How did a library founded over 400 years ago grow to become the world-renowned institution it is today, home to over thirteen million items? From its foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 to the opening of the Weston Library in 2015, this illustra...

Built between 1855 and 1860, Oxford University Museum of Natural History is the extraordinary result of close collaboration between artists and scientists. Inspired by John Ruskin, the architect Benjamin Woodward and the Oxford scientists worked with...

Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as c...

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval...

How did the advertisers of the past sell electric corsets, carbolic smoke balls or even the first televisions? Which celebrities endorsed products? How did innovations in printing techniques and packaging design play a part in the evolution of advert...

Advertisers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century pushed the boundaries of printing, manipulated language, inspired a new form of art and exploited many formats, including calendars, bookmarks and games. This collection of essays examines th...

Daniel Meadows is a pioneer of contemporary British documentary practice. His photographs and audio recordings, made over forty-five years, capture the life of England's "great ordinary". Challenging the status quo by working collaboratively, he has...

During the Renaissance, artists and illustrators developed the representation of truthful three-dimensional forms into a highly skilled art. As reliable illustrations of three-dimensional subjects became more prevalent, they also influenced the way i...

What would a greengrocer say if you were to ask for half a dozen Grenadiers and a couple of Catsheads? In the course of the past century we have lost much of our rich heritage of orchard fruits, but with taste once again triumphing over shelf-life an...

How were the first fonts made? Who invented italics? When did we work out how to print in colour? Many of the standard features of printed books were designed by pioneering typographers and printers in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Altho...