The history of the Library’s original special collection of illustrated Insel-Bücherei, presented by Hans Schmoller, is described on the German language web pages. The range of publications devoted to the Insel-Bücherei over the past 25 years – a journal Insel-Bücherei : Mitteilungen für Freunde, several volumes of bibliography, and a range of articles in journals of library history in both German and English, testify to the ever increasing interest in these examples of quality German book design and printing.

Hans Schmoller’s collection is one small part of the Library’s Insel-Bücherei holdings. When the Library first began to acquire these titles in the early decades of the 20^th century, detailed bibliographical data was difficult to come by, so many of the entries in the Library’s Guardbook catalogue were fairly rudimentary, lacking an accurate date of printing and pagination details. This lack of precision meant that accurate retrospective conversion of these records for Cambridge’s online catalogue, which was not done with book in hand, was sometimes  impossible. We are quite regularly offered donations of Insel-Bücherei, and find we cannot rely on the catalogue entries to establish whether a title is an exact duplicate or not. Direct physical comparison, and subsequent detailed recataloguing, is often required. Continue reading “The devil is in the detail: retrospective conversion of Insel-Bücherei” →