WThe American Newspaper Repository is a charity whose purpose is to collect and preserve original copies of American newspapers. It was founded in 1999 by the author Nicholson Baker when he learnt that the British Library was disposing of its collection of historic American newspapers. He cashed in his retirement fund to successfully bid for the collection at auction. With support from the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, the repository was established in an old mill building in Rollinsford, New Hampshire. While serving as a director, Baker researched and wrote Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper about the way in which other library institutions were destroying rather than preserving such originals.
WThe Ashley Library is a collection of original editions of English poets from the 17th century onwards, including their prose works as well as those in verse, collected by the bibliographer, collector, forger, and thief Thomas James Wise. The library was sold to the British Museum by his widow, Frances Louise Greenhaigh Wise, in 1937 for £66,000. It was named after the street in which Wise lived when he started the collection.In book-collecting as in other things, the sum of all is that what interests you is what concerns you. Now to this end and purpose alone I also hold the Ashley Library to be wonderful, but it has an added wonder in that it reveals so exquisite a discrimination and so great a reverence for our masterpieces of literature... the great catalogue of his life's work and love, which is in effect a history of English literature during the last 300 years, may well appear as a blazing star, or an Angel, to his sight.
WThe Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections previously called the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) form a significant part of the holdings of the British Library in London, England.
WThe British Library contains a wide range of fine and historic bookbindings; however, books in the Library are organised primarily by subject rather than by binding so the Library has produced a guide to enable researchers to identity bindings of interest. The collection includes the oldest intact Western bookbinding, the leather binding of the 7th century St Cuthbert Gospel.
WThe British Library Sound Archive in London, England is among the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings.
WThe Burney Collection consists of over 1,270 17th-18th century newspapers and other news materials, gathered by Charles Burney, most notable for the 18th-century London newspapers. The original collection, totalling almost 1 million pages, is held by the British Library.
WDelhi Book or Delhie Book titled Reminiscences of Imperial Delhi is a collection of paintings done in company style, commissioned by Sir Thomas Metcalfe in 1844. It contains 120 paintings by Indian artists, mainly by Mughal painter, Mazhar Ali Khan. The book was bought by the British Library and displayed in London.
WThe Evanion Collection is a collection of printed Victorian ephemera in the British Library created by the conjurer, ventriloquist and humorist Henry Evans who used the stage name 'Evanion'.
WHenry Buxton Forman was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
WThe India Office Records are a very large collection of documents relating to the administration of India from 1600 to 1947, the period spanning Company and British rule in India. The archive is held in London by the British Library and is publicly accessible. It is complemented further by the India Papers collection at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
WIsaac ben Melchizedek, also known by the acronym Ribmaṣ, was a rabbinic scholar from Siponto in Italy, and one of the first medieval scholars to have composed a commentary on the Mishnah, although today only Seder Zera'im survives. Elements of the Mishnaic order of Taharot are also cited in his name by the Tosafists, but the complete work is no longer extant.
WThe King's Library was one of the most important collections of books and pamphlets of the Age of Enlightenment. Assembled by George III, this scholarly library of over 65,000 volumes was subsequently given to the British nation by George IV. It was housed in a specially built gallery in the British Museum from 1827 to 1997 and now forms part of the British Library. The term "King's Library" was until recently also used to refer to the gallery in the British Museum built for the collection, which is now called the "Enlightenment Gallery" and displays a wide range of objects relating to the Enlightenment.
WThe King's manuscripts are a collection of 446 historical manuscripts held in the British Library. The collection was originally assembled by King George III, and was passed to the British Museum by George IV in 1823 as part of the King's Library. The manuscripts were at first kept with the printed books, but in 1840 were transferred to the Department of Manuscripts. The manuscript maps remained in the Department of Printed Books, and are now held in the Map Library as the King's Topographical Collection.
WThe Klencke Atlas, first published in 1660, is one of the world's largest atlases. Originating in The Netherlands, it is 1.75 metres tall by 1.9 metres wide when open, and so heavy the British Library needed six people to carry it.
WThe Lansdowne manuscripts are a significant named collection of the British Library, based on the collection of William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. The purchase of the collection by the British Museum was in 1807.
