By Elissa B.G. Mullins If seeking a little levity in lovely line and verse, look no further. Peek inside this slim volume of manuscript poems and drawings, bound in gilt-ornamented green straight-grain morocco… Past marbled end-papers like theater curtains, you’ll come to a hand-illustrated title page: “Poetry,” dated “MDCCCXV” [1815], showing two women in Greco-Roman […]
Category: Manuscripts
Elizabeth Susanna Graham poems and drawings
July 1, 2025
Havana customs house account book for 1825
June 15, 2025
By Elissa B.G. Mullins A recently cataloged manuscript offers a grim window into the 19th-century slave trade. The account book of the Havana customs house for January-April 1825 (Post-1650 MS 0878) records daily details of Cuba’s imports and exports, including the import of enslaved persons. I did not immediately register that the abbreviation “escl.” that […]
Epitaph for Colonel John Penruddock: Manuscript
May 12, 2025
By Elissa B.G. Mullins If you, dear readers, recall with interest our earlier blog post on the Eikōn basilikē of King Charles the First, we now invite you to turn your attention to a newly re-cataloged manuscript containing a belated epitaph (in both Latin and English) for one Colonel John Penruddock (Post-1650 MS 0824). The […]
Names Swallowed by the Cold: Revisiting the RBML’s Arctic Exploration Materials
May 9, 2025
By Elissa B.G. Mullins Twenty-one pieces of manuscript correspondence relating to Arctic and Antarctic exploration have recently been cataloged! These materials can now be accessed as Post-1650 MS 0840-0852. Many pieces of correspondence contain information of great scientific and historical significance, while others are only indirectly connected to polar exploration, such as Sir John Richardson’s […]
Journal of a residence in St. Petersburg
March 31, 2024
Open this sturdy stationery-bound journal (Post-1650 MS 0806) and join Hugh Perkins as he embarks from London to St. Petersburg, traveling through the North and Baltic Seas in the autumn of 1834, writing and sketching along the way. His illustrations are skillful, executed in various media, including pencil, watercolor, and gouache, documenting ships, birds, landscapes, […]
A Marriage Contract … and a Book Cover?
March 8, 2024
By Elissa B.G. Mullins Don’t judge a book by its cover—especially when the cover warrants its own catalogue record! Little did yeoman William Butter and his wife-to-be Judeth Shaw imagine that their marriage contract would one day be recycled to cover an astronomical treatise printed a century before they met. A fragment of their contract […]
Adventures in Cataloging: Arabic Manuscripts at RBML Part 3
April 1, 2022
By Hanan Jaber Welcome to the final part of our Arabic Manuscripts at RBML series! Today, we are presenting the last four books for this collection. Hand-written Qur’an – 1845 Of course I was expecting to find Qur’ans within the manuscripts just because many older books tend to be law books and religious texts. I […]
Iron Gall Ink
April 7, 2021
By: Katie Hartman Besides the quill and parchment, ink was one of the most basic components of manuscript production. Black inks were typically produced either from collecting soot (most common in Asia) or from oak galls (most common in Europe). Oak galls are growths that are formed around the larva of the gall wasp. The […]
Making Quills Part 3—Cutting the Quill
March 30, 2021
By: Katie Hartman Cutting the quill’s nib is often seen as the most finicky and difficult part of the quill making process. In a way, this assumption is both true and false. Cutting a quill nib takes practice and some getting used to, especially if you’re nervous handling a knife or razor blade. But, once […]
Making Quills Part 2- Curing with a Dutching Tool
March 25, 2021
By: Katie Hartman Technically speaking, dutching simply refers to the process of hardening a quill by using heat. However, since the process of using a dutching tool differs greatly from the other methods discussed in part 1, it is useful to refer to the process of using a dutching tool as dutching and the process […]