depredations that occurred after his passing. The book is described as popularizing literature but lacking clarity. [Extracted from the article]

This article gives an account of the development of the history of the book as a distinctive discipline and its relation to bibliography and social history, two disciplines that are complementary but that have too often been practiced selectively in the past, giving rise to the tension between Anglo-American analytical bibliography and French social history. The second part of the article includes some of the major trends in the scholarship of the last twenty years and some major unresolved issues that still must be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Biblioteca Augusta of Perugia is one of the earliest public libraries in Italy. Its core foundation is made up of the collection of Prospero Podiani, whose knowledge and interest in the book market led him to create one of the largest collections of sixteenth-century Italy, including some 300 incunabula. Panzanelli’s doctoral research approached documentary evidence pertaining to the collection in order to reconstruct the lively cultural context of the time and space it belonged to. Having transferred the incunabula data into the database Material Evidence in Incunabula, we can now offer a richer and more complex representation of the development and use of the collection, of the books’ survival, loss, and mobility, and of the methodology of the investigation involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL, http://www.cerl.org) is a membership organisation, involving an active community of c. 190 libraries each with a keen focus on cultural heritage in the form of early printed books and manuscripts. Collaboratively, CERL member libraries and researchers in the field develop products and services. These include the HPB, the CERL Thesaurus, MEI and the CERL Portal. This article comprises a description of CERL's strategy, activities and ways to contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration and retrieval of records containing provenance information is at the core of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL)'s mission: provenance records can now be retrieved, when present, in the Heritage of the Printed Book database (HPB), in the CERL Portal (CP), in the CERL Thesaurus (CT), in Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), in Paul Needham's Index Possessorum Incunabulorum (IPI), in Margaret Ford's English Book Owners in Britain (EBOB); help relating to provenance investigation can be sought at Can You Help?, provenance resources on the web can be found in the CERL website according to geographical area. Finally provenance issues, including the preparation of a comparative table of standards of provenance description adopted in Europe, are being discussed and prepared by the CERL Provenance and Standards for the description of provenance Working Group, chaired by Marieke van Delft, The Hague Royal Library. This paper concentrates in particular on two integrated tools: the CERL Thesaurus and Material Evidence in Incunabula. The CT integrates Provenance authority files created by individual institutions and indexes of provenance from various publications. MEI offers a central repository for the copy-specific data on incunabula either not yet described (the majority) or described in scattered printed or electronic catalogues. MEI is linked to the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (=ISTC) of the British Library, from which it derives the bibliographic records, it accommodates the description of any aspect of the material evidence of incunabula, and retrieves it for sophisticated integrated searches, therefore significantly expanding the use of these resources, and of the data generated about them, as historical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the origin and the development of Libri da compagnia, their relationship with books of hours, and the impact of the advent of printing on this type of book. It is followed by a list of fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries editions and extant copies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]