Skip to main content

Early Modern Annotated Books from UCLA’s Clark Library

About this Collection

Comprising over 250 early modern printed books bearing handwritten annotations, this collection offers rich evidence for studying the material history of reading. The books collected here range in subject matter (from science and natural history to literature and philosophy), time period (1472–1818), and type of annotation (from scholarly commentary and cross-referencing to printers' notations and polemical criticism). The annotators themselves include translator John Florio, literary critic John Dennis, painter William Hogarth, French bibliophile François-Louis Jamet, English ephemera collector Narcissus Luttrell, avian enthusiast Judith Gowing, York printer Thomas Gent, London lawyer Thomas Turner, country vicar Thomas Austen, and many other identified and unidentified readers. Digitization of these items has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded the Clark a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant in 2017. The project concludes at the end of October 2018, when the remainder of the digitized annotated books will be published online.

View our statement on digital primary resources and historical description.

Type of Item