The University of St Andrews is celebrating 30 years of its global book hunting project, the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC).
Started in 1995 it is a collective catalogue of all the books published in Europe and its overseas colonies between the invention of printing and 1700. Unlike most other bibliographical projects, which tend to be associated with major libraries or research consortia, the USTC has been hosted entirely by the University of St Andrews.
It is the most comprehensive catalogue of early print in the world, and currently lists more than 1.65 million printed editions, located in 7 million copies in more than 10,000 libraries, archives and museums worldwide.
It allows scholars and students to build up rapidly a corpus for further investigation; and it makes available a great range of analytical tools to study early modern European culture, religion and politics.
Professor Andrew Pettegree
Bishop Wardlaw Professor Andrew Pettegree from the School of History, who began the project said: "The book project started as a much more modest study of French and Dutch books, before we realised the potential of covering the whole print world. This work would have been unthinkable without the creative and sympathetic environment in which I have worked these last decades in St Andrews, and the successive generations of postgraduate students and more than 25 postdocs who have given their energy and expertise to the work, in the process discovering hundreds of thousands of editions unknown to the scholarly world."
The project has embraced the incorporation of 'lost books', that is, books known to have existed in early modern Europe but which are now no longer to be found. This is controversial to some, as bibliographers are by nature people who want to hold books in their hands.
Happily, lost books regularly turn up in previously un-surveyed collections. Their inclusion is also significant as the great majority of early printed matter was not meant to enter libraries, but to be read to pieces, to be posted up on walls, to be recycled. By prioritising the discovery of these works the USTC team is re-writing the history of early literature by shedding new light on the reality of publishing and reading.
Dr Arthur der Weduwen
Dr Arthur der Weduwen from the School of History, who co-leads the project, said: "Our team of around 15 active members is constantly coming across brilliant new finds. In the past year members have uncovered thousands of unique early printed wedding and funeral poems from Sweden (some printed in gold or red ink) and previously unknown books, forms and receipts that were supplied to Dutch East India ships, seized by English privateers and since hidden in an uncatalogued Admiralty archive in London."
Over its three decades, the USTC has revealed the existence of previously unknown places of printing, and regularly documents books that survive only in a library far from their initial place of publication: showing the breadth that books travelled in early modern Europe, and the USTC makes a distinctive contribution by looking for books printed in, say, the Netherlands, that are not to be found in Dutch libraries.
Within the next year, the project will conclude the incorporation of 2 million additional copies supplied by libraries worldwide.
The USTC website, which is free to use and has around 3,000 visitors a month, is now a fundamental tool for all scholars in the fields of history, literature, politics, theology, the history of science or medicine with an interest in early printed books.
The USTC also hosts links to more than 600,000 digital scans, currently tagged to almost half a million editions.
Category Research
