Beautiful library of the early Enlightenment in central Dublin. Opened in 1707; still welcoming visitors, tourists and scholars.
Registered Charity RCN 20000752
Happy birthday to us. Today is the 315th anniversary of our official opening to the public in 1707. If you'd like to wish us well, please retweet these images of our little library.
A heart bookmark found inside a collection of Dutch pamphlets from the 1680s. Amazing that something so delicate managed to survive!
#rarebooks
#bookmarks
"Are the books real?"
This question is coming up more & more often on tours of Marsh's Library. Actual physical, in-person tours when people are 2 feet away from the books. It's as if some people are so used to living online that they can't quite understand physical reality.
Re-found this spider squashed inside a book from 1492 when checking a reference. First time we saw it, we meant to ask if any scientists out there are interested in doing
#DNA
analysis of
#insects
,
#flies
,
#moths
,
#spiders
etc we have found in ancient books or MSS. If so, DM us.
Snap! On the left, an illustrated newspaper ad from 1742 advertising the wares of a Dublin locksmith. On the right, a key still in use in Marsh's today in our reader cages built in 1767...
Hy or O-Brasil is a mythical island off the coast of Ireland, said to appear once every 7 years. It first found on maps from the 14th to 19th centuries. 'O'Brazile' is a supposed eye-witness account of a visit to the Island by a Captain Nisbet.
Y'know, being a rare book librarian isn't all rock 'n' roll, parties and fun. Oh no!! Tasks such as this complete stock-check of 20,000 items can be almost, well, kind of dull......
Something bright & shiny for a dull January day in Dublin. Gold leaf on the foredge of books published in Amsterdam in 1698 with a lovely floral design and the odd bird or two.
Preparing for an online class today, our 1780 copy of Dr Jonson's famous Dictionary opened on this word by chance. We NEVER comment on politics and this should not be read as applying to anything happening in the world this very day. It's just dull old history and etymology.
Why we love this job......
Cleaning books and looked inside one completely at random. It was once owned by the poet John Donne (d.1632). Signature bottom right. His motto top of page.
A tiny drawing of a cottage with a roaring fire. Found inside a collection of statutes from 1672 for the regulation of cities and towns in Ireland
#doodles
#rarebooks
Today's stock check find: a beautifully bound
#19thcentury
polyglot bible, donated to the Library in 1932 and still in pristine condition thanks to its protective box
If you're thinking of redecorating for 2024, look no further than 17th century colour mixing for inspiration. I'm very taken with the 'sanguis draconis'!
It really makes your day when you open a book from 1561 and find that the binding is an old manuscript from 1476 that has been reused. Very common to find old waste in bindings but you don't always get a whole document!
#manuscriptwaste
#bindingwaste
We're used to finding pages from printed books recycled in bindings, but this is a first for us - coloured, uncut playing cards peeking out from a pastedown in a 1615 dictionary of philosophy, likely bound in France
#RareBooks
#Bindings
#Fragments
Today, all staff have come to work as either Oppenheimer or Barbie (they were free to choose which they preferred) and will deliver their tours of the ancient library in character.
#Barbenheimer
We now have about a dozen insects found within books from the sixteenth century onwards. We are wondering if their existence can tell us anything about the readers who killed them: time of year of reading; location of reading. Sounds like a research project.....
Wow! We had 293 visitors today, our busiest day so far! Thank you to all those who visited today, and thank you to all our amazing staff and volunteers!
#OnThisDay
30 April during the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, books in the reading room were 'inadvertently' hit by machine-gun fire. A small entry hole conceals the extensive damage inside.
1709 Proclamation by Lord Mayor of Dublin asking citizens to behave well to "Poor Strangers" who had arrived as refugees fleeing persecution.
This is the only surviving copy of this proclamation in the world.
"Small children with dirty feet MUST NOT walk across the pages of open books."
Library Regulation No. 4587.
A mark left in one of our atlases from the 1790s. You really do need a rule for every eventuality.....
Magnificent plate of the solar system from Bernard Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds (1686), one of the first 'popular science' books, in which a philosopher & young woman discuss ideas like the existence of many worlds, space travel & extraterrestrial life
The bits you don't usually get to see! The sewing structure and a small piece of repurposed manuscript waste on a book bound in loose vellum from 1613
#rarebooks
#binding
#fragments
Gorgeous Irish-language printing from 1618. Produced in Louvain, this copy was once in the Irish College in Prague before making its way to Marsh's. The only surviving copy in the world.
@universalstc
Cataloguing this book of
#17thcentury
#Dutch
pamphlets we came across this heart shaped clip on
#bookmark
. It's unusual to find them as they're quite fragile things that fall off easily so we were very happy librarians yesterday afternoon
We are looking for a qualified librarian to join the team at Marsh's Library. We are certainly among the top three rare-book libraries within the Dublin 8 postcode:
Looks like we might get some snow in
#Dublin
today. These are the first recorded example of snowflakes to appear in print! From Olaus Magnus' History of the Northern People, 1555
#RareBooks
#Snow
#Christmas
Our earliest printed book. 'Letters of Cicero', published in Milan in 1472. This beauty is one of the stars of our forthcoming exhibition about the 75 books in our collection that were published before 1501.
#incunabulum
#incunable
#incunabula
I never tire of looking at this! One of our most spectacular, and baubly bindings, made in Edinburgh at the end of the 17th century
#RareBooks
#Christmas
How to mix colours, from the world's first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Still impressively vibrant 353 years after publication!
#earlymodernscience
#scienceisbeautiful
Something sharp made its way cleanly through the binding & about 300 pages of this 17th century volume of tracts. We're thinking small sharp blade or maybe baby basilisk tooth.
It's not actually international toucan day, but it should be. We came across this today; a gorgeously dark woodcut from a 16th century book by the Italian naturalist Aldrovandi.
James Joyce read at this table and sat in one of these chairs to consult the prophecies of Joachim Abbas (left), an incident which ended up in Ulysses.
Yes, that's a first edition. Not that we are showing off or anything....
#Bloomsday2022
#Bloomsday100
From 1767, readers were locked into these 'cages' to prevent theft.
Ó 1767, cuireadh léitheoirí faoi ghlas sna ‘cásanna’ seo le gadaíocht a chosc.
De 1767, les lecteurs étaient enfermés dans ces ‘cages’ pour prévenir les vols.
Example 764 of why there is no greater love than the love of books: gauffered gold edges! Heated tools were pressed into the gilded edges to create the patterns of flowers and birds on these Hebrew books
#rarebooks
#binding
#booklove