Digitized incunabula
Address
Rare Books and Manuscripts Dept.
Boston Public Library
Boylston St. Building, 3rd Floor
700 Boylston St.
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Contact info
Rarebooks@bpl.libanswers.com
617.536.5400
Rare Books Department website
Acquisition priorities
BPL is actively building its collections of early books and manuscripts, including the incunabula collection. Acquisitions are made through both purchases and gifts.
Though we seek to acquire materials relevant to all areas of the collection, the following criteria represent our current purchasing priorities.
General priorities
- Annotated books.
- Books printed in Italian, within Italian lands, or by Italian authors, with an emphasis on Italian vernacular literature.
- Renaissance humanism and neo-Latin authors and texts.
- Rare printers, texts, and editions, particularly those not yet represented in BPL collections.
Specific priorities
- Dictionaries and grammars in general; Italian dictionaries and grammars in particular.
- Copies that preserve material evidence of production, publication, binding, or decoration, including mixed paper formats, bearer impressions, proof and waste sheets, printing errors, corrections, manuscript waste, rubrication, illumination, etc.
- Copies that preserve material evidence of early or contemporary reading, study, or textual transmission, including ownership inscriptions and marginalia. Price inscriptions, particularly those that show the cost of binding, are of great interest to us, as are books with early or contemporary evidence of women’s ownership and reading.
- Copies in early or contemporary bindings.
Image: BPL Q.406.29. Copy of a rare, 1493 Rome edition of Niccolo Perroti's Rudimenta grammatices -- a Latin grammar interspersed with Italian idioms and heavily annotated by a contemporary reader. Purchased in 2020.
Recent acquisitions
Click any image in the gallery below to see details. Additional images, as well as higher resolution versions of all images in the gallery are available on request.