History
Forty-Nine Survivors: Where Every Gutenberg Bible Lives Today
About 49 Gutenberg Bibles survive of the roughly 180 printed around 1455 — here is where the copies live, from the Library of Congress to Tokyo, and why they lasted.
History: Archives and Context
The history of how books were made, sold, banned and read: print runs and paper shortages, censorship regimes, circulating libraries, the paperback shift and the distribution systems that decided who could read what. Dates and figures included. For readers interested in books as material history.
History
Bound in Iron: What Chained Libraries Reveal About the Price of Books
Chained libraries fastened their books to shelves with iron because one volume could cost a scribe half a year — and the largest survivor, at Hereford Cathedral, still keeps its cases, chains and locks of 1611.