Blog

The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online

25 April 2016

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

In Pictures: manuscript matters: (re)collections - A Workshop

7 April 2016

A brief glimpse of the workshop, in pictures.

The British Library’s West African manuscripts collection

7 April 2016

The British Library holds a small but significant collection of manuscripts from West Africa. As part of his PhD research, Paul Naylor is cataloguing the collection and identifying its contents for the first time. Here, he introduces the collection and gives his preliminary results.

Shakespeare’s handwriting to be digitised by British Library for first time

17 March 2016

The pages of the only surviving manuscript to contain Shakespeare’s handwriting are to be digitised by the British Library, where the public will be able to view an impassioned speech in defence of refugees in London.

It is part of the digitisation of more than 300 manuscripts, books, maps, paintings, illustrations and more that will be available on the British Library’s new Discovering Literature: Shakespeare website.

The British Library has identified Shakespeare’s hand in the pages of the play ‘Sir Thomas More’ through the writing itself and the spelling, vocabulary, the imagery used and the ideas he expresses in the text.

Were investors conned into buying rare manuscripts?

17 March 2016

About 18,000 people in France are believed to have been defrauded in one of the biggest ever arts-market scams. They bought shares in rare manuscripts and letters to a value of nearly 1bn euros, before the company behind it was shut down by regulators. Now the victims of Aristophil want to know what is left of their investment.