Skip redundant pieces


SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts Literary Collections, 19th-20th Century 
Renaissance and Early Modern Imprints History of Science
Eighteenth-Century Collections History of American Education
The Irish Collections Additional Collections
Reader Services Special Collections

The Clubb Anglo-Saxon Collection

The Clubb Collection of Books in Anglo-Saxon Type, named for Merrel Clubb, late KU professor of English, and his son, Roger, was established in 1963. Based upon the Bryson (John Bryson, Librarian of Balliol College, Oxford) copy of the great Caedmon (Amsterdam, 1655) edited by the Dutch scholar Franciscus Junius, the collection already includes nearly 300 volumes of the works of the great septentrional antiquaries and provides not only the best known--if not the only--collection of books printed in Anglo-Saxon typefaces but also an excellent source for the beginnings of English historical and textual scholarship.

The intensive study of Anglo-Saxon texts and the printing of them began with Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575). Parker, moved not only by the motives of disinterested scholarship but by a desire to prove the antiquity of the English church and to disprove the necessity of priestly celibacy (he had a wife), collected manuscripts assiduously and in 1566 hired John Day to provide the first Anglo-Saxon type. This font is represented in the Clubb collection in a number of examples, most notably Ælfric's A Testimonie of Antiquitie, London, 1566 (probably the first book printed in this type and quite possibly the first book printed in England in a font designed in England by an Englishman), William Lambarde's Archaionomia, London, 1568, and Parker's edition of Asser's Aelfredi Regis Res Gestae, London, 1574 (a curious production, being a Latin text set in Day's Anglo-Saxon type). The interest in English antiquities aroused by Parker became a consuming one for the next two centuries and the printing of texts continued rapidly. It is somewhat surprising to find that the first printing of Bede in England did not come until 1644 when Abraham Wheloc edited Bede in Latin and in Anglo-Saxon, along with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (first printing) and a number of Saxon laws (Cambridge, Roger Daniel, 1644). In 1659 William Somner produced the first dictionary of Old English to be printed, Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (Oxford, W. Hart), and in 1689 Hickes' Institutiones Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae was printed by the Oxford University press in the Junius type. In 1705, also from the Press at the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the greatest products of the Saxonists appeared: Humphrey Wanley's Librorum Vett. Septentrionalium, qui in Angliae Bibliothecis Extant, ... Catalogus, published as the second volume of Hickes' Thesaurus. The last great monument of Anglo-Saxon printing in this period was Wilkins' Concilia (London, 1737).

Although texts continued to appear, the number diminished and in the early 19th century when interest rose again the use of Anglo-Saxon fonts was largely abandoned. One of the old fonts has been used in living memory: the Elstob type. This type, designed by Humphrey Wanley for Elizabeth Elstob's The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, London, W. Bowyer, 1715, to replace Bowyer's earlier type (destroyed by fire) in which Miss Elstob had printed her edition of one of Ælfric's homilies in 1709, was acquired by the Oxford University Press before 1764. In 1900 it was used by Horace Hart in some notes on typography, and in 1910 (after some modification) for Robert Bridges' "On the Present State of English Pronunciation" (Essays and Studies, Oxford, 1910).


Special Collections Librarian - Richard W. Clement, 785/864-4334
rclement@ku.edu
Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library,
The University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045-7616 
Phone: 785/864-4334 Fax: 785/864-5803