Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others have disappeared altogether. This is clear not only from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, but from many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be located. In this volume leading specialists in the field explore different aspects of this poorly understood aspect of book history: classes of texts particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. A final section describes modern efforts at salvage and restitution following the devastation of the twentieth century.
Flavia Bruni is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Rome La Sapienza and a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. She is responsible for the survey of seventeenth-century Italian editions for the Universal Short Title Catalogue and currently working on her second monograph on censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy (forthcoming).
Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the
Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication. His new projects include a study of Newspaper Advertising in the Low Countries and ‘Preserving the World’s Rarest Books’, a collaborative project with libraries funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.