Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors and their Books celebrates some of the men and women who have donated their libraries to Cambridge University over the past four hundred years, and the diverse and extraordinary treasures they owned. It brings together the cream of ten exemplary collections encompassing more than a millennium of the written and printed word.
The curators of Shelf Lives had plenty of material to choose from; Cambridge University Library is home to more than eight million items – stored on mile after mile of shelving inside the iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building.
Image: A miniature showing a bishop joining the hands of a couple, from the section of the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX concerning marriage, in a copy produced in Venice around 1475. From the collection of John Moore, given to the Library in 1715 by King George I. Inc.0.B.3.2. Credit: Cambridge University Library
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge