In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies" was the first collec...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

Magna Carta is arguably the most famous document in world history. 2015 marks its 800th anniversary. Yet, until relatively recently, it was unknown how many versions of the document survive, the means by which they were distributed, or the relationsh...

What sets Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" apart from so many other famous works of fiction? What special combination of creativity and vision made possible the drafting of "Magna Carta"? When describing exceptional accomplishments like these – and the...

This series celebrates the Bodleian Library's acquisition of Tom Phillips's archive of over 50,000 photographic postcards dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, "ordin...

This new book from Bodleian Library Publishing tells the story of this remarkable achievement with outstanding images from the collections of The Bodleian and Folger Shakespeare Libraries. The book discusses the obstacles and achievements faced by...

No work has challenged its readers like Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". His "Proverbs of Hell" have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of thes...

No work has challenged its readers like Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". His "Proverbs of Hell" have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of thes...

Hugh Crow was the captain of a slave-trading vessel which made one of the last legal journeys across the Atlantic with its "human cargo". This is a highly engaging, rare, first-hand account written by a staunch defender of the slave trade. Crow depic...

This is an illustrated introduction to the collections of political papers – the private papers of politicians, public servants, journalists and others active during the last 150 years – which constitute an essential source for the study of modern Br...