Library Guides: Teaching the History of Print: Further Resources

Online Reference Sources

Atlas of Early Printing
The Atlas of Early Printing allows users to examine the geographical spread of printing in the fifteenth century with a variety of filters to highlight different aspects of the map.
English Short-Title Catalogue
The English Short-Title Catalog (ESTC) is a vast database designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473-1800. In order to increase access to these items, we include references to microfilm, digital, and other facsimile versions. All of our records are fully searchable online.
Incunabula Short Title Catalogue
The ISTC database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. 30,518 editions are listed as of August 2016, including some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century.
Latin Place Names
RBMS maintains a list of Latin place found in the imprints of books printed before 1801 and their vernacular equivalents in RDA (Resource Description and Access) form.
Universal Short Title Catalogue
The USTC is a database covering European printing from 1455 to 1650, including full coverage of the first two centuries of print in all our searches and analysis.

Databases and Facsimiles

British Periodicals
Offers facsimile page images and searchable full text.
Date coverage: 17th - early 20th century.
Early American Imprints, Series I and II
Contains searchable PDFs of material published in Colonial America and the early U.S to the early 19th century. In addition to searching, the collection may be browsed by topic (e.g., Genre: Songs, Economics: Liquor Traffic, History: Louisiana Purchase, Satires, Peoples: Illinois Indians, Government: Church and State).
Coverage: 1639-1819
Maximum Users: Unlimited
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Early English Books Online
Provides full text, digital images of almost every book printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and every book in the English language printed abroad from 1470-1700.
Access provided through a partnership of the English Department, the College of Arts and Science and the MU Libraries.

Date coverage: 1475-1700
ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Contains English-language titles and editions based on the English Short Title Catalogue, made available online over the course of the next two years.
Date Coverage: 1701-1800

Maximum Users: Unlimited

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Search Guide: http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO?locID=morenetuomcolum&ste=24

HathiTrust
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

MOspace: Digital Library
Digitized resources from the University of Missouri Libraries. Resources include maps, newspapers, posters, hymnals and University of Missouri publications.

Courses for Further Study

The following courses from Rare Book School at the University of Virginia focus on printing and illustative processes. Reading lists are available online:

Texas A&M University offers an annual workshop on the operation of a hand press. Further information can be found here:

Book History Workshop