History of the Book
Online Course
The Worth Library is committed to sharing our wonderful collections for the history of the book as widely as possible and to do this we have developed a number of online resources. Our popular FutureLearn MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on ‘The History of the Book in the Early Modern Period: 1450-1800’, compiled in conjunction with colleagues in the Departments of History and English, Trinity College Dublin, uses both our collections and the fantastic collections of TCD’s Old Library, to explore the history of the book in early modern Europe.
Online Exhibitions on the History of the Book
The Worth Library is famous for its marvellous collection of wonderfully preserved bookbindings from Ireland, England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain, for Worth was a connoisseur collector, evidently interested in the book as a material object. Some of these have been explored in smaller exhibitions such as our display in the National Library of Ireland in 2012, and our small online exhibition on French bookbindings and blogposts such as the August 2013 Book of the Month which investigated a binding on a book belonging to Pierre Séguier (1588-1672), who was Chancellor of France from 1635 until his death. Many of our lectures have focused on the important bindings in Worth’s collection and in 2022 we were delighted to host the Ligatus Summer School on the History of Bookbindings.
Worth was clearly equally fascinated by rare printings and, as his sale and auction catalogues dating from the last ten years of his life make clear, he was especially interested in developing these collections. Some have been the subject of large online exhibitions such as ‘Aldines at the Edward Worth Library’; ‘Estiennes at the Edward Worth Library’ and ‘Printing in Sixteenth-Century France at the Edward Worth Library’. Many of our publications investigate how and what Worth collected: details may be found on our Publications and Podcasts webpage.