WPapyrus 5, designated by siglum 𝔓5, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of John dating palaeographically to the early 3rd century. The papyrus is housed in the British Library. It has survived in a very fragmentary condition.
WPapyrus 18, designated by 18, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript containing the beginning of the Book of Revelation. It contains only Revelation 1:4–7. It is written against the fibres of the papyrus. On the other side of the papyrus is the ending of the book of Exodus. It is unclear whether the papyrus was a scroll of Exodus later reused for a copy of Revelation or a leaf from a codex with miscellaneous contents. The two sides of the papyrus were copied in different hands, but the original editor of the papyrus did not think there was a great interval of time between the copying of the two sides. He assigned the Exodus to the third century and the Revelation to the third or early fourth century.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 7 is a papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. It was discovered by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus, and published in 1898. It dates to the third century AD. The papyrus is now in the British Library.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 20 consists of twelve fragments of the second book of the Iliad, written in Greek. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The fragment is dated to the second century. It is housed in the British Library. The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 213 consists of two fragments of a tragedy by an unknown author, written in Greek. It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a roll. It is dated to the second century. Currently it is housed in the British Library in London.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 220 is a treatise on prosody, written by an unknown author in Greek. It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a roll. It is dated to the first century or second century AD. Currently it is housed in the British Library in London.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 221 contains Homeric scholia by an unknown author, written in Greek. It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a roll. It is dated to the second century. Frederic G. Kenyon dated it to the first century or the first half of the second century. Currently it is housed in the British Library in London.
WPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 222 is a list of ancient Olympic victors by an unknown author, written in Greek. It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a roll. It is dated to the third century. Currently it is housed in the British Library in London.
WPsalter World Map is the name historiography gave to a medieval world map that has been found in a psalter. This mappa mundi is now conserved at the British Library in London.
WThe Royal manuscripts are one of the "closed collections" of the British Library, consisting of some 2,000 manuscripts collected by the sovereigns of England in the "Old Royal Library" and given to the British Museum by George II in 1757. They are still catalogued with call numbers using the prefix "Royal" in the style "Royal MS 2. B. V". As a collection, the Royal manuscripts date back to Edward IV, though many earlier manuscripts were added to the collection before it was donated. Though the collection was therefore formed entirely after the invention of printing, luxury illuminated manuscripts continued to be commissioned by royalty in England as elsewhere until well into the 16th century. The collection was expanded under Henry VIII by confiscations in the Dissolution of the Monasteries and after the falls of Henry's ministers Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Many older manuscripts were presented to monarchs as gifts; perhaps the most important manuscript in the collection, the Codex Alexandrinus, was presented to Charles I in recognition of the diplomatic efforts of his father James I to help the Eastern Orthodox churches under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The date and means of entry into the collection can only be guessed at in many if not most cases. Now the collection is closed in the sense that no new items have been added to it since it was donated to the nation.
WThe Stefan Zweig Collection is an important collection of autograph manuscripts formed by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. After his death in 1942 his heirs continued to develop the collection, and donated it to the British Library in 1986. The collection includes many literary and music manuscripts, mainly in the composers' own hands.
WTamil Heritage Foundation (THF) is a non-profit organization that collaborates with the British Library to collect, preserve and digitize documents of Tamil cultural heritage. Among activities around the world, the project activities are centered primarily in India, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and South Korea.
WTauchnitz was the name of a family of German printers and publishers. They published English language literature for distribution on the European continent outside Great Britain, including initial serial publications of novels by Charles Dickens. Though copyright protection did not exist between nations in the 19th century, Tauchnitz paid the authors for the works they published, and agreed to limit their sales of English-language books to the European continent, as authors like Dickens or Bulwer-Lytton had separate arrangements for publication and sale in Great Britain.
WUncial 070, ε 6 (Soden), is a Greek-Coptic diglot uncial manuscript of the New Testament. Palaeographically it has been assigned to the 6th century.
WThomas James Wise was a bibliophile who collected the Ashley Library, now housed by the British Library, and later became known for the literary forgeries and stolen documents that were resold or authenticated by him.